Thandeka more than me. She was academically inclined and excelled in class. She loved educational toys while I was into Barbies. But at least I bought them with my own money. Thandeka’s head was always buried in books.”
If only Khanyi had done the same. She failed Grade 7.
3. I hate jazz
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
