ABSTRACT
Black men would buy . . . ‘leopard beer’ [which] looked toxic, untrustworthy . . . [There was an] ‘African toilet’, which always smelt bad and whose walls seemed stained with piss . . . [it] was a kind of infra-zone . . . that somehow existed below (but within) the norms of a white suburb. . . . There was also an open-air barber nearby . . . The question that sometimes presented itself . . . was whether I would ever get my hair cut . . . at a place like this . . . or [whether] this was ridiculous because [of] such unhygienic conditions – dirty clippers, unclean scissors . . . There were often bits of black hair scattered around this . . . dusty section of ground . . . ‘scalped’ bits . . . bodily scraps that connoted moral inferiority . . . that seemed always so different to my own.
