The hairdresser’s song

I have seen apes, ‘whitish’ apes that roam the earth. Their heads, their true heads are nothing but a mass of matted hair, like a congregation of starving flies buzzing and fussing over fresh faeces. Their faces, veins criss-crossing like misplaced highways and when they wince, my nose cannot be saved. The reek of old vegetables and overchewed plastic gum hung all over my frock and I have to wash every evening, to rid me of the demons and ghouls that ascend into my fingernails and wide nostrils. I have to work on all of them, those with the strong stench of unwashed bodies and unbrushed canines. Save me oh master, from those women, those who walk in here with acres of horse hair and dead human pubic on their head, like this is a ranch. Save me, papa in heaven, from the whitest of women, white women with black scalps and ashy lips.

What happened to Africa, papa in heaven? I have spent my life working on heads fancy on the outside but with the aura of a mismanaged public lavatory on the inside. I have worked on white women with black knuckles and even blacker knees. I have worked on wild white women, apes with fingernails that would put a leopard to shame. They speak to me, shamelessly of the young men they ensnare as they pat their old and abused crotches. I laugh and applaud, papa in heaven, just so they don’t move their money, white money from their black days. But if you give me a car, I promise to walk away and jump from the edge of the world. Save me from these women, white women with black nipples and dark crotches.

I have seen it all, from prostitutes with their well maintained dandruffs to ‘respectable’ white African women, apes speaking in tongues, English laced with an illicit American and Nigerian accent and a heavy dose of their mother tongues. Remember me, papa in heaven, for it is not my wish to put a dead and probably rabid dog from china on the women’s head. It is not my wish father, but I need the money, and the apes need their white beauty. When I see the white women, apes, I see horses, dogs and even smell old sweat from the armpits of a victim of world war two. There are ghouls, papa in heaven. They walk the streets, seducing stray husbands and the eager joysticks of randy teenagers. They come to me, and I place hair on the white women, and the demons of the long ago deceased women wake up to claim what was theirs. I hear horses neigh when they come in and a lost dog barks when they walk out. Save me, papa in heaven, from these white women, white women with black armpits and even blacker elbows. Forgive me papa in heaven, for I am just mistress who picks the comb and brushes away at long strands, stubborn and resilient, and chase away demons before invoking new ones. He who has sinned not must cast the first stone.