My Mzansi Heart
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For Alex and Thandi Mamacos, my South African family
First published by Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd in 2014 10 Orange Street Sunnyside Auckland Park 2092 South Africa +2711 628 3200 www.jacana.co.za Š King ADZ, 2014 All rights reserved. ISBN 978-1-4314-0932-7 Also available as an e-book: 978-1-4314-0933-4 d-PDF 978-1-4314-0934-1 e-PUB 978-1-4314-0935-8 mobi Cover design by publicide All images by the following are used gratefully with their permission: Banksy (page 36), Liam Lynch (page 38), Broken Fingaz (page 46), Casius Stone (page 50), Swoon (page 67), Stßssy (pages 100, 101), Ntsika Cele (page 120), 2BOP (pages 134, 135, 137, 138), Parowphernalia (page 157), Roger Ballen (page 160), WK Interact (page 167), A1one (page 195), S.G.O.D. (page 216), Blek Le Rat (page 218), Jason Smith (page 232) Set in Garamond 12/15pt Job no. 002155 See a complete list of Jacana titles at www.jacana.co.za 4
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When you boil it down, this non-fiction journey/ novel/whatever is two stories: one in the present day, the other in the past, mashed together to form some kind of cohesive narrative – not exactly rocket science. The story of my life. The first story is the quest I’m on right now, to make some sense of modern South Africa – not an easy task, but those are the best ones. Mentally and physically, I’ve been living in between the UK and SA since 1996 and I’m still trying to work out what the fuck is going on in South Africa (and in my head) most of the time: culturally, politically, mentally. To help me get a better understanding of all this, I spend as much time as I can in the place, in order to hang out with a selection of interesting, unusual, and creative locals. From Jack Parow to Bee Diamondhead to Roger Ballen to Thandi Mamacos. I also visit the most interesting places (in my opinion): Portuguese restaurants that are well past their sell-by dates, street culture festivals, small dorps that are off the map (and the hook), regenerated suburbs, and areas where there is not an ostrich, wine farm or garden route in sight. You see, when I’m in South Africa I instantly feel at home, as I really love this place, but often, I don’t really know what’s going on around me; what is really happening. Why stuff is going down the way it is. The other story is set in the past and is all about how I came to South Africa (with my wife, Wilma and two children, Kaiya and Casius) and worked in the world of brands, advertising/digital media, and accidentally became a film director, or tried to anyroad. I say this because I fell into bad company (with people who are now ‘famous’ film-makers and big-shot, big-time artists) and got into drugs and living large, which nearly ruined my health and marriage and would have really screwed my kids up – who were like 18 months and three at the time we first moved south. But thanks to some real friends (you know who you are) and a very patient, understanding, and loving wife, I held it together and got my shit straight. Even back then I think my mission was always more powerful than the distractions – and there were shitloads of them! Things worked out as my daughter is now at Oxford; my son is just 6
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as clever; my wife is one of the hottest artists out there right now (in all senses of the word) and I’ve had a few books published internationally (this is my sixth) as well as made a handful of documentaries that I’m very proud of. On the drugs front, I have been clean as a whistle for 10 years, but I still work with brands from time to time, and still have problems with my clients, but I seem to be able to take it a bit better. On the chin like. Not a diva-esque meltdown in sight. I used to spend more time in the bathroom than a geriatric on a coach trip. But what is important is that this is my first novel. Okay okay, I know it’s a non-fiction ‘novel’ – but it’s all words and no pictures. There are a few scribbles and illustrations to make it look like you’ve just stumbled into a fanzine or a notebook of someone who’s fucking with time like Marty McFly, but it’s all about the word. The word is all up in the video, as they used to say. This book is a testament to my love of my adopted home, South Africa, the birthplace of my most creative endeavours, and the birthplace of a million very talented and lovely people with a unique perspective on the world, albeit an upside-down one. Originally this book started so differently. I’ll post a PDF of some of the original layouts online (kingadz.tumblr.com) – probably when I’m trying to hype the shit out of this very book and get some press – so through the magic of time travel, it will be out there for you to see, once you’ve got this book in your hands! When I first started this journey it was going to be a big coffee table book with a tonne of pictures and all very hipster and visual, but then something inside me snapped. I’d already done plenty of books like that and I knew that it had to be about the word and not the image. I realised that whatever had come before was just jumping through hoops to get to this very moment. (Sorry folks, but perhaps you can take a look and let me know which one you’d have preferred, not that it really matters anymore but that is what the Internet is for. Irrelevancy. For anything of any meaning, stick to books.) Stay close to me as I ride south… 7
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I landed for the very first time in Cape Town in the mid-’90s and was picked up by my politically incorrect uncle – who had been here since the mid-’60s – in his big, German car. He was wearing a tan-coloured hide bushwhacker hat and looking almost colonial, and I mean that in the harshest terms. Uncle Kenny living large in the Cape. Obviously I didn’t know this on arrival – having only met the guy once before, when it was all smiles and hardcore handshakes and even harder mucho-macho slaps on the back (this was the same guy who, in the future, would throw down a chilli-eating challenge for me to pick up). But driving from the airport towards Wynberg he quickly tuned me to the fact that he was a complete idiot. Driving on his horn, cutting people off, running lights, not batting an eyelid at the mayhem he was causing and always, always, being rude to folks of the non-white persuasion. Like he owned the fucken place. Writing this now, I can see that perhaps he was stuck in a time when, as a representation of the white folk, he did have more of a grip on the whole country. More of a say, as it were. I was coming round from the ass-breaker of a 12-hour flight from Heathrow, and sitting there, watching this unfold, caused a sinking feeling in my stomach – a kind of painful embarrassment – at the cold reality that was dawning. I was stuck with this moron for the time being as I was staying in his house and didn’t know a soul in this country. ‘There are a few things you need to do: buy a gun, get a dog, never ride the KTs and don’t ever go in there –’ he said, pointing to the sprawling township that was spinning past. ‘KTs?’ I asked. ‘Kaffir. Taxis. Those –’ he pointed at a minibus taxi that was driving somewhat erratically past, chock-full of people. ‘What’s in there?’ I said, my turn to point. 8
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‘Township. Gugulethu. Gugs. You won’t come out alive.’ Oh, so it’s going to be like that then. A very strange time: we turned a corner and out the window I caught the amazing scenery of Table Mountain, complete with tablecloth draped casually over it, a killer sight. But slap bang in front of it was a township linked with caged walkways over the highway. We swerved off the highway into Athlone, and edged through a busy intersection with an eclectic market thrown all over the place, up and down, the pavement full of people and a lot of movement and life and colour: a direct contrast to what was not happening inside the lily-white, dour, squeaky-clean car. I loved the view out the window, but inside it was so wack and my brain was so fried by Kenny. The goings-on in the market looked so dope and fresh and like nothing I was used to. The lights changed and we lurched off. Soon the slightly tattylooking Victorian houses began to get a make-over, done up a bit like, and then someone threw a few palm trees out front, and before I knew it I was surrounded by the amazing Cape landscape of the affluent Southern Suburbs. All neat and tidy; a maid and gardener for every home. ‘Where are we now?’ I asked as we wobbled round a corner on two wheels. ‘Trovato Link.’ Whatever the fuck that meant. As I recovered from the whiplash of the sudden braking needed to slide the car off the main road into a small dead-end road, I realised, as the high electric gates cranked open, that just like a bird of paradise, I was stuck in a vibracrete cage for the next few weeks. Like the majority of everyday South Africans, except theirs is a lot less fancy-schmancy. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself here. I’m using the scrollwheel through the past a tad too quickly and so I guess I’ll have to rewind and come again to my life before South Africa – BSA, which up until that very moment was just an old English motorbike. I was living in the right-on seaside town of Brighton. These days it’s just London-on-Sea – expensive and crowded – but back in the early ’90s, when I moved there with my wife Wilma and six-month-old 9
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daughter, Kaiya, it was a very alternative and arty and progressive place. It was the gay capital of England and that meant that it was pretty laid back in its attitude. It was the coolest fucking town in England and I had a great time living there. My son, Casius, was born on the couch in our flat and this was where I wrote my third and final novel, which almost got published. I had spent some time writing novels that I thought were brilliant but the publishing world had other plans for them. It was hard on all of us, as we weren’t exactly rolling in it. To be honest, we were properly skint, but living on the beach with a couple of small kids in a creative town was lekker lekker. Still, we did need some money. So I made an agreement with Wilma that if I didn’t get the book into print, I would fall back on my skills as an art director and get a job. Lo and behold, after being on the Faber and Faber publishing list for six months, I knew it wasn’t going to happen, so I started working for a skate and surf company as an art director. One weekend Kenny came to stay and painted the most beautiful picture of South Africa. He had been there forever and as I had never met him before, he was obviously putting on a good show and had his best behaviour on. No comments that might put me off. Nothing about kaffirs or such. Kenny, in his favour, ignited something deep inside Wilma and me about the land we knew nothing about. Nothing, that is, apart from what we’d learnt in the ’80s from the Special AKA singing about freeing Mandela, the right-on kids protesting outside Barclays about the bank’s role in apartheid, and people who’d bang on about boycotting Cape 10
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t of another one... Unknown to me This was the end of an era, and the star t could have possibly happened. at the time this was the best thing tha This letter opened up my world...
fruit. I think deep down we were interested, as we needed something to shake up our almost-perfect life – and the next thing I knew I was on the flight south – which is where I came in. I was clean as a whistle as I didn’t really drink, had long since stopped smoking (dope and cigs) and never really had any time for hard drugs after the summer of love in 1989 had become a chemically enhanced memory.
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It took me a million smooching years of taking drugs, sucking the bottle, piping the little bits of rock – pipe dreams beneath hyperreality, the low-down from the low-down – before I realised where I was going wrong. The distractions just wouldn’t allow me to learn from my own, many, mistakes; they wanted me to fail: to fuck right up. Boom! One time all massive and all that South London possie crap. I came. I saw. I conquered. Crack Dope H Sulfur; the whole shebeen. This is a message from the past; past writing, past thoughts. Before I saw it I knew. I watched the street shit playing its game. I watched the gangbangers frantically humping and sweating all their square heads. And the fools down below trying to park their cars. Yes I’m back. These words, these pictures, have taken years to come through. Like the small solar-powered spaceship beaming back pictures of the sun, times 10. Eons and eons. More than light years – it’s taken a while, and there have been a few false starts. Fashions have come and gone a couple of times and still I’ve not come up with the goods. Hip hop is now massive, drum ’n’ bass is passé; past tense long gone. My kids have grown taller than me and I’m still an uptight white knight (who knows a trick or two) – more words from the past; another news flash from a failed coup. But… I can always rewrite, reshoot, dig up the past, unlock the floppies (stiffies in SA speak) and begin again. The words can change, but I’m slowly decaying. Grey hairs have been appearing on my head; my hairline, thank god, is still relatively the same, but the name – then skinhead, is now creeping towards my ears and eyes. What the fuck is going on? Why am I changing? Why are my legs aching, my arse on fire every now and again? Who have I become? Black into white into bergie? ‘What’s a bergie?’ I, too, once asked. The old routine is about to fall into place again, the writing and scratching mode is about to commence. Fourth time lucky and I can feel the excitement, the netherworld of fiction and images, about to rise. This time, more than any other time this time, even though it’s June 1998 and I’m living in South Africa. Suid-Afrika. Like I said, what the fuck is going on? 12
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And the reality is that I did find myself living – not in a shotgun shack, but in a Southern Suburbs Victorian bungalow with a corrugated-iron room. I do drive a large automobile (living large indeed, in a vintage BMW 2002) and have a beautiful wife … But that’s not how I’d put it. Sentimental works from a childhood memory; a song that freaked me out and was potentially my first real glimpse of reality from out of the playroom so sweet. So from the above you can guess that I didn’t stay clean in South Africa for long! Read on, player, read on.
Let’s start this off with a bit of a confession: I am a white English writer, with South African permanent residency, who’s spent the last 15 years living in England, America and South Africa. My passion is street, youth and creative culture and everything that comes free with it, and right here, right now, South Africa is a gold mine for original, fresh-to-death (sometimes literally) creativity. I’d just finished writing a book on youth advertising – The Stuff You Can’t Bottle (Jacana Media, 2013) – which included a chapter on South Africa, and six months later, was about to return to continue my street culture workshops, when I realised there was a story here that I was destined to write. In a lot of the ‘developed’ countries the old out-number the young, but in my beloved South Africa the opposite applies – almost half the population is under 21 – and not only is this a great thing for the youth, but also an amazing resource for the creative industries. In my teens, growing up in the outer suburbs of London, my introduction to South Africa was the sounds of the Boyoyo Boys and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, thanks to Paul Simon pillaging the musical culture (which Rolling Stone referred to as ‘lovely, daring and accomplished’.) I also knew the haunting loop from ‘The Lion 13
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Sleeps Tonight’ – composed by Zulu-migrant Solomon Linda and recorded in an office in downtown Jo’burg – which has been well documented by Rian Malan, who we shall hear more from later. This seamlessly links to the fact that I’m a massive fan of Nick Broomfield (who in turn was inspired by Rian’s book My Traitor’s Heart) and I watched his films on Eugène Terre’Blanche and Chicco Twala many times before coming to live in SA. These sparse cultural elements were my introduction to the visual and aural landscape. In the words of Nick Broomfield: ‘I remember driving into a service station and there were these three black kids hunched over a ghetto blaster listening to township jive and I bought the tape off them. It was this tape that actually ended up in the [Eugène Terre’Blanche] film. I felt it had the spirit of Africa in it, as well as being really energetic. It made for really amazing driving music and all the black kids were really into it.’ But my hands-on, foot-on-the-stoep introduction to the realdeal-Holyfield creative culture of South African was discovering Kwaito in 1996, after having moved my life and family to the Southern Suburbs of Cape Town. I’ve still got the CD – Kwaito Hits – and as I worked in advertising at the time, I was lucky enough to work with local Kwaito talent Digi Vox, and together we made a radio ad for Spiced Gold rum. I took a Kwaito staple and re-imagined it. The longer I spent here, the deeper I got into the creative cultures, the more I began to see some real shifts in the culture, moving towards a very unique place; but at the same time, whenever I tried to get my head around exactly what was going on – creatively speaking, why it was so good – I couldn’t really work it out. It’s a complicated cultural and political equation, one that is still something of an enigma – even now, when I can almost understand the formula, get the influences and chart the trajectory. But this is what makes it so great; this is what makes it so unique. So fresh. So clean. I mean, where else could an emerging fashion designer be working out of his township shack? (The answer lies deep within this book.) It is also relevant to look at the flow of inspiration in and out of the country, as it’s not just a one-way stream: it’s a cultural game of give-and-take. I’m a living embodiment of this. In my last book I set 14
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out to bottle the un-bottle-able, and once again I want to discover exactly what makes this country so amazing; show and tell, and then let this cultural currency fly up into the ether and inspire the rest of the world. Starting in Cape Town and working my way across the country I go looking for every kind of creativity, which is often to be found mainly in the big cities, but my journey is covering the whole land.
Okay so I left you hanging a bit. I was fresh off the boat without a contact in my address book, apart from a mad old uncle and his happy white-bread brood. And just as the contradiction of being introduced to this lekker lekker country by a racist fokken whitie (you can see how I’m being influenced by the company I’m keeping), it was through one of my pretty straight beer-bok-n-braai cousins that I got myself in the creative loop. An in is an in is an in – it doesn’t matter who, what, when, where, why, as long as you have an in, and mine was through a nice rich white girl from Hout Bay called Sam, who just so happened to be the girlfriend of one of my cousins, and she was studying at a place called AAA. Triple what? Another seed is planted. All part of the relentless hustle that is my life. Just be aware that deep down I’m a hustler. So I rode into town one afternoon in my aunt’s knackered old brown Audi 10000, with my book (my portfolio) tucked under my arm. I hooked up with this nice bloke called Clayton, who was one of the younger tutors at AAA School of Advertising. Thankfully he liked my work and he wrote down a list of people in Cape Town who’d be sympathetic to my style. Phone numbers and all! People who he knew would dig where I was coming from. My work was pretty out there for the rather conservative South African market, but the times-they-were-a-changing. The one thing I had on my side was timing. 15
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I’ve got to come clean here. I had worked most of the book up from scratch. Just like Isaac Mutant schooling himself in the library, (wait for it!) I got to grips with a PC and Photoshopped myself a body of work. With the body of it being fake. The only real stuff in there was the skate and surf advertising and design I had done for Bone Idol, the company I worked for in Brighton. Anyway that is all water under the bridge and I appeared to be a fully paid-up member of the art directors’ club. Isn’t the advertising game all about what it looks like on the surface? Appearances can be deadly and ultimately that was what I was selling. So I blagged my way into the world of South African advertising and within a week or so I had myself a job at an agency. Did somebody shout house of cards? Or something about sand and foundations? All I had to do now was to get permanent residency.
After visiting Kenny in South Africa, I returned home to England as I had to apply for permanent residence from abroad, and began to play the home affairs shuffle, once I had all my paperwork in order – five years of work references, and all the info about who I’d be working for, and so on. Once this was all in and I’d paid the money – 700 pounds – we began to plan where we would live. I brought home several copies of the Cape Argus property guide and fuck knows how many times I looked through them, dreaming about what it would be like to live in each house that we liked. The hero returning from a hard day at the office kind of fantasy, which is exactly what it was – a fantasy, as I’ve never really been able to hold down a job. The monotony gets me and I start to behave badly. The whole visa process took a year from start to finish and during this time I had to go to Trafalgar Square for an interview with a very nice Afrikaner gentleman, who told me that the only thing I might notice was that the crime rate was slightly higher in South Africa, and that I couldn’t ship my car over as I’d not had it for long 16
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enough. Apart from that it was all good. I was ready to become a South African resident, when they stopped fucking around and stamped my passport that is. Then the four of us packed our shit, put most of it on a ship and then flew south. I was 28, Wilma 26, Kaiya three, and Casius 18 months. We flew Sabena airlines (long gone) via Brussels and Jozi. The four of us all moved into a large room in Kenny’s big old house for starters, which was an interesting time. The first night I was there I drove out to a petrol station on the main road and bought a cone of weed. Wil and I smoked it out of the window of our bedroom, but it somehow wafted back into the house and properly stank the place out. No wonder Kenny began to dislike me! Not just because I got stoned on the first night but because smoking zol was what the blacks did! ‘They’re up there smoking dagga!’ he must have been saying to my aunt. I bought a car – Golf 1800 Sport with tinted windows – which one of my cousins referred to as a ‘booger’ car. Say no more. We started looking for a place of our own. Apart from the low-level racism (I’m kidding) and the little digs, everything was idyllic for a while. The kids swam in the pool. I discovered the Wetton Meat Market where a filet of beef cost 50 rand. I also discovered that, in the bottle shops in the shittier parts of the suburbs, I could find well-dusty bottles of wine from the 1980s for 60-odd rand. Each time I bought one the oke on the till would check me like I was nuts. ‘Fucking vintage mate!’ I’d throw out by way of explanation. The sun was just as bright as it would be in, say, California, but the air was much cleaner, fresher. More African, would you believe. We drove the kids around looking at the spots: Muizenberg beach, Simonstown, Hout Bay, Pringle Bay, Llandudno, places that sounded like they were straight outta some Treasure Isle boys’ adventure book – from a farm in Somerset West where the kids could pet the animals, to Tygerberg Zoo – a very sad place for animals it turned out. I discovered the Steers peri-peri burger and then Nando’s. This was back in 1997 when Mandela was still in power, and the crime rate was still rocketing towards the sky (as predicted by the bloke from home affairs) but it missed us completely. We fell 17
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in love with the Southern Suburbs and rented a tin-roofed Victorian bungalow in below-the-line Claremont and the kids played outside in the garden irrigation system and on a water slide. Rainbows from the water all over the place as it cooled us down. There was one moment back there, deep in history, when I was lying on the rough African grass in my back garden, looking straight up at the clear blue sky with the water from the irrigation splashing down on my face, the kids running about getting wet, screaming with delight at our game, and – just for a moment – I truly felt at one with the world. I was in touch with reality, I was connected to my family, I was in love with them and the world. It was perfect. I didn’t need a cigarette, a drink, or anything. I was just there. I thought to myself, This is it! I lay there for as long as I could, until one of the kids wanted me to join in and get off my ass – and poof! The spell was broken, but the feeling stayed with me forever. I knew whatever happened with my life, my ‘career’, whatever, I was blessed by the love of my immediate family. Wilma and Kaiya and Casius. Those first few months were one big adventure – we were exploring somewhere new and we got a lot of invitations to go out through my work and so we got a 16-year-old girl with a pierced tongue to babysit the kids and went out as many times as we could each week. Drugs were in abundance in the world of design and advertising. I got a job at a very cool digital (back then they were called ‘interactive’ or ‘Internet’) agencies called Electric Ocean, and one night a colleague of mine came round to take me and Wil out. He gave me a welcome card and inside was a gram of coke. I kid you not this actually happened. Flash forwards to 2013 and one of my old school chommies offers everyone a line but no one wants in. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ Anthea Knows Best tells me later. ‘That was so old school. I mean who does drugs?’ Kids these days are way too busy trying to make it big to take their eye off the game and do drugs. Living the vida loca on one level, but on another, deeper level, we weren’t really. We were not integrated in the real world of South Africa. We were skating on the top. Don’t get me wrong – it was all good fun, but we were just dipping our toes into the reflection on 18
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the surface of a dream. I learnt how to braai and ignored anything about cricket or rugby, quite rightly as those were the sports of the oppressor. I was never into football, but sometimes I wore a vintage yellow Arsenal shirt and pretended I was, primarily to wind up one of the owners of the ad agency I was working for, who was an avid Man United fan. But we were just like those bugs that can skate across the top layer of water; we were getting a taste of the privileged, the few. The world of the media scum, here I come.
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