host. Dashing Babes was infamous for breaking hearts and playing the field. It wasn’t exactly love at first sight.
“I didn’t think he was my type,” Gladys told little Khanyi.
She kept Babes at bay until one night at a dance when he got up on the stage, quite drunk, and said into the microphone: “Gladys Mavuso, you are going to marry me!” Her friends erupted around her, cheering him on, but Gladys couldn’t believe his nerve. How dare he propose like that? But she eventually softened to him, liked his daring, and realised he meant it.
MaMavuso, Khanyi’s maternal great-grandmother, was another formidable woman. She owned horses and had a business selling cold drinks and magwinya (fat cakes or vetkoek). The Mbaus were generally seen as a cultured family of higher standing than the average Sophiatown local. Trevor Huddleston, the renowned cleric and anti-apartheid activist, even tutored MaMavuso, and remained a life-long friend. Babes was from a poor background and was the quintessential struggling artist. It was noble poverty. When MaMavuso died, he was there for Gladys and that brought them together in a 40-year marriage.
Khanyi was their first grandchild and they spoiled her. She got everything her heart desired. They were both very Western in the way they dressed and saw the world. They both spoke fluent English. Gladys insisted one should “speak English well or don’t bother at all”. Dressing and behaving properly were in the rules. You always had to dress appropriately and speak correctly.
Gladys would cane you if you broke the rules. She ran her household with the decorum and attention to detail of Buckingham Palace. Khanyi lovingly called her gran the “Queen of England”. Everything had to be just so. She was strict but caring. Good cop and bad cop in one.
Babes turned out to be a canny entrepreneur. He managed to run a printing company during the apartheid years. All his life he insisted that the children learn a musical instrument. Playing music had meant so much to him, he wanted to pass that joy on but warned it was impossible to make a living as a musician. Khanyi’s aunt ensured her upbringing was even more cosmopolitan and unusual. Nikiwe lived and worked in Germany as an engineer for BASF. She was a smart, successful woman who had travelled and seen the world, and her visits left the little girl with an expanded sense of her own potential. There was far more to see and do than the township offered.
As a girl, Khanyi loved cartoons and eating bowls of cereal in bed. Significantly, she was addicted to The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, an early reality show that celebrated the excesses of the 1980s, showcasing giant homes, expensive cars and yachts. Can there be any doubt this planted an envious thought in her young brain? Something along the lines of “if they can have all that, why can’t I”?
She also liked CNN and never missed the evening news on TV1. She would hop onto Babes’ lap in his rocking chair and they would take in the bulletin together. The images of a rapidly changing country. Babes taught Khanyi to count in that rocking chair and he also taught her how to play the piano. But her mind wandered during the lessons. She was far more interested in colouring in.
Gladys tried to inject some grace and poise into the child by taking her to ballet classes. All that demanding effort and discipline would turn her granddaughter, she hoped, into a little black swan. Like Gladys, Khanyi would dance professionally later in life.
“I was brought up believing the Mbaus were regal,” Khanyi says. “They speak well and are to be envied.”
She would tell her grandmother she was going to be rich and have a big house. That she would have orphanages and children’s hospitals named after her. She was affected by the images of malnourished children in Ethiopia that were all over the media in the 1980s. “It broke my heart,” Khanyi says. “I told my grandmother that my business would be called Mbau Bridges. I wanted to help. I was groomed to speak properly and make sense. Inculcated with the belief that I have to be the best I can, a leader or the boss – be the owner and founder of things.”
That self-belief was challenged by an absence in her life. Khanyi longed for her father. “I had wonderful grandparents,” she says. “I had my mother, my aunts and uncles but I had no daddy. When we did school projects and I had to draw my family tree, I had to put my grandfather in the father block.”
Babes didn’t approve of her father. Menzi Mcunu was just a lowly taxi driver to Khanyi’s grandmother. He didn’t visit much and young Khanyi had very little information about him. That her father was Zulu and lived in Zondi, a suburb of Soweto, in a four-roomed house was about all she knew about him.
“He spoke funny,” she recalls. “But he fascinated me. I spoke to him in English and he tried to converse in his broken English. I’d never seen someone like him. He wore dirty overalls covered in grease. I saw a clown that ate with his dirty hands. My grandmother would die if she saw him. I wondered what kind of life he led and what kind of food they ate in Zondi? But my grandmother would not allow me to visit. ‘He’ll put you in a taxi,’ she told me. ‘It’s not safe. It has no seatbelts.’”
Before her teens, Khanyi could only see her father outside the house. He was not allowed in. Later, she would drag him to family events though he wasn’t invited. “I would pull him into the house to gatecrash,” she says. “I wanted him to meet my cousins and aunts. He’d sit in a corner and have scones and tea but he’d always want to leave right away. I pleaded with him to stay. I longed for his company.”
Menzi would sneak into the neighbourhood and pick up his daughter in secret. He would spoil her with sweets and cash. “He was my Father Christmas,” Khanyi says.
“He’d take me to his scrapyard and show me cars in Dube. I would play under them and have magwinya. He would ask me not to tell my grandmother but whenever I was upset with her I would shout things like ‘My dad said you are evil and he will come and steal me – he loves me!’ Then he would get in trouble with her. She’d warn him not to ‘mess up this child’ and then he’d get angry with me because I didn’t know how to lie. But I couldn’t help it. I grew up in an honest house. Nevertheless, I loved my dad. He was my clown. I felt that no-one understood him.”
Menzi had children with other women and over time Khanyi got to meet her four half-sisters and six half-brothers. No bonds ever took hold, except for Thandeka, with whom she became very close and who still plays an important part in her life today. At some point Menzi tried to reconcile with Khanyi’s mother, Lynette. “But she would push him away,” Khanyi says. “I saw the commotion between them but it didn’t regsiter in my kid mind. Still, I know he was fond of my mother.”
2. A star is born
Khanyi went to a whites-only crèche called Flock on Eloff Street in downtown Johannesburg. Persuasive and professional, her mother Lynette managed to sneak her in. She and one other child were the only black kids allowed. Khanyi travelled there daily with her mother, who worked in one of the nearby big office blocks. Wendy, the founder of the school, had emigrated to South Africa from England and had no hang-ups about racial mixing.
“We’d hug and drink from the same cup and grab sweets from each other’s mouths,” she recalls. “That never bothered Wendy so I grew up in a world where blacks and whites were equals and I never really experienced racism. Except for this one time.”
Her friend Laris was a beautiful coloured girl who passed for white when that sort of thing mattered. Khanyi visited for a sleep over but felt out of place. Laris’s mother was good to her, but her boyfriend gave her strange looks. “It made me feel like I was black and dirty,”
