‘When it happened they were having a car show. So there are a lot of cars in the Dome now. But they would change what was in it according to what they needed. It wasn’t always cars.’
‘What else?’
‘Eish. Anything really. Hip-hop shows. Gardening shows. Baby shows. Every time it was different.’
‘What was a show?’
‘Eeeish.’ I put my brush down. ‘I guess more than anything it was a gathering of people. A lot of people would come together in a space – like the Dome – and then they would share everything they knew about a subject. So, if the subject was babies, for example, then anyone doing anything involving babies would present their activities at the Dome, and then all the other people interested in babies, people about to have a baby, maybe’ – I laughed as Sthembiso winced at the rhyme – ‘would go to the show and look at what the others were presenting and maybe discuss things about babies. Possibly they would buy something that someone or some business was presenting and take it home with them, to help them with whatever they were doing with babies. If that makes any kind of sense?’
He followed along carefully.
‘And then of course they would also have concerts at the Dome,’ I went on. ‘People would buy tickets to go and watch bands play, to listen to their music.’
Silence. ‘Roy?’
‘Yeah, mon.’
‘Could we have our own show?’
‘What kind of show?’
‘A kids’ show. We could display things we’re making, and then the visitors could see what we’re doing and then maybe buy some of it.’
‘Interesting idea. Not sure what we’d use for money though.’
‘I’ve got plenty of money. Hundreds of thousands of rands. In my room.’ He squirmed, beamed laser eyes at me.
‘What kind of things would you display?’
‘I’m making an aeroplane.’
‘Jesus. An aeroplane? Really? How big is it?’
‘Bigger than this house.’
‘How would you fit it into the show then? Tight fit, nè?’
Sthembiso paused.
‘Not to worry though, that’s just logistics. Let’s stick to blue sky. Have the others got anything to show? Do you have collaborators in this venture or is it a solo gig?’
‘Thabang and Lerato are making clothes.’
‘Nice. Clothes always work for a show. Anything else?’
‘The girls are making houses out of matchsticks.’
‘Which girls?’
‘Lizabeth and English.’
‘OK.’ I dribbled my brush through the water cup, thinking. As was often the case, Sthembiso was neatly setting and fulfilling his own specific agenda. ‘It sounds like you have the makings of a show. The beginnings at least. I think we should build it into school, so we can plan it properly and do the whole thing right. How does that sound?’
‘Fine…’
I waited for the coup de grâce.
‘Roy… can we do it at the Dome?’
Sthembiso was eleven years old, and like Babalwa, his mother, he had a prodigious talent for long-term planning. He also had no fear of extended negotiations. Final concession for the expo took, for example, over two months. He whittled away at us systematically, lobbying each adult individually, frequently on the sly, and then engineering casual group sessions where he incrementally nailed down a series of small victories and common assumptions. Eventually we gave our approval to an expo, delivered by the kids, that would occupy the unused bottom hallways and corridors of St John’s School – the portion where the scraps of our abandoned attempt to tell our survivors story lay. (Paintbrushes solid blocks of colour granite. Boards featuring the beginnings of visual ideas. Bad, self-conscious sketches of ourselves doing important things.)
Much as he lusted after the Dome as the expo venue, this was the one victory Sthembiso was unable to achieve. We pushed him back with the ace of the wireless network, which was unavailable all the way out in Northgate. He mooted the roll-out of base stations to allow the extension of the network, a ploy which failed only when discussions reached the manual labour required to set up each station.
Once the expo was approved, Sthembiso worked on the name. The brand. Essential, he said, to the overall identity of the event and its long-term success. Fats accused him of reading too many old marketing magazines. The venom of his denial suggested the truth of this, and Fats looked proud. We had managed, despite the suffocating weight of our circumstances, to breed a marketer.
‘Solo: Our Future’ was just on two years in the making. If you count the full course of Sthembiso’s lobbying and approvals journey, the entire thing took twenty-seven months to conceptualise and deliver. Sthembiso himself was past his thirteenth birthday when the day finally came around. Throughout, his biggest challenge was the duality of the thing. Adults were unfortunately necessary to help with key construction elements, but were also the only audience. This division was one of the reasons behind the protracted time frame. Sthembiso and his lieutenants (Roy Jnr, Sihle, Lerato and Thabang) insisted that we – the audience – be given a genuinely fresh experience, something to ‘surprise and delight us’. This meant a lot of driving between the farm and the Dome, which held much in the way of expo trade tools, from carpeting to advanced WAN interfaces and the hardware required for a ‘properly compelling experience’.
We arranged the post-school schedule much as a normal family would have done. We moaned about the labour involved, about the kids’ inability to be ready on time – all important dynamics within the larger function of going somewhere, and coming home again. Fats and I took naturally to the whole thing, of course. The expo awakened many slumbering beasts.
‘In its best form an expo is a multi-level experience,’ Fats explained to the cluster of children gathered at his feet during class. ‘Stop me, Roy, if I go off track, nè?’ I nodded – in all seriousness – from my perch on the windowsill.
‘A multi-level experience means there are three important elements,’ Fats continued. ‘Is anyone writing this down?’ He pushed an eyebrow at Sthembiso, who nodded at Roy Jnr, who was indeed writing it all down. ‘Element number one is straight entertainment. Your audience is looking to get away from it all for a few hours. They want to forget their worldly troubles for a short while. They want to laugh. They want to relax. They want to be entertained. Fail to entertain them and your expo is dead.
‘Element number two is experience. A great expo offers people at least one or two things they have never experienced before. Here we’re talking new and exciting. Things that open their minds to what is possible now, and what might be possible in a new world, a future world.
‘And number three – Roy?’ Fats kindly cut me in.
‘They want to stuff their faces,’ I said.
‘Exactly. Food and drink. People want to eat, and a lot of them, especially the men, want to go home drunk.’
Whatever Sthembiso’s original idea, it was powerfully morphed by the force of Fats’s expo lecture series, which lasted several months and which featured a full presentation of his own work in the field, which was, admittedly, both extensive and impressive. His personal hard drive from agency days still contained before-and-after presentations for Epic Golf, Your Baby, VR Now, The Motor Show, The Boat Show, Sexpo, Cloud Life, Our Community, Golf Life, Mobile Now and many others. Despite my memories of him as a largely useless strategy fuck, I was impressed. Fats had put together good events. They were full of people, and they were very slick. The punters’ faces were invariably excited, aspirational, full of food and, yes, frequently quite drunk.
Once his lecture series had concluded, Fats put the class through a naming workshop, at which point I bailed out. Workshops were never my thing. The idea, he told the adults expressing doubts as to the worth of the exercise, was history. Creating an expo was a way for the kids to get a real, tangible sense of the past. Of where their parents – and, indeed, their people – had come from. It taught them about money and products and marketing and sales and open markets and all those things that are so hard to explain in the abstract. And if they were going to do it, it needed to be done properly. It started with the name.
He was right, of course, in all these things. In addition, there was the factor that no one really mentioned but that everyone clearly enjoyed.
The expo gave us something to do.