I guess, like a lot of things, it started in nursery school.
This kid told me he was having a pirate party and that a special pirate ship had been built for the occasion. When he said it, I saw it, the magnificent ship with its flapping black sails. This was going to be the best party ever.
I arrived excited, there was the usual party shit, balloons, and the blowy things that unfurl, and if you do it just right, smack somebody in the face. But no pirate ship.
He lied.
This was so devastating to me at the time that I still remember it.
I just left the party and wandered off, causing a big hullabaloo until I was found. My upset mother’s words stuck with me: “You need to learn to fit in.”
To fulfill this far more complex mission than you’d ever imagine, I’d have to find some people I could actually fit in with. Thus began the lifelong, often tragicomic, mission of Finding My People.
In the early school phase, there was some hope, a few fellow misfits who didn’t belong, or chose not to belong. The cryers. The talk-in-classers. The glasses wearers. The undiagnosed. And me, the observer — always wanting to be close to the story, without the risk of actually participating in it.
As school dragged on, everyone got weirder and weirder until eventually I realised: if you’re the only one who’s not weird, then you’re the weird one.
The late school phase was trickier. I was treading water, hoping it would all end soon. Trying not to get beaten up. Like everyone else, punching down while listening to the whirl of the apartheid machine.
Ug.
After Paul Siebert left*, I never found anyone who really shared my interests. Sure, I met a few nice people — usually girls — but never that person I could talk to about the things that actually mattered.
This is probably best illustrated by the fact that the boy I spent the most time with was a Jewish, Elvis-loving born-again Christian.
It was an odd friendship. He was listening to Elvis; I was listening to the Sex Pistols. He experienced Jesus as salvation; I experienced Jesus as a symbol of white nationalism.
We eventually fell out over a girl.
Thinking back, I really didn’t like the guy, but he was older than me, and by standard eight, he had a car.
So there was that.
Then, suddenly, I was finished with school and studying, and earning money.
The first job I ever had paid R90 a week. Not much, you say; life-changing, I say.
One day, I did the maths. Hold on—if I saved a bit, I might actually have enough to get the fuck out of The Cult Headquarters** and get my own place.
Next thing, I’m opening a section of The Star Newspaper I’d only ever used to line the litter tray — the classifieds. I scroll past For Sale/Wanted, past Personals, past Obituaries — usually short because you paid by the word — past Situations Vacant, to Accommodation.
And there it was:
Kenmere Crest
Two Bedrooms
One Bathroom
R240 per month
Hold the horses, you mean if I share with a friend, I pay R120 a month to be free as a bird, with nobody telling me what to do? Are you kidding me?
And that’s how I came to live in Yeoville.
First hurdle for a privileged boy: buy food and cook for yourself.
Smash and tuna was a good option, cheap and idiot-proof. If there was no tuna, then Toppers’ fake mince for fake mashed potato.
This was less of an adjustment than you might think, because food at home was seriously kak. Like many Edenvale families, we had a set meal for each day of the week. I remember overcooked lamb chops and mashed potatoes, fish fingers, and frozen peas, though I couldn’t tell you which day belonged to which.
I do remember that Sundays were Koo-tinned spaghetti or sweetcorn on toast, and best of all, Thursdays were hamburgers from Zippy Burger or a foot-long hot dog from the Apple Bite Roadhouse.
I digress.
Yeoville, my new home, was also home to students, dropouts, chancers, draft dodgers, and dagga smokers — so it wasn’t exactly strange that money, or the lack of it, was always an issue.
I could handle the lack of clothes — you only needed one good pair of jeans — or never eating out, or, if you did, a shared, greasy pizza from Mama’s, or driving my klapped-out old car on the smell of an oil rag.
But my second hurdle was how to jol and meet girls without a budget.
To meet girls, you had to go out to nightclubs, and that meant having enough money to get in, buy drinks, and get drunk enough to actually talk to the girls you met.
Or Bars, but they weren’t without their issues.
When I first moved into Yeoville, Rocky Street wasn’t yet the legendary jol strip it would later become. Back then, there were really only three places worth going to.
Café Casablanca was one of those impossible-to-get-into, exclusive spots owned by a record-company executive who managed some famous groups. We never had much Joy there or Rumours, a jazz club for really old people —
And lastly, La Tortue — the meeting place for young bohemians, which, of course, is where we went. It was owned by a guy called Horst, who looked like Riff-Raff’s less successful brother. Unfortunately, the beer was bladdy expensive, which is a problem if the whole point is to get drunk and meet girls.
Then my brand new friend Sheila invited me to come to the Box Theatre at Wits to see some local bands.
I really didn’t want to go. At the time, my idea of local music was some ou singing I Shot the Sheriff — the Eric Clapton version — on an acoustic guitar at the local steakhouse on a Sunday night.
Super kak.
Anyway, I turned up and was very effectively ignoring the bands until this one song began. The first two lines were the narrator, the next the shopkeeper:
I go to the café, I want one packet chips
I look in the packet — what’s this?Where is your mother? She must look after you
Because you come to make trouble, not to buy food.***
Then the singer stops mid-song and starts taking orders from the audience.
“I’ll have one Staal Burger and a packet chips!” someone shouts — Staal Burger being a member of a notorious apartheid hit squad at the time.
There’s another line where the shopkeeper says, “Get out the shop, you break the machine.”
Yes. I wanted to break the machine.
The song was Toasted Take-Away by the Cherry Faced Lurchers.
And I thought, fuck me. After years of doubting my sanity, thinking maybe the stork had dropped me in the wrong country — finally…
I’d found my people.
I met genuinely cool people — in Yeoville— people who had interesting things to say about politics and music. People who watched subtitled films had sophisticated views on drugs and sex, owned books by Nabokov and Jean-Paul Sartre but didn’t insufferably quote them, and, importantly, hated many of the same things I did.
This, to me, was un-fucken-believable.
But there was something else: there was no shame in having fuck-all ambition. It even had a name — NARFI — no ambition and fuckall interest with a silent R.
We were forty years into the thousand-year Reich, or so we believed, so what was the point of anything? Nobody was going to think less of you for sitting around all day smoking dagga and reading comics.
As long as you wrote the odd song or poem or graffitied a slogan on a wall, or imagined the film you were going to make that would change the world.
That was peak nobody-telling-you-what-to-do time.
Yeoville wasn’t just a place — it was an idea. A temporary republic of misfits and outsiders, where nobody cared where you came from as long as you had a story, a theory, or a spare cigarette.
For the first time, I wasn’t trying to fit in. I just was in.
And it wasn’t about success or careers or five-year plans. We lived from gig to gig, conversation to conversation, beer to beer — believing, perhaps naively, that culture could be a form of resistance.
We didn’t break the machine; we broke with the machine.
Yeoville will live in my heart forever.
*Amounting to Nothing: A Success Story
You buy one rand potatoes, you give me a hundred rand troubles. Get out of my shop. And so it goes. No more corner cafes.
👏👏