Cabby

When I was a when-we vre, there was none of this indaba on the television about food. We had no special channel or slow-motion shots of onions being chopped or dishes being prepared by hair-gelled chefs to slow jazz music, no scouring of exotic markets for rare ingredients cooked to traditional recipes. Aikona. We had one channel and we had Wooty, and he had some bowls, some wooden spoons, a whisk and a drinking problem. Except it wasn’t called a drinking problem back then; it was just called being Rhodesian. Also Wooty cooked recipes with ingredients you could find at the OK Bazaars and Spar, which would have been on the very safe side of exotic – flour, eggs, some meat, a chicken, sunflower oil, Stork margarine, rice. No galangal or shrimp paste, let me assure you. Kaffir-lime leaves back then meant you had sent the houseboy outside to pick some lime leaves, and I don’t remember anyone who even had a lime tree. Wooty also had hair that touched his collar. Now I’m no fundi on this sort of thing, and I was very young at the time, but I can tell you right now that any man in Rhodesia who cooked AND had hair that touched his collar would have been under a lot of suspicion of being light in the trousers. It was a standing joke around braais Rhodesia-wide, that the man standing at the braai cooking would be called Wooty by one of the other men sitting around drinking. It always got a laugh. Think you’re bloody Wooty now I suppose? one would shout and the rest of the crowd would chuckle and swallow ice-cold beer in long draughts while the bloke braaing would click his long meat tongs menacingly through the coriander-scented wors smoke and tell them to stop buggering around and bring the cook another beer, because it’s bloody thirsty work braaing and that’s no joke. One of the wives might even remark that they had tried one of Wooty’s recipes and that it was marvellous, I’m telling you, the whole family loved it and the appropriate husband would perhaps nod to confirm this as fact. I think Wooty even brought out a cookbook once at the peak of his career.

We didn’t have reality teevee in those days either, unless you count the Rhodesia Broadcasting Corporation’s news and in retrospect I’m not sure how much reality there was on that. According to the news ‘we’ were winning the hondo hands down, so the late seventies must have come as quite a fucking surprise to some people. Reality wasn’t a big part of being a Rhodesian anyhow, certainly not a Rhodesian my age back then, and I quite liked it that way too. Our small air force was the best air force in the world, Rhodesian beef was the best beef in the world, The Bamboo Inn was the best Chinese restaurant in the world, Four Jacks and a Jill was the best band in the world (even if they were from Down South). Ian Robertson was the best rugby player in the world, and no one was as good at cricket as Mike Proctor. S’trues Bob. We were the best in the world at everything and man we were proud hey? The Rhodesia Is Super t-shirt with the happy blue elephant on it wasn’t a marketing gimmick, it was a fact, and we were proud of that too. Of course, back then, for us little white kids anyway, Rhodesia was the best place in the world.

I’ll tell you one thing Rhodesia did have long before the rest of the world had one: a national television star, a true celebrity. If there had been cameras with long lenses in those days instead of just Box Brownies and magazines other than Scope then this guy would have been as hounded by paparazzi as anyone ever was anywhere; Man, do you remember Scope? First time I gripped a chick I couldn’t believe she didn’t have stars on the tops of her noombies, that was the joke we boys all told each other. More of us were telling the joke than gripping chicks, that’s no maybe. Sorry, I was talking about Cabby, but the mention of Scope side-tracked me one time. Anyway, there wasn’t one of us little kids who didn’t love Cabby and sit glued to the box when his show was on. My mother would always say, honestly, you kids, sitting there bloody glued to that thing, your eyes will go square, seriously. This was also back in the days when the TV had to warm up first, and it would hum and sputter first as the valves and widgets warmed up inside, so between June telling us we watched too much television and the television warming up, you needed very good hearing to get what was going on. June would also tell us all the time that if she caught us touching the back of the teevee she’d kill us because we could get electrocuted, so of course we’d dare each other to touch the back of the teevee all the time.

Cabby was fucking magic hey. He always smiled, and he was always kind, and he always wore a suit, either safari or a black one, with a white shirt and black tie, though it was black and white television so it may have been a brown suit. I never went on Cabby, but loads of other kids I knew did, and I always felt a little bit jealous of them. You’d see them at school and they wouldn’t shut up. For days every sentence would start with when I was on Cabby until one of the other kids would say you know what you think you’re soooooo great don’t you? which was our way of saying we’ve talked enough about that now. When we got older we’d call it Cabbage, like we didn’t care anymore, but we never stopped caring, well I didn’t, and I remember two things when Cabby died. One was that I felt quite sad, and the other was a thing in the newspaper about his death, and a man was quoted saying oh no how will I tell my children that Cabby died? My guess is that he went home and said hey kids guess what? Cabby’s dead, because that was just how Rhodesians did things.

The thing that I remember most about Cabby was that these guitar groups would appear on the show. Big groups, like twenty kids, and they played dzimma-dzik music only. You know what I mean, the chords go dzimma-dzik, dzimma-dzik. Easy songs, two, maybe three chords tops. They only ever played two songs that I remember, these guitar groups: one about Noah and the ark, and the chorus was humpy-back camels, and long-necked geese, something alligators and chimpanzees, cats and rats and elephants but sure as you’re born, the loveliest of all was the you-knee-corn. The other song they always did was The Yellow Rose of Texas, which they sang thezza-yella-row-za-ticksis because that’s how Rhodesians sang. Those were the two songs, and that was that and we always watched and we always loved it. Also sometimes a boy would come on in a kilt wearing a white shirt in the bloussant style and a silly round tartan hat with two little ribbons at the back and he would mime let the wind blow high let the wind blow low, through the streets in my kilt I’ll go, all the lassies say hello, Donald where’s your toooooo-sers? Even in black and white you could see the freckles on his face, and he winked as he sang. I’ve never been able to get that song out of my head. Fuck you for that, Keith Lindsay.