Javas kept rolling. ‘What I learned is that there is only fashion. No one decides on their own whether they like art or not. They are taken to art by the winds, they are told what it is, and what it’s worth, in whispers.’
Javas told a good story. He also knew how to make a print, having been trained in the art of spoon printing by a benevolent teacher in his early childhood. A few years into his stint as city knee-breaker, he began an affair with a Zulu girl of a similar age, an artist who had moved through the Jozi system, studying at UJ and then going on to be mentored by bigger names at bigger venues.
Thus the artist life of Javas Khumalo was born. Funded by his knee-breaker savings, Javas’s career followed a remarkable upward curve. A few months into producing cheap but innately sellable prints, he took a studio space in the inner city and began welding scrap metal together, creating massive, demonic, disturbing figures. Towering events really, more than sculptures.
‘Remarkable for their combination of size and form, for their ability to both mimic and reflect the fluidity of African life,’ said Andile.
‘She’s quoting a brochure,’ Javas added. To hear him tell it, his works were simply collections of scrap metal welded into each other and given names, stories, faces – and a big fucking selling price.
Gangster connections and art connections were not as mutually exclusive as one might think. Kentridges and Makamos and Sterns and Ngobenis and Catherines were always in underground circulation, alongside diamonds and gold, sewage tenders and IT systems, and teenage girls from Thailand or Swaziland. Art, as well as the influence and fame it evoked, was a sought-after commodity. Above ground and underneath.
Javas’s connections dovetailed powerfully. The girlfriend’s crowd of teachers and mentors and buyers were awfully impressed. The zing of hard gangster money reinforced the magic, creating an elixir of success, excitement and ego. Men from across the continent, afro mamas in dashikis, tight young girlfriends in super-high heels. The sunglasses and the BMWs and the pink shirts. His exhibitions created the slippery, high-tension buzz that advertising people dream of and that art buyers are powerless to resist.
And so the drug dealers chatted smoothly to the professors, who rubbed shoulders with politicians and DJs, and the hype grew and the prices went up and the girlfriend was overshadowed and outstripped by her find: Javas Khumalo, game ranger turned refugee turned debt collector and club bouncer turned artist turned sculptor. Javas was moving his pieces for well over thirty million each when…
When…
He shrugged and threw a log onto the fire.
When I actually saw Javas’s sculptures, deeper dimensions emerged. Despite his story, even recognising and respecting his claim of being the incidental recipient of the winds-of-art fate, there was magnificence. The sculptures towered six metres in the air. The heads – sometimes made of engine cylinders or even complete car radiators – balanced easily on top of tortured metal bodies twisted with movement and potential. Tractor wheels and driveshafts and bearings and God knows what else combined to create an immense parody of humankind. Monstrous, delicately balanced, vulnerable giants on their last legs, reaching out for hope, for stability, for one last step before the fall.
I saw Andile’s art too, in later months, and it was more technically accomplished, more thoughtful and nuanced. But it was small and usual and, ultimately, expected. A1 Fabrianos have been lining up, side by side, across Africa for generations. Her work was simply unable to match Javas’s brute force. His ambition. I wished that I could have seen just one of his events, could have just once been in the city to witness his giants surrounded by the cloying ambition of man perfume and chequebooks.
And that, in a three-hour session of beer and fire, laughter and complete seriousness, was Javas’s story. At the end, deep into the night, when we finally dragged ourselves off to our respective lodge beds, I was overcome by the desire to hug him. To embrace him. To enfold him in my arms.
And I did.
CHAPTER 33
My school name
We spent the next two days roaming the park in the Hummer, braaiing meat and eating it, opening gates, looking at game and swapping positions. It was, structurally speaking, a classic Kruger Park trip.
After the enlightenment of his life story, Javas was good company. Not only did we pick up on many of the personal threads he’d let loose, but he was also a mine of wildlife information. He would force us to get out of the vehicle and make friends with a zebra, a buck and even an elephant – none of whom cared about our presence. He explained the details. What they wanted to eat, who they wanted to fuck and when, spoors and tracks.
We drove up from Skakuza through Letaba, Satara, Olifants and up to Pafuri, the dry north. Every time we opened a gate it felt like a grand, important action. We did it ceremoniously, in recognition of our fundamental inversion of the order of things. Often we weren’t opening much at all. The bigger gates were really just booms fronting empty guard huts. We swung them nonetheless.
Once we reached the top of the park we contemplated keeping going, up through Zim. Suddenly Lillian’s let’s-drive-through-Africa vibe didn’t seem that weird. There was easy fuel wherever we went, and there we were on the border of Zim with no problems whatsoever.
Gerald nixed the idea. ‘Risk,’ he said. ‘The odds are wrong. We make decisions as a group so we all understand what’s happening. It wouldn’t be fair to the rest. Which would be bad for us. Risk.’
And that was that.
Still, it was enticing. Point north and vok voort. I couldn’t quite shake the idea, even as we turned back south.
We took a lot of pictures.[5] Well, Andile did. She wanted them for her paintings – source material and such. It wasn’t something I had considered before the trip, but on the occasions I had a camera in my hands I shot with relish. I realised months later, looking over my animal photos, that I had developed the habit of always positioning someone in a far corner of the frame, nearly, but not quite, out of the shot. Just a hint, the tiniest hint, of humanity.
We only took one full-group picture, tourist style. Andile balanced the camera on a table and the five of us linked arms and beamed at the lens like we were Germans. I still have that shot now, pinned up on my wall. We all look so young. Young and bedraggled and bush dirty. My top lip had slipped up in the heat of the moment to reveal my guillotine, making me appear the most hobo-like of us all. Andile looks alarmingly young in that shot – just a girl really, just coming into the world. And beautiful in the way only the young can be.
Her own story slipped out piece by piece, in the shadow of Javas’s epic. Even at the end of our excursion I saw her within the context of him, although by then I had begun to perceive the outer edges of her shape.
I only truly considered Andile and her trajectory once Javas had shocked me with his. Before, I simply perceived them as the twins. As a singular entity. I was comfortable with them sitting neatly in the middle distance of my consciousness. I’m still not sure whether I was the only one to be so slow, so self-obsessed and wrapped up in my own ideas, or whether the rest also suffered from a similar blinkered state. I remember asking Gerald at the time how much he had known of Javas’s story. He gave me the Gerald sigh and beady eye and said, ‘I am the same. I have two names. Gerald is my school name. My real name is Mudyathlari. I have also travelled and disappeared. Javas’s story is mine. It’s just that he had borders and passports.’
5
The best of these have been archived in Annex III of the Slovo Library, miscellaneous section – which shouldn’t be underestimated; it contains many minor gems.