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?”
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