The best handwriting in the world belongs to a 20-year-old Nepalese woman called Prakriti Malla. Don’t be absurd, of course there's such a thing. And, no, it’s not an entirely objective assessment.
But, we can agree that her calligraphic acumen is at the top in the same way we’re in subjective agreement that King Charles's ears are probably too much.
If you search for her handwriting on Google you’re likely to agree, unless there’s green slime covering your eyes and you won't stand for a peasant woman from Nepal having superior penmanship to your Aunt Dolores from Kuruman.
Penmanship. What a mindf***. I want to weep into my ale when I think of all the hell I’ve endured on account of the pen. We didn’t have that pen licence nonsense in the Bantu Education cheap labour factories called schools. Everyone just sommer migrated from the slate to pencil and, ultimately, to ink pen by sheer virtue of passing Sub B (Grade 2). Please don’t judge my teachers harshly. I can’t imagine it was easy telling us apart when there were 85 per classroom. That's when my problems with the pen started.
I interrupt my column to give you context by way of my family history. You see, I'm the spawn of Africans dubbed amaZemtiti in the late 1800s/early 1900s. The word is a corruption of the English word “exempted”. These were the African bourgeoisie exempted from oppressive colonial laws, including land ownership restrictions. In the Cape Colony, they even got to vote.
There's a long history of these “special” blacks on both my maternal and paternal sides. They went to mission schools and often crossed the Atlantic to study in the US, riding around on horseback with a “Mandela path” in their hair.
My great grand uncle, Langalibalele kaDube, was one of them. So basically the 1800s version of the “better blacks” or “clever blacks” that our former father of the nation, Baba Msholozi, used to obsess about. What this means is that, unlike a lot of my classmates whose families were semi-literate at best, I had to deal with my handwriting being scrutinised more than a penalty decision involving Kaizer Chiefs.
By the time I was 11 years old it had been established that I had, by far, the worst handwriting in the family. In other families the only paperwork you needed to present to visiting aunts was your term report. I was comfortable with my report populated with As, but no, not my Zemtiti family. They'd demand my daily workbook to assess my handwriting. And that’s how it was decided I would become a medical doctor.
This inevitably meant that I developed a complicated relationship with the instrument I obviously couldn’t master, the pen. I lack the vocabulary to describe how much I despise the pen.
The reason I’m so comfortable with “fessing up” to this malady is that I speak for millions with the same problem. One of my mother's first interventions to try to fix my handwriting was convincing me that, of the two types of pen available to us — the Bic ballpoint and the Bic fine point — the latter suited my writing better. This was quickly reversed when it became apparent that I was using so much pressure to write I was shredding the paper, especially if it was a jotter and I was making an attempt at cursive.
My brain, neurological pathways, synapses, hand muscles refused to assimilate that cursive nonsense for a simple reason: “What the hell for?” I mean, isn’t the point of making scrawls and scribblings on paper to convey information? Miss Corah Ngcobo (RIP) didn’t think so. She regularly organised a meeting between my tiny buttocks and a cane because of my rubbish writing even as I aced her English and biology tests.
Speaking of the pandemic, one of my failed predictions was that it would teach black people the possibility of having a funeral that doesn’t cost R250,000. I was as mistaken as I was about the extinction of the pen
Around 2000 I made a bold prediction that pens would be obsolete by 2020. Standing in a queue, scribbling my details on the Ampath forms with a Bic fine point tied to a string ahead of a Covid-19 test in August 2020 I felt a wave of depression at the realisation that we're hanging on to this relic.
My most vivid memories involving pens are wild and violent. Did you ever get home and have your mother emit a blood-curdling scream pointing at your school shirt pocket and realise that a pen spilt its ink? Did fistfights over pens not dominate your school recesses?
I remember a wild one between Michael and Bethwell in Standard 4, over a pen that both said had identifying teeth markings. After the nosebleeds had been washed away I realised that I'd accidentally taken Bethwell’s pen with his teeth marks. I didn’t have an appetite for fisticuffs, so I returned it to his desk when no-one was looking.
Speaking of the pandemic, one of my failed predictions was that it would teach black people the possibility of having a funeral that doesn’t cost R250,000. I was as mistaken as I was about the extinction of the pen. That's why I don’t trust anyone with neat handwriting. It's a sign of criminal pathology. Sociopathy.
I bet Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer had pretty handwriting. But I won’t insert the line about whether Dr Nandipha’s colleagues ever picked up that her handwriting was “undoctorly” and neat, a departure from occupational norms. That would be way too soon.
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