with a fifteen-month-old baby boy.
He’d tell you: “I packed my bags, bid farewell to this great city, but you need cash to get out of the city.”
And with that he would make me remember that first day I came to the city.
We had just passed Witbank, we were running on the N12 in an aging Japanese-made taxi. Without any music and with fifteen passengers it was tense and kind of hostile. Nobody was talking. Maybe everybody was thinking about this great city, planning how they were going to do whatever it is that they were going to do there, do it better and in a quarter of the time. I smiled. Miriam Makeba’s “Gauteng” was playing soft and sweet in my ears. Then I took a vow: When I come out of Gauteng I will be driving my own car. Well, I was still a teenager then.
Molamo was studying film and broadcasting at that great institution.
“I’m thankful that I didn’t have the money to leave then because I would have gone. But I learned to survive in this great city. I’m still here, satan. I’m the ‘thank you-man’. Let me tell you a secret: When you are with people, don’t act powerful, be humble and weak; your body language should ask for protection, and you’ll see much of the good in people,” he said, sober as a lion.
He was from a farm. He went to primary school under the care of his grandmother, which meant neglect. They had a saying on the farm: There is a crocodile in the water (meaning that you fear it, so you can’t wash). Until he went to high school there was a crocodile in the water. He went through primary school without even a toothbrush. But that was not this Molamo. These days he was a fashion parade and had to wash each and every morning, then have a late-night bath with a book in his hand. He was the most expensive of the 207s; everything that he put on was heavily priced.
With eyes that he would claim could see people’s souls and a permanent smile that made him look like he knew all things on, under and above God’s green earth, this was Molamo.
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