Room 207. Kgebetli Moele

you want to stay in a rented, single room with your five friends, like your father? Don’t you want to drive very nice cars, have your very own house and enjoy your own money like Uncle Khutso?”

      Note the “uncle”. Khutso was his mother’s boyfriend and a wannabe stepfather. He was trying with everything he had to get Tebogo to marry him. Molamo knew about the brother, knew that he was Tebogo’s boyfriend, or keep-company as Molamo always called him. He wasn’t threatened by him in any way.

      Khutso was what the masses call the black elite. Young, black, under thirty and successful in financial terms. He had the world and all. This black elite in particular had two townhouses, a four-by-four and a couple of sports cars.

      He’d pushed for four years at university without friends, without even a girlfriend. Taken refuge in books and in that way ensured his survival of UCT. He wasn’t conscious of the damage done by those lonely-wishful four years; for him everything was possible because now there was money. He didn’t have friends then, but now that he had money there were a million friends.

      Khutso was expensive, a fashion parade, but all the pain and pressure that he’d felt when he was still poor was encoded somewhere in his heart. He always looked like he was trying to run away from it, looked like he was the richest man in the world.

      “What is the difference between your father and Uncle Khutso?” his mother asked the other Molamo.

      The other Molamo got the point and he never missed school again. The son didn’t want to be like the father.

      Molamo had saved some cash while driving that heavy-duty truck and, with that money, he entered himself in that great institution of tertiary education for the second time. Paid half the tuition fees upfront. This marked the start of his personal venture in dream city.

      He always called himself the “thank you-man” because that was how he paid for things.

      “My ladder to the top, every step that I have passed, has a face, that I have thanked, and those faces are holding me, this ladder, together.”

      You would be walking with him down Claim, going into the CBD, and he’d just stop to talk to this man or that woman from his past that he had thanked for something.

      “Excuse the cliché, but no man is an island,” he would tell you afterwards. “No one is a self-made something. People can help you with a very small something, and that can help you to be a very big something. I’m still dreaming a dream because of these people and the very many things that they have done for me, and all they have had from me is a ‘thank you’. If it wasn’t for them, well, I don’t know.”

      All the money he had saved dried up with the start of his second year. But he ‘thank you’ed and ‘thank you’ed until the great institution barred him from entering the examination room.

      After all his hard work he became a dropout.

      At the same time, Tebogo was writing her exams 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.