Читать книгу Bitch, please! I'm Khanyi Mbau - Lesley Mofokeng - Страница 11

The moment she hit her teens, Khanyi started to rebel against everyone and everything. She had piercings in her tongue, nose and belly button and once even shaved all her hair off. She wore skintight tops that would have made her grandmother faint.

“I even hated jazz which my grandparents loved so much and made me listen to. I felt they had disempowered me because I couldn’t sing along to Brenda Fassie, Senyaka, Chicco, Mercy Pakela and all the bubblegum music of that time. Something every other black kid could do at the school. All I knew was Frank Sinatra’s ‘Fly Me To The Moon’ or Thelonious Monk. I blamed my grandparents for making me feel like a misfit . . . Of course, today I’m very grateful to them and I’m again a huge fan of jazz.”

Khanyi was an angry teenager. Not only was she unhappy that her mother had got married and had another child, but her raging teenage hormones also made her moody and unpleasant to have around. “I was so full of anger,” she says. “I hated my mother and I wanted her to leave me alone. I locked myself in my room and never wanted any company. I had good friends, I had bad friends. I was a law unto myself.”

She was belligerent, but while her friends drank and smoked, she never liked the taste of alcohol and cigarettes made her cough. The one forbidden thing she fell for was dope. She was exposed to marijuana by some of her friends at school, who all believed that smoking was hip. For her it was all about fitting in rather than about achieving the scintillating high associated with the green herb.

Khanyi was one for having a good time at any place where there was music. She would go out and not return home for days. “I hurt my mother and grandmother,” she says, shaking her head. “I put them through so much hell.”

She especially remembers the time she and her friend Liziwe Coka, who would be a contestant on Big Brother Africa in 2009, bunked school. They followed some guy Liziwe had a crush on and ended up in a house in Soweto in the company of township thugs who smoked weed and drank Hansa. The men ordered kotas for them but for several hours would not let the girls go. They were only freed after 6pm.

Khanyi, too scared to go home, spent the night at a friend’s house in Naturena where they watched movies and smoked weed. He was living by himself and Khanyi crashed on his couch in her school blazer. She remembers waking up feeling dirty, but she was still wary of returning home. She knew she was in deep trouble but at some point she would have to face the music.

When she walked in the front door, she was confronted by a severely upset Lynette. And what a hiding she got from both her mother and her uncle Mthoko Mcunu, her dad’s younger brother, who was called in to discipline her.

Despite her teenage demons and too many crazy nights, Khanyi never stopped believing she would be “somebody”. By this time she had outgrown all her child-presenter roles and wasn’t in shows any longer. She had to use her last savings to help pay for her education and extramural activities. Her family had experienced financial difficulties ever since her grandfather had died a few years before. Babes Mbau had provided for the entire family, but his printing works collapsed soon after his death. A few times her mother even borrowed money from Khanyi to pay for petrol.

Still Khanyi held onto the vision of herself as a star, one of the elect, someone other people wanted to be. A friend once offered her a part-time job at Sportsmans Warehouse but Khanyi refused. “I am not a worker,” she says. “Everyone around me was either waitressing or working at Truworths and I never wanted to be like them. I knew my place was a lavish firmament elsewhere.”

Lynette, at the end of her tether, took her wayward 15-year-old daughter back to Soweto. Khanyi was happy to be reunited with her grandmother. Gladys was her best friend and the one who had brought her up with so much love and care. She had a soft spot for Khanyi and tole­rated her wilfull personality.

“I spoke so much nonsense and she answered every question I had. I told her what a great person I was poised to be. I’d tell her that one day I would drive a fast car, wear new shoes every day and live in a big house surrounded by comfort and luxury. And she’d tell me how she missed her husband, while she drank tea and I slurped Fanta Orange.”

Gladys’s indulgence of Khanyi’s fanciful notions about her destiny meant nobody ever told her to stop thinking these thoughts. She was free to believe in the dream of success and luxury. “I thought I was going to marry into royalty,” she recalls. “In my dreams I could see myself being the first black member of the British monarchy. Prince William was going to be mine and we’d give Queen Elizabeth brown great-grandchildren.” Then she checks herself. “Marrying older men was never my life plan.”

Gladys indulged her motormouth grandchild and asked how she planned to bring all her dreams to life. Khanyi told her she just knew it was going to happen. It was her destiny.

Lynette joined them a few months after she got divorced. Her marriage had been a mistake and an unhappy one. Khanyi was overjoyed. It meant they could be friends again. The war that had raged between them during the marriage could finally wind down. “I was pleased she got rid of that irritating ant she called a husband. We patched things up and she became just like an older sister to me rather than my mother.”

To the young girl, it was all so much fun – her grandmother even let Khanyi drive her Mazda. “All these generations of women living under one roof and travelling around together. Times were good.”

But soon Lynette yearned for her independence again. After about a year of living with her mother, she moved to Yeoville. Khanyi tagged along to be close to her new high school. After repeating Grade 7 at her old school, Milpark Primary, Khanyi enrolled for Grade 8 at Bedford High.

Her subjects were English, Afrikaans, mathematics, history, geography, accounting and typing. “I hated school and felt like I was in a trance for most of the time,” she says. “I don’t remember anything my teachers taught me. That whole X plus the square root of whatever algebra didn’t make sense to me.”

But it wasn’t all bad. Extramural activities like art, drama, the choir and PT allowed a creative, expressive, physical child like her to excell. She was left-brained and gifted. Today she’d get a bursary to the National School of the Arts in a heartbeat but the transitional education system in the early 1990s didn’t have the imagination or the resources to cope with someone like Khanyi.

Her worst subject was accounting and her nemesis was Mr Nel, the accounting teacher. He would chase her out of his class for back-talk and insubordination. She couldn’t bare listening to him drone on. “It was the idea of sitting for 30 minutes just listening to someone talking that drove me up the wall,” she says. To liven things up she developed the habit of asking silly, pointed questions to derail the class. She became an expert at pushing teachers’ buttons to get kicked out of class.

Then she’d wander around the school or hang out with a Zimbabwean gardener called Mr Johnson and help him pick up newspapers for collection. He told Khanyi stories of his troubled homeland, of their rich struggle history and the chimurenga (the Zimbabwean liberation struggle). It entertained her far more than accountancy ever could. She and Mr Johnson shared the dream of a better place. For him it was returning to a functioning and prosperous Zimbabwe; for Khanyi it was anywhere besides school. Khanyi identified with his frustration. She too was stuck somewhere that didn’t feel like home. School was just somewhere on the way to where she knew in her heart she needed to be. No classroom could contain all she had inside.

The principal’s office became her de facto classroom since she spent so much time there. “Go sit in the principal’s office,” frustrated teachers would tell her almost daily. They noticed she was happiest roaming the halls and hanging out with Mr Johnson so they soon sent her directly to the office. But Khanyi wasn’t stupid. She passed (barely) without even really trying. She was doing just enough to get to the next grade and closer to freedom.

Back home, things were not great either. The divorce ruined Lynette’s finances. The mother and her two daughters had to make do with a near-empty flat and aging clothes in their wardrobes. Times were suddenly tough.

“I only had flip-flops and Barbie socks throughout winter,” Khanyi recalls. “It was unthinkable that anyone could have 800 pairs of shoes at that time. My only clothes were black jeans, a T-shirt, flip-flops and socks. I would be invited out by friends and my mom would beg me not to go because I had nothing to wear. Our TV was mounted on a box. We had one chair and one sofa and a funny bed with a wooden post.

“Our Friday treat, for my sister and me, was chocolate wafer biscuits that cost R1,99 and a can of Coke from the Shoprite. Suddenly it hit me: Damn, I’m poor. My allowance was R10 a week and I would walk to school near Eastgate Mall and take bus 22 to Yeoville to save money. Things were so bad, I realised I had to do something, I had to be resourceful.”

So she bunked school and walked into the Oxygen clothing store at Eastgate and asked for a job which she got on the spot, three days a week. The other shop assistants were fabulous and funky. She was 15 and obviously underage but lied to the manager about being 17. Khanyi was so tiny her employers had their doubts but she was a natural with customers – alert, attentive and extremely persuasive.

But her own wardrobe sucked. She really did only have the one pair of black jeans, white tee, flip-flops and socks. One of the shop assistants finally declared: “Jy dra dieselfde goed elke dag!” (You’re always wearing the same clothes!). It was a joke but the truth hurt. Khanyi wasn’t living her out her destiny. She was a long way from Buckingham Palace.

The supervisor called her over one day. “Can you do something with your wardrobe?” It was too much for the schoolgirl. “I started crying,” Khanyi remembers. “She saved my life by giving me sale clothes to wear during work hours. I would arrive early in my black jeans, white tee and flip-flops and change into something trendy and amazing. When the shop closed I would wait to be the last to leave so I could change back into my real clothes without customers noticing.”

Wardrobe deficiencies aside, this was a girl who knew how to work a room. She could hustle with the best of them and quickly mastered the fine art of helping impressionable shoppers part with their money. Khanyi bumped up sales and was soon the star performer in the shop. She could finally even afford to buy her own clothes and was given the more demanding and lucrative Thursday to Sunday shifts.

Between sales and class, she met a boy – the head boy of Bedford High, no less. “Ghana was the first black head boy at the school,” she says. “It was strange because I was a Grade 8 freshman and head boys always date fellow matriculants. But I had money from Oxygen and I felt like I was almighty. I mean, it doesn’t get bigger than dating the head boy!”

It put Khanyi in the cool kids’ camp. And these kids ran a racket. If a student wanted to leave school before home time they could open an “entrance” for that pupil. Parts of the school fence were cut enough to allow someone to escape. These “entrances” were pricey. They all made so much money they could afford hotdogs and burgers. The racket was protected by the head boy, who enjoyed the rewards.

Eventually Lynette started to wonder where all her daughter’s nice clothes were coming from. One day she confronted her directly, asking whether Khanyi was sleeping with men for money. Lynette was rightly worried, since child prostitution was rife in Yeoville at that time. Some of the women who lived there were prostitutes and she was concerned that Khanyi was mingling with them.

Khanyi denied it vehemently, but could not give her mother a straight answer about where she got her new clothes. One day Khanyi returned home to a belt in the face. Lynette was raging mad. She kept whipping Khanyi around the flat. “My mother hit me so hard that I thought I was going to die. I became breathless from crying and running around. My mother screamed ‘Today is the day you die’ and that day I believed her.”

Khanyi spilled the beans.

“I confessed the whole story about my truancy at school and the Oxygen job. I told her I did it to help make ends meet. Then she cried. My mother cried. ‘I never thought I would let you down,’ she said to me. ‘I failed as a parent.’ She went to Oxygen and told them my true age and they fired me. I looked at my supervisor with pleading eyes but she just said: ‘No, babe – you’re a great kid and you will go far in life. You are ambitious. Here’s a pair of jeans.’”

Being unemployed just meant more time to focus on romance. She wanted to marry the head boy but he was off to Wits while Khanyi had a few more years in school. To preserve their love, matrimony seemed the only way. Khanyi didn’t want to lose him. So they told their parents of the hurried nuptial plans. Ghana planned to put a Kruger ring on her finger. They sat down with his mom and she immediately wanted to know whether Khanyi was pregnant. She wasn’t, though they’d hardly been angels.

“I will work over weekends and take good care of her,” Ghana vowed to his mom, who did not waste any time calling up Lynette. They both agreed the young couple just wanted to get married so that they could have sex. This was missing the point. Khanyi really loved him. “I was honestly afraid of losing my Ghana,” she says.

With the nuptials quashed by their mothers, all they had to look forward to was his matric dance. They chose to emulate the Hollywood power couple Will and Jada Smith with matching leather cowboy suits from the premiere of Will’s film Wild Wild West. The rest of the matriculants would be in tuxes and ball gowns but they were determined to be different. Lynette helped put Khanyi’s outfit together, doing what she could to get the look just right. Khanyi’s make-up was memorable – a clown who’d escaped the circus with mixed lipsticks and heaps of eyeshadow.

She shrugs thinking about the head boy now. She’s come so far since then and has fulfilled so many of her dreams. “Last time I saw Ghana,” she smiles, “he was a gold-toothed, pimpled, fat-tummy tel­ler at Absa.”

Even as a confused, angry and rebellious teen Khanyi never stopped believing and tells this amazing story about keeping her dreams alive. “Often at around 4pm there was a mysterious man who would walk past our block of flats, whistling ‘Stan’, Eminem’s song about an obsessed fan who eventually takes their own life.

“I would sit by my window waiting for the whistler to enthrall me. He whisked me away to a faraway land called MegaStardom – where I drove a sports car, sipped champagne and was surrounded by maids tending to my every whim. He spurred me on. I felt I could face anything. I travelled in private jets, signing autographs and eating as much chocolate as I wanted, just like they did in Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But then my whistler disappeared and I actually got sick. My tonic was gone. I got the flu out of anxiety. Would he ever return?”