Three transformative lessons I

I was brought up in a bubble, in a different timeline, in a parallel universe.

My upbringing was as close to perfect as it can get for a young black kid growing up in South Africa. My parents were professionals. Both were academics at the local university. So the idea of learning and having a profession was always within my reach.

My school was within walking distance, yet my classmates were from every background imaginable: black, white, American, European, Asian, and a few from north of the Limpopo. My teachers were from Sri Lanka, Ghana, Britain and even Cape Town.

The idea of middle-class black people who drive nice cars and live in big houses was right there in my street. I did not have to go far to find it.

It was the roaring eighties. I was living in Mmabatho, the capital of the then Republic of Bophuthatswana, and Lucas Manyane Mangope was my black president. You could say that I was living in la-la land. But in truth, and in my sheltered mind, this was bliss: there was no apartheid, no state-sanctioned racism, no boycotts, no Nyalas, no comrades, no toyi-toying, no detentions, no petrol bombs, no bullets, no guns, and no weekly political funerals.

It was another time, another place, another life.

And that life was simple: To go to school, do your homework, get good grades, pass matric, study medicine if your marks are good, maybe law if you’re that way inclined. Accounting was a new career option for black kids and engineering was only just emerging. We had a teacher who would take us for Saturday school. He was from Mozambique, at a time when that country was really just a rumour for most South Africans. He was tall, dark, handsome and somewhat left of centre. His name was Zé. One day at Saturday school Zé put a drawing on the board (Figure 1). He asked us what it was.

Figure 1: Zé’s drawing. Image by the author.

None of us knew. He volunteered the answer: “It’s a matchbox”.

But how?

“If you take a matchbox and look at it from the side,” he said, “what you see on one side – in this case, the left-hand side – is the inside of the matchbox, the container that carries all the sticks. On the right-hand side is the cover. The dotted lines are the parts that you do not see.”

At that moment the penny dropped. The idea that you can represent and work with things that you cannot see was crossing my mind for the first time. For a little black kid of 15 or 16 years, even living in the bubble of privilege in which I was, this idea was truly mind-blowing. It opened a window that wasn’t there before, and a view that I didn’t know existed. Ultimately, in a world where my peers were excited about studying medicine,

law and accounting, I found architecture. This was a direct result of the idea that Zé had planted in my mind.

From then on I started paying attention to all the buildings that were rising in the little town that I called home. There was the magnificent Garona (Our place) building, seat of government, built out of dark, exposed clay brick, appropriately shaped to echo a Setswana homestead. The building was put up around a circular courtyard with imposing round arches running along the outside perimeter. There was also the University of Bophutha- tswana (now University of North-West), with its sleek modern forms that pointed to a bright, hopeful future. And then there was the futuristic Mmabatho Stadium. It was essentially a set of concrete platforms strategically placed around a football pitch and an athletics track to a strange and delightful aesthetic effect. And then of course there was Bop Studios – three massive black boxes juxtaposed against each other, housing state-of-theart, world-class audio production technology.

There were countless other examples of projects, activities and experiences that were within a short walk for me and my peers in Mmabatho but were unimaginable for the average black child in the broader idea of South Africa back then.

We lived in another time, another place, another reality.

Fittingly, I was inspired. I applied, was accepted and went on to study architecture at the University of Natal, now the University of KwaZulu-Natal. It was only then that I realised that my privilege was relative – while my upbringing was better than most other kids like me, it was a far cry from what the white kids took for granted. For example, the white kids in my first-year class knew what a drawing board and scale rule were. I didn’t. They had been inside the offices of real-life architectural practices. I hadn’t. They had family members who were architects – mostly fathers, brothers or uncles. I, on the other hand, had never met an architect in my life.

As exciting as my brief exposure to the mushrooming architectural projects around Mmabatho had been, my white peers had grown up having internalised many more complex buildings – skyscrapers, museums, airports, multi-level homes built on hillsides, mezzanine floors, pieds-à-terre, cottages, studio apartments – the list goes on. Moreover, a few had been to Europe and America and had seen in person many of the cathedrals and iconic buildings that I was learning about for the first time.

It was a confusing time. On one hand, I had seen so much. On the other, I was like a deer in the headlights.

I barely passed the first year and flunked the second year outright.

On one pivotal early morning in the studio, at two or three am (architecture students were notorious for living in the studio), in my second stint of the second year, my classmates and I were huddled around a cigarette that was being passed around (I think it was a cigarette but it could have been some other substance). I caught this one guy mid-sentence as he said “Blah blah, blah us creatives…” I’m not sure what came before or after. I re-

member asking him: “Dude, what did you just say? He repeated himself: “Blah blah, blah us creatives…”

Then it hit me. This was why I had such a hard time getting through university. All the time I had been trying to learn what the rules

were so I could apply them – how does a roof meet a wall, how does one design a house, how does a building come together?

That was of course completely the wrong approach. It was only when my classmate put the idea that I was ‘creative’ into my head that I got to understand that, actually, my job was to learn how to make stuff up – invent a new way for a roof to meet a wall, design houses that the world has never seen, find novel ways to put buildings together.

It was only at that moment that I realised that, actually, all those buildings around me – the city, the neighbourhood, the university – were all made up. There were no ten commandments somewhere that said this was what things were and they could never be anything else.

This big mysterious edifice called the universe had come as it was, and when we emerged out of the mush, we humans started figuring stuff out, making things up, and layering our interpretations as we navigated the terrain. There were no templates to fill in and no guidelines to follow. Except maybe for the laws of physics.

The economy is built the way it is because – to simplify – a group of people sat around a boardroom table and asked themselves the question: “How might we build it so it works best for us, and not them,” whoever them was. Politics works the way it does because a group of people decided that it will serve their interests best to arrange the system in a particular way. The art world is structured the way it is because people made it that way, not because it’s the only way it can be. All these things are real, but they are made up.

This was the second transformative idea that I learned in life

– the idea that reality is what you make it. It starts off as a blank canvas and your job is to put paint on it (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Blank canvas. Image by the author.

You have the power to create. You do not have to follow any rules, and you do not have to accept any commandments. In fact, you would probably not create anything of value if you did. This too was a big idea for my little head. The sheer magnitude of it created a mini-crisis in my life.

Significantly, the backdrop to this eureka moment was the nineties with the apartheid state coming apart at the seams under the sustained pressure of grassroots struggle action and international sanctions.

Armed with the realisation that I was a creator, I then started creating. I did this with an expanded sense of freedom and single- mindedness. I began to excel, specifically in Design, in a way that I hadn’t before. For the first time since high school, I was among the top students in the class, at least in Design, my favourite subject, and the only one that truly mattered. The ability to design was a brand new superpower that I seemed to have always had but hadn’t known about until my third eye was opened. I even moved my drawing board out of the studio into my room at the university residence because I needed to work day and night.

What happened next was inevitable, at least in hindsight. I stopped listening to my professors – for good reason, in my view. I reasoned that I could figure stuff out myself, and I found that I was learning better when I was doing so on my own. The more intellectually independent I became, the further away from my professors I moved. In the end, I could not study any further. I could not bear the thought of going into lectures and doing as they said I must. I could not follow their rules.

Long story short: I stopped going. I could not find it in me to continue with my university studies anymore. I was conflicted. I had built up an expectation of myself that I needed to live up to. My parents had expectations for me. My peers were studying and preparing to become productive members of society. And my own future was staring at me, asking questions.

I fell into a deep depression and checked myself into a psychiatric clinic. My time there turned out better than I expected. I spent two weeks on a couch telling a stranger about my problems. He listened attentively, responded occasionally and offered the wisest and gentlest of guidance. Figure 3: Reality is nothing but a creative challenge. Image by the author.

It was like being in a two-week meditation – a fortnight of bliss. I came out of it with the conviction that reality is nothing but a creative challenge (Figure 3). I decided that I was going to do with my own life my own thing and see where that takes me.

Around that time, a free Nelson Mandela had walked out of Pollsmoor Prison with Winnie Mandela by his side. South Africans of all shades were shedding their old skins and readying themselves for a future that was at once uncertain and exhilarating.

On my long walk out of architectural studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, I took a detour to the University of Pretoria (UP) to see one last time if the grass might be greener on that side. I thought learning in Afrikaans – effectively the only language option available at UP back then – might shock my system enough to reawaken my desire for the discipline.

I met good people at UP and made lasting memories, but the experiment simply did not work. Six months into my studies there, I packed my bags and said a final goodbye. I reconciled my thoughts with a mental nod to both achitecture and Afrikaans: “Maybe we’ll meet again, at some other time, in some other situation.” The language, in this case, unlike in 1976, was a Good Samaritan offering a helping hand.

This timeline – Mandela, democracy, freedom – has led me into me a whole and richly varied creative path in life, with multi- disciplinary work in a wide variety of industries that include advertising, graphic design and conferencing. These days I find myself carrying my creative toolbox into the most unlikely businesses, with agriculture and food security among them. Looking into the future, I dream of dipping my toes in renewables, monetising sunshine and helping to power a better world.

I embrace my privileges. They have afforded me the benefit of taking the scenic route at a time when others had to struggle through treacherous terrain.

But I must also accept my responsibilities, along with my even more privileged peers. Our collective job is no less than to ensure that those following in our footsteps must find that, while history rhymes, it does not have to repeat itself.

And that while we cannot bend the laws of physics, we can bend reality.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ithateng Mokgoro is a versatile, multi-disciplinary creative thinker. He has been co-curator of various TEDx events since 2010, including TEDxJohannesburg. In that role, he has worked with innovators from all over the world, curating discussions on technology, design, entrepreneurship, politics, leadership, art, agriculture, climate, health, food and women. He has a long and varied background in brand communications. He started his career in advertising as an art director in 1997 and went on to work in various creative roles at a number of communications

firms. He is a founding member of the Mandela Poster Project, a global design initiative.