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The Gift of Having Nothing to Lose

Why the fastest slave wins the race;

lessons from the vampire economy; and

the truth about the shape of the world

He charges down the track in a blaze of colour – green for the land, gold for the sun, black for the colour of who he is and what he is better than anyone else in the world at doing: a black man, running for his life.

His arms cut the air like blades, his legs pump up and down like the pistons of a steam locomotive. He is a machine, made from flesh and blood. He is as human as you and me, but when he crosses the line, he turns into a god. He stands with his feet planted firmly on the ground; he leans back; he angles his right arm, taut and strong, in an archer’s grip, and he points to the heavens, from where he draws his fire.

His name is Bolt. Lightning Bolt. Usain Lightning Bolt. At the 2016 Olympics in Rio, he ran the 100 metres in 9,81 seconds, to become, once again, the fastest man on earth.

You and I, as human as we may be in our limitations, as godlike in our ambitions, will not easily wrest the title from him. Just as we are unable to out-lightning Bolt – and I speak for myself here, your abilities may vary – so are we unable to out-think Einstein, out-box Muhammad Ali, out-­sing Beyoncé.

But all of us are capable of striving, and striving begins with asking the big, nagging questions that have bothered us from when we were young: how and why? How, in this case, did Bolt get to be so unstoppable, so unbeatable? And why, as it turns out, is he only one of a whole breed of super-sprinters to have emerged from the island nation of Jamaica?

To begin with, we learn from Bolt that excellence is a moving target, that you pursue it with grim discipline and daily rigour, in the knowledge that there will always be someone in your shadow waiting for you to stumble and fall. We learn that he became a winner, and the only athlete in history to strike gold in the 100 metres in three consecutive Olympics, because he couldn’t picture himself not winning. ‘I don’t want to come in second,’ he once told an interviewer. He had to overcome, he had to push himself further, drive himself harder, because he has been afflicted since childhood with a weakness that would otherwise have held him back: scoliosis, an abnormal curvature of the spine. But the happier accident of his birth was that he was born a Jamaican.

So many elite sprinters come from Jamaica (Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, Asafa Powell, Nesta Carter, Elaine Thompson, Veronica Campbell-Brown, to name just a few) that scientists have long wondered whether there is something in the air, some­thing in the water. A study by researchers from the University of the West Indies found that the answer may be more down to what’s in the earth. The high percentage of aluminium in the Jamaican soil can encode a gene known as ACTN3, which promotes the development of muscle fibres in a way that generates ‘strong, repetitive contractions’ – the rhythm of the runner in motion.

But there may be another, deeper reason why the race here is to the swift and strong. And that is race itself.

If we travel back in time, faster and faster, through the ages, to the middle of the sixteenth century, we will see the spiral of DNA echoing the curl of the ocean waves on a voyage from the shores of West Africa, across the raging Atlantic, to the tropical lull of the Caribbean. The cargo on board was human. When the ship docked, the survivors were yoked at the neck, shackled at the feet, and set free only to slave in the plantations, from four in the morning until sunset, hacking and harvesting sugar cane in the cloying heat. Those who survived the journey, those who survived the toil, were the strongest, the fastest, the hardiest. They went on to build the nation. To see a Jamaican athlete break­ing the tape on the track today is to see the human spirit in surge, to taste the sweetness of victory, like the sugar in the marrow of the cane.

And what of us, here on the southern tip of that bloodline? What of the ships that came to our shores? What of our toil, our survival, our race to the finish? Let’s contemplate that with the words of another great Jamaican ringing in our ears: ‘Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds.’ Bob Marley was saying that we alone must own responsibility for our freedom, for our redemption. But we can do that only if we remember what it means to be free.

I grew up in the township of Wattville, near Benoni, on the East Rand of Johannesburg, between the freeways and the mine dumps that always made me think of upturned bowls of yellow mealie pap. Oliver Reginald Tambo, then secretary general of the ANC, lived in Wattville in the 1950s before he went into exile. And he is buried here today, along­side his wife, Adelaide, in the shadow of the airport that now bears his name.

I was an in-betweener. I was born in 1985, when apartheid – the institution, if not the idea – was in its death rattle, on the cusp of the new dawn. I remember seeing soldiers in the township, in their dusty, malt-brown uniforms, cradling their rifles, eyeing us with a mixture of suspicion and fear. I remember seeing the armoured vehicles, lolling in the dips of the dirt roads like monsters rising from the swamp. I remember running, laughing, to join a big march in Dube Street, not knowing who was marching, or why.

But mostly I remember my grandmother’s chickens. She kept them in her backyard. (What township Gogo didn’t?) One day, the chicken coop was dirty, so she took the chicken out and tethered it by its leg to a tree. She left it there all day. Then, in the evening, she said, ‘Vusi, go and untie the chicken and put it back in the coop.’ So I undid the knot and slipped the rope off the chicken’s scaly leg. It was free. But it just stayed there, frozen in place, resigned to its fate. I shooed it, pushed it, shouted and clapped it towards the coop. It feebly flapped its wings and clucked, but carried on scratching around in the narrow, invisible circle that had marked the limits of its world. Sometimes, when the rope has been cut we don’t realise that the rope has been cut.

I hate the idea that I, because I am a black man, must blame somebody else for my disadvantage. I hate the notion that I, because I am a black man, must lack the means to take control of my own destiny. I can step outside the circle. I can fly. I think of those slaves, those survivors, wrenched from their villages and their families, forced into bondage in a faraway land. I think of the gift of speed and stamina and courage they would bequeath to the generations that followed.

What is our gift, as South Africans? It is the gift of opportunity, born from struggle. It is the gift of possibility, born from sacrifice. We come from deprivation, from lack, from want, from three and a half centuries of dominion and four decades of subjugation by a minority in our own land. We come from having nothing. That is our gift: that we have nothing to lose.

We have learnt over the years to live on very little, and that is why we are so good at dreaming of living on a lot. I must have been the biggest dreamer in all of Wattville. I remember the day my big dream swam into focus, from the blurry half-imaginings of my boyhood, into the crystal-­clear colour and noise of unbridled ambition. That dream rode in on whitewall tyres, mag wheels and the roar of a V8 engine, competing with the boom-boom thump of a pounding bass. We stopped playing football and turned to look as the Ford Grenada, bottle-green, stirred up dirt and screeched to a halt. The music kept playing. The door opened, and a man stepped out from the driver’s seat. We scoped him out, from his All Star shoes, to his leather trousers, to his silk shirt, to his Sportif hat, to his aviator sunglasses. He was all cool, all swagger, all money. His name was Mabaso, and I wanted to grow up to be exactly like him. Then I learnt what he did for a living. He jacked cars. I had the right dream, but the wrong role model.

Every South African township is a model of a mixed economy, from the big corporate chain stores to the spaza shops run from people’s homes to the pavement hawkers selling fruit, sweets and peanuts on the street corners. But there is another economy, a sub-economy – one that thrives on illicit entrepreneurship, car jackings and robberies and petty theft. This is the vampire economy, so named because it sucks the life and blood from the system that is meant to sustain us. We are meant to work for a living, put in the hours, draw the reward that is commensurate with our endeavours. But it doesn’t always work out that way.

On the subject of the underworld economy, somebody who was talking about black business, lamenting a string of failures, said to me, ‘The trouble is that black people have not learnt how to organise.’ Come on! Do you know what it takes to pull off a cash heist? Well, I don’t personally, but let me hypothesise here. It takes military-level planning; in-depth knowledge; strategic thinking; split-second timing; carefully delegated, intensely coordinated teamwork; and the exact right amount of resources and equipment for the job. But, as a navy commander whom I worked with on a business project in the US once told me, ‘No plan survives the first gunshot.’ When hell breaks loose, all you can do is fall or run, with or without the cash in your hand. That’s why I work in finance, equity, venture capital, entrepreneurship: there are fewer gunshots.

There was a gang in Wattville known as the Gerani Gang. I knew of them only by reputation, by street talk, by the fingers that pointed as cars drove by. Only years later, after I had left the township, did I discover where they took their name from – a menswear boutique called Gerani, which sells high-fashion, high-ticket, Italian-label shoes and clothing. Like them, we aspire higher, and there is nothing wrong with that. What is wrong is that we forget why we aspire.

For example, my brother came to me one day, excited, looking for brotherly advice. He was about to buy a car, and he knows I know cars. What should he buy? A V8? An SUV? A convertible? An Audi? A Merc? A Porsche, maybe? I stop him right there. ‘Two things,’ I say. ‘One, God’s been good, so it’s not you. Two, and more importantly, it’s not what you drive that matters. It’s what drives you.’ It sounds cheesy when I say it, but what I’m saying is, don’t let the trappings of society define who you are.

The singer Thandiswa Mazwai, in her beautiful soaring voice, asks us, ‘Have you forgotten the lineage that you come from? Have you forgotten the history, the tradition? Have you forgotten?’ In the Western philosophical tradition, we say, ‘Cogito, ergo sum’. (I think, therefore I am). In the African tradition, we say, ‘I am because you are.’ But we forget that collective tradition. It is easier now for us to just say, as we strive, as we rise, as we succeed: ‘I’. I live here, I drive this, I do that, I have this, I want this, I want that. When you have nothing, you share everything. When you have everything, you keep everything to yourself. In the township, when you put a palisade fence around your house, it is a sign to everyone who passes by that you are going up in the world. You have something now, worth protecting, worth looking after. You have a barrier of spears between yourself and everybody else.

In township-taal, a palisade fence is called a ‘stop nonsense’ – as in, go away, don’t bother me, ‘stop your nonsense’. Where I stay now, on a secure golf estate, midway between Johannesburg and Pretoria, we don’t have a stop nonsense around my house – but we do have one around the entire estate, electrified, with a boom gate, key code entry, ID verification and an always-manned control room at the entrance. When my mother comes to visit, she marvels at the greenery, the birdlife, the wide-open space. But she says: ‘It’s too quiet.’ Her location is the location. For her, the noise, the buzz, the smell of food wafting in from the street, the clamour of people coming and going, popping in for a visit without calling to make an appointment … that is the poetry and the joy of living in that space.

I send my children to stay with my mother because I want them to form relationships with people on the other side of the fence. I want them to grow up culturally and socially ambidextrous. At the same time, in their own home environment, on their own estate, it pleases me to know that when they see a black man, a neighbour, driving a Lambor­ghini, it’s not something that should come as a shock. They don’t need to stop playing their game to watch. The question we need to ask ourselves, when we think about these things is, why do so many black people leave the location? The answer is simple. They leave because the location reminds them of who they are and where they come from, not who they want to be and where they see themselves going. But the barriers of the mind remain.

When I go back to Wattville, I see shopping centres, new houses, bright-green grass on the soccer fields. But my mother still stays in the same house, goes to the same church, buys her beer from the same shebeen. She sends me to buy a six-pack. I ask, from the shebeen? She says, of course! But it’s much cheaper at the supermarket down the road, I tell her. And what if somebody sees me? Somebody I know? What’s that going to look like? ‘Shhh,’ she says. ‘Go to the shebeen and buy me a pack.’

I grew up in two worlds, and I came to realise that both of them are based on a lie. I went to school in Wattville, and I was bright, smart, smooth-talking, always questioning, always answering, eager to please, eager to learn. I got pushed up three grades: accelerated, like a fast car. Our teacher, who also happened to be the principal, stood before our class one day. He picked a tennis ball off the table. He held it in his hand and began turning it slowly with his thumb, mimicking a revolution around the sun. ‘The world is as round as a tennis ball,’ he said, perfectly enunciating each syllable. It was the only thing he said in English during the entire lesson.

Then I went to high school in Benoni, a mixed-race Model C school, where English was the full-time language of instruction. I got moved down two grades. My fast car was suddenly going in reverse. On my first day, the geography teacher pointed at a globe on the table and said, ‘The world isn’t round. It’s a geoid.’ I almost fell off my chair. How could my principal have been so wrong? Or maybe my geography teacher had got it wrong. ‘Geoid.’ That means, when you break it down, that the earth is shaped like the earth. That’s like saying water is a liquid because it’s wet. But I grew to like my school, and I liked my fellow students, some of them a little more than others.

There was girl sitting a few rows away from me. She had a Greek surname. And she looked like a goddess. I asked her, eventually, when I caught up with her in the corridor one day, ‘Will you go out with me?’ To my amazement, she didn’t say no. She said, ‘I’ll think about it.’ The next day, I caught up with her again. ‘Did you think about it?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ she said. And then she gave me her answer: ‘No.’ I made the mistake of asking her why. ‘Because you’re a kaffir,’ she said.

The word hit me like a smack in the face. Nobody had ever called me that before. It spun me around, reeling me back across the great divide I foolishly thought I had crossed. When I recall this, it takes me back to the other world, back to Wattville, where every night, as a young boy, my mother would call me to undo her bra, because the clip had broken, so she had to tie it in a knot at the back. She couldn’t afford to buy new underwear because she was sending us to school.

I think about that girl, the girl of my broken dreams, and I realise now that she was the one who was living in mental slavery. She was the one who was trapped in and by the past. I was free. I have learnt the truth about the world: that it isn’t as round as a tennis ball, and it isn’t shaped like itself. It is shaped the way we shape it, according to the way we see it, the way we mould it to our ambitions and our destiny.

I know the colour of who I am. I am a black man, running for my life, for my freedom, for opportunity born from struggle, possibility born from sacrifice. And I am running too, for my father, who never became what he hoped to be, and who never got to see what his children would one day become.