Catherine Sasman
Apparently there is a certain kind of dating ritual that is starting to take shape in the great and booming northern city of Oshakati, I have come to understand. It is called the Oshakati VIP dating game.
This, a recent acquaintance tells me, involves – usually – career women from Windhoek – with a penchant for a very important suave businessman with endless fortunes, or purported fortunes, or if nothing else, at least the potential to generate such fortunes.
What is an absolute requirement, though, this acquaintance says, is a sleek expensive car. He can be the ugliest in town – which is apparently preferable – but should at the very least think he is the coolest in the room. That way, other ladies might be repelled, or he will not be suffering from tiresome complexes.
The first date usually goes like this: he comes to pick you up with his very impressive car. After all the necessary courtesies, he sweeps you off to his shiny car, swings open the door for you, and off you go into the night along the arterial Oshakati/Ongwediva highway dodging people and donkeys effortlessly.
For some privacy and in the absence of a decent restaurant, he takes you to a shebeen on the outskirts of the town.
Full of the airs of a perfect gentleman, he jumps out of his side of the car as soon as you have arrived, runs to your side of the car, swings open the door for you and chivalrously leads you into the thumping, dim-lit shebeen.
For dinner, you have the option of kapana plain, or kapana chilly. Then he orders you a drink.
“Give the lady a Tafel Lager,” he barks pompously to the bar lady.
She comes back with a flowery tray with what they call a long beer. The long-ness of the beer comes from the size of the plastic glass in which it is served.
If you are a smoker and have forgotten your smokes at home, he orders cigarettes for you.
The bar lady returns with a loose Peter Stuyvesant because shebeens do not sell cigarettes in packets.
As you settle down in the haze of your cigarette smoke, gulping down the long beer, the rich and sought-after gentleman gathers people around who feel obliged to tell you how lucky you are to have secured a date with him.
By then you would probably have had your third long beer, and feel for something more sophisticated and expensive. After all, you are in the company of a wealthy tycoon – or upcoming one, or prospective one. So he orders you “just the most expensive drink in the house”.
The bar lady runs back to the counter and emerges with the best flavour of the night – a half a bottle of whiskey! She then collects your plastic glass which she washes out from a bucket of water under her counter, and hands it back to you with another loose cigarette.
Only then, according to my acquaintance, are you officially considered the VIP lady in the bar. The escape plan should everything becomes a bit too much, my acquaintance advises, pretend to get very upset about something someone has said to you in the bar.
If that does not work on Mr Richie, pretend that you are too tipsy from the whiskey mixed with beer that you just simply cannot stay on any longer.
And if that does not either work, then it is “payback time”. Or so I hear.
Eewa!