When Thulani Mankwenta, voice hoarse from unbridled singing at a traditional ceremony next door hobbles over and makes an unusual request, I quietly wonder whether the guy’s head is screwed on right. “Pour some wine,” he croaks, “and put on some Bowling for Soup.”
Uhm…say what? My ears must be mucking about.
At his age, in this place, the last thing you’d expect is a song request for a quartet of middle-class American adolescents belting soppy teenage lullabies about girls and such inconsequential pubescent tantrums. African gospel, Amapiano, maybe some mbaqanga would be more congruent but given my own left-field musical preferences, who am I to register any complaint? So like a dutiful neighbour I put away The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, pull out an upturned bucket to my visitor, and reach for the papsaak.
Ah, fond memories this band arouses, Thulani sighs. Wonderful memories in snow-clad Edmonton, Thulani performing opera to rosy-cheeked Canadians who clapped approvingly and argued as to under whose roof he would be spending his three-month long stay. One sallow slip of a girl was smitten enough to want to marry him, maybe start a mixed family. “Had another great day with Thulani,” read some of the emails from his hosts, “he is crazy and we just love him.”

A curious figure he must have cut. This stocky black kid from a gun-toting and drug-infested Cape Town’s Lwandle township to sporting a tux inside an amphitheater, singing the music of Eurocentric sophistication.
For a bored upstart writer, he was a Godsend. A rugged muse who once did memorable things in faraway cities only to wind up falling through the cracks and – if you discount the photo album with yellowing newspaper clippings and his voice – there is little else to verify whether any of it ever actually happened. Weather-beaten and wary, an average Joe that nobody ever really notices, who has fallen on hard times, winding up in a drab Colesberg ghetto. Yet when this haggard ex opera singer with a voice that the papers once described as “startling” stumbles on my doorstep, it feels like I’ve found my own Sugarman.
Unlike Stephen “Sugar” Segerman and Craig Bartholomew-Strydom, fortunately, I did not have to go looking for this guy. Sometime in the late 90s these two South Africans embarked on a search for a once exquisite musical talent whom much of the world did not remember, know about, or was quite possibly dead. The rumour mill went that, following a bad gig, Sixto Rodriguez had doused himself infront of a live audience with petrol and set himself alight. Or he’d painted a wall with his brain. But the one that caught on was how he’d followed the curse of many great musical legends – going by way of a drug overdose.

In his native America, he was an unknown. In South Africa the folk-rock singer “is believed to have sold more records than Elvis Presley.” A cult figure among dope-smoking hippies and white liberals, his music was a sedative to the repression and paranoia of living in segregated Mzansi.
The two fans would finally track Rodriguez down to a seedy downtown Detroit neighbourhood where he was “doing work that no one else wanted to do.” Suffering from glaucoma, he was going blind and had long put away any extenuating dreams of pop superstardom. Following a highly successful tour of South Africa, however, Rodriguez would discover that his best days were far from behind him. He performed sold-out shows and sat down to big interviews. His unlikely story would lead to the production of an Academy award winning documentary entitled Searching for Sugar Man which was met by standing ovations and weeping audiences wherever it was screened.

Now here was Thulani, not quite with a story as compelling as that but a story all the same.
A rather typical township story, with a typical township school forming the backdrop … learners here dabble with weed at breaktime. Well-worn knives are snuck up socks and there are pistols in schoolbags because one can never be too careful. Street gangs are recruiting and there’s peer pressure to join. Thulani is tempted, sadly not having a violent bone in him, lacks both the temperament and the temper. In fact in this setting he is something of a pariah, the unpopular guy who sings with the school choir after hours and a with an older township outfit on weekends.
To be sure, the choristers have what it takes but the streets of Gugulethu are saturated with singing talent. Fortunately, a certain Marijke Roos to whom Thulani’s mother is employed as a retainer has an ear for these things and knows just the guy who might make things happen. Scout Leithead is a clean-shaven director of the Kokopelli Choir Foundation in Edmonton, Alberta, who happens to be travelling throughout Africa in search of people like Thulani; gifted types from the sort of places talent scouts seldom visit. After a few meetings with Leithead, Thulani and some of his fellow musos are in the papers, plane tickets to Canada in hand.
There, they infuse bits of African folk music into old opera joints. It’s an experimental long shot but it actually works. In no time, they are touring Canada, these township youngsters from the world’s murder capital, pulling off traditional Zulu dances in between impassioned renditions of Mozart. In more privileged backgrounds, this would be called “a gap year” and no more fuss would be made of it. In Thulani’s case it’s a moment of such immense pride that a bovine is slaughtered in celebration. He is the first in his family to go overseas and his mother never passes up the opportunity to let everyone know it. Three wild months of that and a few more in Namibia and Botswana and unexpectedly Thulani’s mother passes on. It’s a major psychological blow and being the elder child the family responsibilities fall squarely on his shoulders.
The music takes a back seat and before he knows what’s what, it’s almost two decades on and he wonders what might have been. What might Scott Leithead be getting up to these days. Thanks to Facebook, we manage to establish some contact with Thulani’s former mentor who is due in Cape Town sometime this month. From the correspondence, Leithead is ecstatic. He too wonders what might be keeping his old buddy sane nowadays.
We could give him the long of it; the hard times roughing it, the eye accident that has left him partially blind, the bingeing, the quiet nights wondering where it all went wrong? What might have been done differently? But nha…today we’ll take you to where the magic is happening: on a small stoep outside a rented room somewhere in the Karoo. On the stereo the original Sugarman, Rodriguez, holds court singing his hit song I Wonder and who should be there to accompany him in a “startling” baritone than Thulani Makwenta? Arms flaying in the cool evening air, feet tapping wildly; it’s all improv, so never you mind the lyrics. It’s nothing exceptional in the great discography of 21-st century music but the voice is alive and reverberates throughout the neighbourhood. The guy is clearly enjoying himself and tonight that is more than enough for everyone.
Editor’s notes: Due to the size of the video, eParkeni was not able to upload it. As soon as those technical glitches have been overcome, you, Dear Reader will be the first to enjoy it.
Rick Emmerson; Construction Worker Colleague to Rodriguez: “He approached the work from a different place than most people do. He took it very, very seriously, sort of like a sacrament. He was going to do this dirty, dirty work for eight or ten hours, okay, but he was dressed in a tuxedo….the artist is the pioneer.
Thanks again Phakamisa. This engendered nostalgia in me, although in this case I was already too old to dance with what you refer to as white liberals – already predictably, and by leftie design, off the charts in ideological and identity stereotypes. Even maybe so, there was an energy in such sugartimes that helped unravel apartheid and its many minds in spite of such being airbrushed out – and an energy that can be increasingly found on the margins of South African peri-urban areas today. The experience of hearing full blown opera singers surprise in the pavement cafe’s of Stellenbosch these days, being only one example of so many new cultural treasures we have… Write on please – you are helping uncover layers of our many truths….