OK, here’s the story of a black librarian who lived and worked in post-apartheid (yea, we know in name only) South Africa in 2000. She lived in the Mpumalanga Province with a very sweet extended family in a small community very close to the Mozambique border and the Kingdom of Lesotho. She was also very close to the crash site turned stark memorial to Marxist-thumping Samora Machel -- 35 steel cylinders symbolizing the number of lives lost in the air crash, plane fuselage at all; a tourist destination not easily forgotten.

The big city was Nelspruit, an oddly eerie “county seat” type of town surrounded by truly outpost villages and communities that is also a major stopover point for tourists traveling to the Kruger National Park and Mozambique. Nelspruit was in a 1970’s time warp then and utterly depressing given that black South Africans lived on its periphery and made trips there for the type of shopping that couldn’t be done close to home.

That librarian was I; and how I reconciled the affect of that year and work was identifying with the landscape of Texas and the great Southwest—my birthplace. Lonely, vast open spaces, part dust and part farmland with the ubiquitous  ‘county seat” centers folks drives for miles to to get any real shopping done.

Which brings me to an odd movie from an odd guy, fascinated by white women, Indo-South African, Muslim and born in Nelspruit. Filmmaker Yunus Vally . I can't wait to see this flick!

 Like How to Make Love to a Negro (Without Getting Tired)


How to Make Love to a Negro (Without Getting Tired) (1989)

based on the great Dany Laferrière novel of the same name and starring a very young Isaac de Bankole', Vally’s documentary, The Glow of White Women has that self-absorbed, overly-indulgent Woody Allen-inspired feel that’s typically a disguised musing (and exercise) on being horny as hell. Laferrière’s work is a biting satire of sexual conquest and the familiar saga of black immigrant men in predominantly white spaces and all those encounters with forbidden fruit…..

But Vally is different and there’s a twist. The documentary has won the Grand Jury Prize for best documentary at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles and set to premiere on teh BBC. The docu is semi-autobiographical and uses the forbidden fruit metaphor as showstopping a ploy to open a delve a discourse on color, race and beauty and South African history. And beauty,  as we all know, is highly influenced by the "glow" of white women-- what they want to look like and desire to look like. It’s a residue that’s left on us all.


GLOW OF WHITE WOMEN (2007)