I had not seen my friend Phybia Dlamini since varsity, or some point in time very close to that distant era. She called my name and I instantly knew her voice and was transported directly to Senate House at Wits, where we used to hang out on a concrete outcrop in the far corner close to the doors that led to a lift that took you up to the Vice Chancellor’s office. I know this geography of the university administration because people would stand on our concrete outcrop when in great anger to challenge the VC . It was a fairly regular occurrence and our concrete block was very good for proximity to the subject of the complaints. Apparently it used to be a fountain, but by the time we occupied it, it was no longer. But it still bore the name.
That fountain was the epicentre of our daily gatherings. We were a motley crew of kids of many shades, from wildly different lives and experiences of South Africa in the early ‘90s. Townships, rural areas and dispersed neighbourhoods in Joburg coincided on this one perfect coordinate. Without this “ex” fountain, we would never have met and bonded in that deeply overwrought manner of youth over the abominable muddy liquid purporting to be coffee served in the canteen and which we downed with blind abandon in gallons out of polystyrene cups that probably still live on in all our organs. Our plastic inheritance.
We met over a shared love of house music and hip hop. We raved. We hung out in Yeoville and Hillbrow and the city centre endlessly talking and talking, and dancing (and in my case shopping for vintage clothes that freaked my mother out – psychedelic flares from the ‘70s, ‘50s frocks and moth-eaten velvet jackets paired with Doc Martens and Converse All Stars). Phybia had a yen for bold polyester shirts. We liked the fact that we looked like a Benetton advert and would regularly get swept up in the aforementioned protests and tear-gas incidents, but the time for hardcore politics had passed – free elections and all that. Our primary interest was in film, music, books, theatre, art and this unfolding delight in what we felt we represented. A new way of being in South Africa where you could just be friends with the people you actually connected with and take it from there.
A packed-out memorial for a Joburg icon becomes a meditation on memory, grief and the people who shape our lives.
Now Phybia was standing in front of me in the Joburg theatre lobby and looking like a slightly shop-soiled version of that same girl, with that same wry gaze and the same gravelly voice, telling me she thought I was living in Canada, which can induce instant hives on so many levels, but could have been true as a metaphor representing the distance between our youthful selves and this sad reunion.
Because we were both in a cast of thousands who’d arrived to sing Maria McCloy’s praises at the theatre. It was impossible for so many to believe that Maria had died. Just like that.
As I sat in the audience watching the beautiful spectacle of Maria’s life replete with scenery and heavy hitters from every Joburg cultural touchpoint of the last 30 years, I felt like I was mourning this version of ourselves that Maria had burnished, promoted and willed into life.
She embodied the energy of this new world where we reinvented what it meant to be South African. It looked and sounded and acted like Maria. A sharp, funny, incisive, seen-it-all, knows-literally-everyone hybrid model running on her own solar-recharge battery pack that plugged into every single creative current that crisscrossed our cultural landscape and charged us all up. And here we were all sitting in this sold-out theatre heaving with affection for our friend, whose beautiful face beamed from the stage, wondering at the breadth of her connection to the world around her.
Afterwards I was exhausted and lying on my bed trying to make sense of the blip of the brief miraculous thing of a life lived well. Scrolling the gram for reprieve, as one does, it gave me this gift from the sea of schlock.
“A human being is a part of the whole .... He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of … consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.” – Albert Einstein.
It made me think of English 1 and all the novels I skimmed in haste. And how my professor stood at the front of a small room with old-fashioned desks and extolled the key idea in Howards End, a book in which EM Forster describes the unnerving, rapidly changing world of his time, and his only reasonable response: “Only connect.” It was the lesson of the day. It was the lesson of a lifetime.
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