Judge is Ready to Rule

Last night, we ate dinner in almost complete silence. Even though my brothers in my host family are a little bit older than me, they sometimes still display an almost child-like deference to my host mother. Musa and Mjiva finished dinner, went to the kitchen, and quickly broke the quiet and entered into a heated discussion about something. I was tired out from going out into the community during the afternoon, so I wasn’t really tuning in. Plus, they were talking rapidly. They got so loud that my host mother and her eldest son (in his late thirties) yelled at them to shut up or khuluma ngaphandle (talk outside)!

As I finished my plate (I’m a slow eater, usually the last one done especially if I decide to use my hand instead of a spoon), Musa came over and said that he wanted to settle the argument. He came over, hunched over the table next to me, and said quietly, “Let’s say Jay-Z has 500 million dollars in the bank. If he goes to the bank to withdraw 2 million dollars, will they give it to him?” That’s what they were arguing about? I told him yeah, American banks are usually pretty liquid, and that the big ones would have no problem giving that to him in cash given some lead time. I said Jay-Z probably is a big customer at a big bank. They probably know him on a first-name basis, and would give him a cold drink when he came in and maybe even a nice chair to sit in. I think that settled it, and Mjiva accepted that he had lost the argument. To make him feel better, I told him that if Jay-Z had his account at a Swazi bank, he would probably have a pretty tough time having free access to his 2 million USD. How often does a skinny Asian kid with glasses get to be the final arbiter on these important matters?

A couple nights ago at dinner, I was asked to explain what “hustling” was. After I defined it to Musa, he said that he, too, was a hustla. Man, it’s times like these I wish yall were here to hear this.