Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - July 17, 2005

NOSINE is a 72-year-old woman who has a boyfriend of 34 called Penha for whom she has bought a house and car. He is from the middle of Africa.

She lives in a smart part of Langa, owns a chain of spaza shops and butcheries, seems also to wear an HIV/Aids hat and goes by the onerous title of Sexual Behavioural Modification Specialist.

She wears a curry-coloured turban - actually a couple of turbans, one sitting on top of the other, that look like beehives - and sits in a room that seems to have been soaked in a rich gravy of dark browns.

She has strange ash-coloured hair that might be grey or blond or might not even be real, the strands of which poke out of the headdress like bits of straw. There is a silver fruit bowl on the coffee table, and a smooth collection of stately, expensive steel appliances in the open-plan kitchen. The whole place is dominated by the Bang & Olufsen plasma screens in nearly all the rooms.

Penha lives with her, but she has also bought him an apartment in Table View which she shows me a picture of. It is decorated with a spun-aluminium hanging lamp, a Modigliani print and Penha - who is lying back in a black leather chair.

"I love him," she says.

"You know this boy, he had nothing. He came here and he was a bright boy. You know I could see it in his ways. He knew about money. He was very effective." She sounds as if she is talking about a very good electric gadget.

"I found him through the Net, he was advertising for a sugar mummy." She still has the ad.

"Hi I am Penha, a Nigerian and I live in Lagos. I need a sugar mummy that can take care of me and that I will in return satisfy her in what ever she needs. Black or white."

What does she get out of the deal? She adjusts her turban rather grandly, giving her the strange, androgynous look of a slightly tipsy pasha. "I am alone here and I love this boy. He is a welcoming sort of boy. Very caring, you know, laughing all the time."

There is a downside: Nosine's children, a 24-year-old daughter and a 30-year-old son do not approve of this union.

"They are jealous," says Nosine complacently, "they are frightened they don't get the money. I take no notice. I owe them nothing."

Unfortunately, I do not get to meet Penha. When I ring Nosine a few days later, she says, "Bad boy. He went away and took the TV and the microwave."

However, she doesn't sound too upset. There are a lot of others where Penha came from. The Internet is full of ads from men looking for sugar mums. Some are poignant, some verge on the pornographic.

"I am searching for dating with a lady with financial security. I am polite, pleasant, promising, prudent, painstaking, perfect, and a peaceful personage."

Another reads: "Hi sweet mammas out there; I am 28, living in Nigeria; I need sugar mummies who likes to take care of me and also who likes to have fun, when I say fun I mean raw, dirty and uninhibited sex."

Some are simply straightforward. "Please reply if you will like to marry me. I am black man and I am 17 years of age and would like to meet ladies, black or white, for instant marriage. Any age, from 18 to 99."

I ask a colleague who lives in the township if he knows about sugar mummies. "These are words I hear all the time," he says.

The sweet, sweet sounds of the words "sugar mummy" have even penetrated the suburban environs where I live.

Two tall, blue-black men moved into my street. They looked genius in majorly labelled clothes. They were both very keen on an all-white look, shirt and jeans and even shoes - low slung shiny brothel creepers - which was startling. To me they looked like pieces of typography, white and black, or two chess men from an onyx chess set. And they were kinda stately as well, if not imperious.

We greeted each other occasionally and then one day I got an urgent written note in rather strange French, "Sil vous plait venir immediatement de ma maison demain" which, roughly translated, means come to my house tomorrow urgently.

I went. There was a third man dressed in black, squeaky leather which made him look like an office chair and appeared to impede anything more than a vertical stance. When he moved it creaked. This man spoke neither French nor English, but after a long discussion with the other two, one of them turned to me and said: "This man, he wants sugar mummy. He thinks you just correct."

"What will this entail?" I said, playing innocent. Everyone looked slightly embarrassed. The office chair disappeared and came back in a new set of leathers. "He be very, very good to you, super good, you know."

Everyone giggled.

And what would he get out of it? "You give money." Perhaps fearful that he had been too blunt, he added, "You know, not too big money, but like clothes and eateries." The office chair looked hopeful, "And he can live with you, you like that. You, a person so alone."

Did I hear the word passport mentioned along the way? Or was I just imagining it? The office chair smiled encouragingly at me.

And what might there be in this arrangement for me? I wondered.

Tenra, writing on the Internet, partly answered this: "I'm 19 and in search of an American sugar mummy or British but financially stable. I have the magic stick."

It is this fabled magic stick that has mythologised African malehood for generations. When I used to travel north, usually looking for fabulous jewellery, people would give me a nod or a wink: "We know what jewels you are after."

But more than women believing in the magic stick, the African men believed it as well. A lot apparently still do. "Ah what you need is a black guy," they boast, or "Is this your first time with a black man? Be in for BIG surprise."

Ndigal, from The Gambia, writes, "A romantic caring and handsome man who can give you all the satisfaction you need from a black man. Don't be shy."

I read recently that all those mad women travellers like Freya Stark trekking across Africa on camels in their quest for ancient artefacts were, in fact, also after the magic stick.

Leni Riefenstahl was famous for photographing the Sudanese Nuba, whose assets were only too available to the naked eye. At 72 she had a young Nuba lover in his 20s.

The sugar daddy is much more stereotypical. His Rolexed presence has been around for years, stalking the expensive jewellery shops and florists, bringing out rolls of cash, buying cars for girls, handing over money in unmarked envelopes in secret trysting places.

Sammy, a Nigerian, told me he kept four women at a time. "I am a sugar prince," he said, "I preside over a constituency of women." He says he has a wife and two children back home and has at least two other children, maybe more, in South Africa. His entire architect-designed glass house is decorated in migraine-inducing leopard skin. Even the bathroom towels are spotty.

Although Sammy says that in the kingdom in which he reigns condoms are the rule, a report by the Alan Guttmacher Institute for Reproductive Health Research recommends that "sugar daddies" should come with a health warning. Anecdotal evidence indicates that sugar daddies are common in sub-Saharan Africa and that they are helping to fuel the spread of HIV/Aids.

Perhaps for this very reason the sugar mummy is gaining in currency. The tone was set by Kenyan politician Wambui Otieno, 67, in July 2003 when she married Peter Mbugua, 26. Her children were furious, but she couldn't have been happier, saying out of the thickets of her traditional white veil like a young bride, "Love is what matters, love is blind."

Kenyan feminists joined the fray saying that love does not recognise age barriers and that marrying a woman much older than you is no big deal. It has been happening, is happening and will continue to happen, a spokesman said.

Last year, Free State Premier Beatrice Marshoff, 47, divorced and with grown children, surprised her province when she hastily and secretly married journalist Sphiwe Mboyane, 27, soon after the couple met.

After the wedding she took her new husband with her on an official trip to Matanzas City in Cuba, a romantic tourist destination also known as the Venice of Cuba, where the couple stayed as guests of Fidel Castro. The trend is global.

June is a 56-year-old woman living with a 31-year-old Serbian boyfriend. She works from home, has good reproduction furniture, an onyx decorative chess set on a table that looks as if it has never been touched and a pearl-coloured carpet.

She met Milo through an Internet dating service. "He had the most terrible time you know. His country was shattered, his mother killed, actually struck by a bomb or a grenade or something that came through the window of her apartment."

Milo, who I meet later, has a child's face with a concave centre that looks as if someone has given him a bash. He is almost an albino. His hair has the quality of optic fibre and his lashless eyes are porridge-coloured.

He has a wide boy charm and his conversation has a shoddy brilliance. His English is fluent except for a slight hiccup around the w's: vont and vot.

Just looking at him you could believe that his ethics might cross all borders, sexual, legal, personal. He is the sort of foreigner who might wear a hairnet in bed and it would not surprise me to find he was wearing a corset. His waist seemed ominously nipped in. In our conversation, although he said June had helped him and that he truly loved her, he told me inter alia that his aim was to get to the US - and one can't help wondering whether June will be part of that package.

The sugar mummy in all her various guises seems to be highly in demand. They are already a fixed asset in the lesbian world where an older, richer woman will take care of someone young.

In fact all these affairs seem to have well-defined boundaries, but the sad thing is that these boundaries are not wholly recognised by both participants. Few of the women I spoke to seemed connected to their fates.

My research indicated that far from loveless arrangements, they were often filled with love, but only from one side. I was reminded of the lyrics of a song by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: Sugar, sugar sugar,/ that man is bad/ the road he drives you down/ o sugar it's a drag.

Let us give Nosine the last word:

"I would love to be loved untruly, than not to be loved at all."

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