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Payday in Windhoek – The Namibian


Windhoek payday weekends are a special breed.

The air feels different. People strut. Folks you haven’t seen in three weeks emerge from poverty’s oppressive clutches and talk loudly into cellphones as if the last few days of pap and prayer were naught but a bad dream and the war for your wallet begins.

For event organisers, the pressure is higher than the average electricity bill. Posters are churned out by anyone with a Photoshop crack and the time and city dwellers browse the local entertainment menu like cultural connoisseurs par excellence.

“Entrance fee for what?”

“I’m not trying to lose my phone.”

“That place is the ghetto!”

The competition is fierce and Windhoekers, puffed up with payday pride, are discerning.

Places they frequent in the land before debit orders cease, for the moment, to exist and suddenly the foods that have faithfully held body and soul together taste strange, metallic, like lack.

On the first Friday in spring, Windhoek, a place once famed for its ability to bore you to death, is pumping.

Open-air markets bloom from Independence Avenue to Katutura and the situation in the malls is a sartorial battle to the death as “sale!” signs blare and baddies strip clothing racks of everything worth Instagramming.

At the salons, it’s not much better.

Overnight, the hairdressers who’ve spent the worst part of the month inquiring “Sister, can I do your hair?” via WhatsApp or calling out to you as you scurry self-consciously past them in the street have been promoted to the rank of ruler.

The haughty high empresses and baron barbers who hold that evening’s look in the palm of their hands as you beg them for an hour for a plait under, for wig maintenance or for a fresh cut.

Established loyalty and an offering of gifts – a cold Coke, a bag of biltong – may tip the scales in your favour but on payday, money talks and everybody has airtime.

The threat of sitting in a salon with your head half done as you feed braiding hair to a stylist while a parade of hawkers saunter in trying to sell you boiled eggs, junkies or bootleg Niknaks is real.

By nightfall, the city is simmering in earnest.

Cash loans have been secured. Girlfriend allowances have been paid, edges are laid and, for two nights only, Windhoek feels like a serious and thriving hub of arts, entertainment and culture.

Instead of what to do, the question is “what can I afford to miss?”, and many of us, overwhelmed by the sheer amount of invitations and the need to rush from one event to the next, think: “Would it kill organisers to space out da tings! For the love of God, stagger!”

A friend of mine wonders why Windhoek is so often this way. One, maybe two, weekends of more events than anyone knows what to do with and then not much until the next payday.

“It’s … poverty, Peter,” I reply, gently stating the obvious.

Everyone is hustling for a piece of the payday pie.

For most Windhoekers, the money we work for all month doesn’t last much longer than a week but, for a brief, shining moment, we can pretend to be kings.

We can splurge, drink, eat well, send reckless ewallets, do our hair, live soft and play at not drowning.

By the next week, it will all be different.

The air hot and choking. Our struts traded in for sensible walking into work. Folks hibernating for three weeks … humbled by debit orders, hangovers and the grind.

[email protected]; Martha Mukaiwa on

Twitter and Instagram;

marthamukaiwa.com





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