BUSY BODIES

by ene ijato - January 08, 2017

So, here’s the thing about busy bodies, we are usually the radical ones. Rebels who defy authority and norms that try to stifle us and our right to expression.

Have you ever been caught in a horrendous traffic at 7am on a Monday morning? The smell of dew, crisp ironed fabric and assorted perfumes lingering in the air until your taxi stops, and carbon monoxide lingers instead. The smell of anxiety toxic and unsettling. Hollers of raucous taxi drivers and exasperated civil servants indistinguishable and then you perhaps worry about the lecture you could be late for, or the assignment you had to turn in. Monday mornings couldn’t get any more eventful.

As laughable as it may be, I have the blood of a busy body. The rush to be busy, and If I lived in a more developed country which had time to diagnose ADHD instead of malaria and typhoid and cholera, perhaps I might have prescriptions to make my body crave stillness outside sleep.

Right now though, milk mildly does the trick.

**Fast forward to two taxis and a kekenapep (tricycle) later, almost two hours and a healthy fast paced walk, the University envelopes me into its activities of mind filling rigorousness.

So, here’s the thing about busy bodies, we are usually the radical ones (Oh it has its levels). The rebels who defy authority and norms that try to stifle us and our right to expression. We’ll probably wear grey when you ask us to wear white or grow out our hair when you ask us to grow it because we do what we want and we pretty much always wanted to grow it out anyway. Lol.

We’ll challenge you if you impose on us, question everything and believe by choice. We do not sit quietly because we cannot, and cannot afford to either.

Busy bodies have existed in varying centuries and decades carrying different demeanours and accepting different names. I scrape the laughter in my throat as I sit through documentaries on the Roaring Twenties (Easily the most glamourous and rebellious decade as far as I’m concerned). With youths in rock and roll t-shirts and bandanas (indeed in retrospect it is hilarious). Jazzing their way through the conservatives and redefining gender, redefining normalcy; brazen and raucous and passionate.

Through apartheid regimes, through injustice and through racism, they have raised their voices in soaring tempos and lived large. Some were not as boisterous, they held pens, wrote poetry and joined processions.

So perhaps we are not all activists. Some of us are simple people with simple lives and common joys but some of us aren’t. However, one thing patent of all busy bodies is that we identify with who we choose to be and be it, identify with what we want and chase it, our bodies are always very busy.

*Disclaimer* We do not commit crime! I am like hurricane behind you if you choose to be a busy body. However, when you get arrested for being severely and unlawfully so, I assume my perfectly worded disclaimer shows how much evidence proves I am just as mortified as the police.

BTW we are in no way affiliated with busybodies (of course the difference is obvious! A space bar people). And shall I blame climate change for the deteriorating cold recently, or could it just be one of the perks of living directly under the sun?