Chargement
Trouvez votre prochain book favori
Devenez membre aujourd'hui et lisez gratuitement pendant 30 joursCommencez vos 30 jours gratuitsInformations sur le livre
The Kelly Khumalo Story
Actions du livre
Commencer à lireLongueur: 329 pages5 heures
- Éditeur:
- Jacana Media
- Sortie:
- Oct 1, 2012
- ISBN:
- 9781920601140
- Format:
- Livre
Description
Kelly Khumalo is an award-winning kwaito star who rose to national fame at the age of 21: the shining star who, after a string of bad decisions and relationships, soon lost her shine. The book tracks the life and times of the fallen township pop princess, her plummet from grace, disastrous relationships with men, her addiction to cocaine, and finally her hardfought battle back to sanity and her real love, music. Seen through Melinda's sharp and always original eye, this book promises to be a page turner from start to finish. Now reunited with Kelly, manager Sarah Setlaelo, in her contributions to the book, offers a rare glimpse into the backstage of the South African music industry, rife with sensation and backstabbing. It is a tale of highs, lows and personal triumph. Can Kelly come back from the edge?
Informations sur le livre
The Kelly Khumalo Story
Longueur: 329 pages5 heures
Description
Kelly Khumalo is an award-winning kwaito star who rose to national fame at the age of 21: the shining star who, after a string of bad decisions and relationships, soon lost her shine. The book tracks the life and times of the fallen township pop princess, her plummet from grace, disastrous relationships with men, her addiction to cocaine, and finally her hardfought battle back to sanity and her real love, music. Seen through Melinda's sharp and always original eye, this book promises to be a page turner from start to finish. Now reunited with Kelly, manager Sarah Setlaelo, in her contributions to the book, offers a rare glimpse into the backstage of the South African music industry, rife with sensation and backstabbing. It is a tale of highs, lows and personal triumph. Can Kelly come back from the edge?
- Éditeur:
- Jacana Media
- Sortie:
- Oct 1, 2012
- ISBN:
- 9781920601140
- Format:
- Livre
À propos de l'auteur
Melinda Ferguson is the bestselling author of her addiction trilogy Smacked, Hooked and Crashed. She is also an award-winning publisher. In 2016 her groundbreaking title, Rape: A South African Nightmare by Prof Pumla Gqola, won the Alan Paton Award for non-fiction. In 2020 she joined NB Publishers under her imprint Melinda Ferguson Books.
En rapport avec The Kelly Khumalo Story
Aperçu du livre
The Kelly Khumalo Story - Melinda Ferguson
Setlaelo
PART 1
Meeting Kelly Khumalo
CHAPTER 1
The Call
NOVEMBER 2011
Do you really think people care about girls like Kelly? No one remembers one thing Kelly did on the music front. With her, it’s all been about scandal and chaos and drama.
– Melinda Ferguson, Features Editor, True Love magazine
‘Why the hell would I want to write a story about Kelly Khumalo?’ my voice barked at a woman’s voice belonging to an unknown number.
It was 3 pm, November 2011. The phones in the office had been ringing off the hook all day. End-of-year madness was mounting. Magazines are a bombsite during the weeks leading to Christmas deadlines. True Love mag was no different. Before we could wrap up for the year, we needed to finish the February 2012 issue, send it to the printers and have the March 2012 issue planned and ready to go when we got back, new year, in January. No matter how hard one tries it is always chaos.
When that unknown number hit my screen, disturbing my hard-to-manage train of thoughts on ‘How to Rock your Man’s Boat on Valentine’s’ I all but threw the offending BlackBerry against the back wall. But over the years, since cleaning up and getting sober, I have learnt a few invaluable skills in stress management, so I managed to delay my instinctive psycho response. Yet that didn’t mean I wasn’t irritated at the intrusion. I hate picking up a call from a number I didn’t know. Probably stems from times in my life when the people who were calling weren’t ringing to say, ‘Hi, how are you?’ but rather ‘You owe me’.
‘I have a story you might be interested in.’ The voice on the other end of the line had begun the conversation. It was nervous.
‘My name is Sarah. My client – a very famous singer – she’s just come out of a bad relationship – she wants to talk about her drug addiction. She’d like to do an exclusive with True Love, with you. We both respect you because of what you’ve been through. I’ve read Smacked, many times – it’s a brilliant book – so that’s why we thought of you …’
The voice had become garbled; it had all but run out of breath.
Most of the time flattery will get you everywhere with me. Give me the word ‘brilliant’ and I’m all yours. Plus, the idea of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll (or, in this case, kwaito, RnB, hip-hop) had always held appeal. But on that November day it was going to take a lot more to coax me out of my deadline delirium: there was copy to edit, stories to write, emails to answer …
‘Well, I can hardly say yes unless I know who she is?’ I barked. ‘Control yourself,’ I muttered to myself.
Long pause. Deep breath, I could almost hear the tremulous intake.
‘It’s Kelly Khumalo,’ said Sarah. For a moment I struck a blank. Of course I’d heard of Kelly Khumalo, but who was she again? What had she done? I knew she sang … didn’t she? Then suddenly it all flooded in. Kelly Khumalo. Bad Girl Kelly. Jub Jub’s girlfriend. Last time I’d seen her, she was bruised and swollen, pics of her face plastered all over the Sunday tabloids. She’d looked shocking.
Drugs, I’d thought.
My heart dropped. It was all making sense. Sarah was Sarah Setlaelo, Kelly’s manager from way back. As far as I remembered she’d been estranged from Kelly for a long time. I’d read about that somewhere – I think it was in Drum magazine. Sarah. The one Kelly had screwed big time. Bonsai Entertainment Sarah – also once known as Sarah Shongwe when married to her music producer husband Bonsai. The one who’d dragged Kelly through court in a year-long legal battle that had been splashed weekly in the Sunday tabloids. What the hell was she doing making calls on behalf of Kelly, trusting Kelly again?
As much as I had to admit my interest was rapidly being piqued despite the traffic jam in my inbox, red warning flags, like pop-ups on a porn website, waved even stronger.
Why the hell would I want to write a story on Kelly Khumalo?
‘Kelly Khumalo? Are you for real? Nobody wants to read about Kelly! She’s a total has-been, an embarrassment really. What about Jub Jub? Our readers – we’re all pissed off that she’s still hanging with the creep after everything that happened. And clean? C’mon, is she for real? You don’t just get clean and then get a cover! I’ve so had it with all the stars: these Britneys and Whitneys who think all they’ve got to do is confess and say I’m clean
and then, hey presto, the heavens applaud and it all happens. Trumpets and all. Do you know how hard it is to get clean? Do you know that life is so achingly fucking terrible post drugs that most people can’t stay clean for a day, never mind a week? How the fuck do I know she’s clean anyway?’
By this stage, people in the office had stopped doing what they were doing. They were staring at me, my outburst still echoing across the open-plan office space. But I was on a roll; my drama training at UCT had equipped me well to deliver ‘The Soliloquy from Hell on Kelly Khumalo’.
‘Do you really think people care about girls like Kelly? No one remembers one thing Kelly did on the music front. With her, it’s all been about scandal and chaos and drama. The virginity joke, the man trouble, her beef with Khanyi, the court cases with Bonsai, with you – it never ends. She’s like a shopping list of disaster. The True Love reader wants to read inspirational stuff – stuff about people like Judith Sephuma, Lira, Bassie Kumalo, not some girl who’s hooked up with some alleged Mini Cooper murderer.’
My voice banged on and on. For an umlungu I actually knew a lot about Kelly. I was impressed. ‘Hello?’ Was anybody still listening?
Finally the voice on the other side crackled back.
‘I understand … But … Why don’t you meet her … see for yourself?’ said Sarah. She’d been waiting for a gap.
And then, from absolutely nowhere, like a bash on the head from behind, it happened – Step 12 came to me. The Twelfth Step in Narcotics Anonymous: ‘Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to addicts …’ That was the commitment I made when I had got clean back in 1999, the silent promise to reach out to other addicts who still suffered from the same affliction that had all but killed me.
And then something else came rolling in like some wayward tsunami: ‘You can only keep what you have by giving it away.’ The pay-it-forward mantra – what I, as a white girl living in SA, understand about the concept of ubuntu. Share what you have with those around you and you will keep staying clean. Alone we are nothing – together we are everything: the mantra I had learnt for the last twelve years at Narcotics Anonymous, the words that had kept me clean for 12 x 365 days.
It struck me all at once, that deep knowing when you hit on a truth, that one they call ‘a lightbulb moment’. Who was I to turn my back on a person who was suffering? The fact that she was Kelly Khumalo should not turn me off. How little had I learnt if I couldn’t even practise a simple act of kindness? It suddenly dawned on me that I was being confronted by a supreme lesson in judgement and I needed to do something about it, right away.
And in that moment, as it has so often happened during my time in sobriety, something of a higher order, a higher power – some may call it God – threw open the doors of my heart. Say yes. That’s all I heard.
‘Okay,’ I sighed. ‘Yes. I’ll meet her.’
But just to make sure I didn’t come across as some willy-nilly pushover, I cracked the whip. ‘Just a minute, before you go. Listen carefully ’cos this is how it’s going to work. Forget a story, a cover with True Love, ’cos right now that’s really out of the question. Let’s all go to a drug-support meeting. I’m not sure if you’ve heard about NA – Narcotics Anonymous. There’s a meeting on Tuesday night in my neighbourhood. Norwood. We can meet somewhere on Grant Avenue at a coffee shop before so I can check Kelly out. If she has any chance of ever appearing on a True Love cover, she’s got to start attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings ’cos I’m not doing a story unless this girl is absolutely for real. I’m warning you, I have great drug radar. If she’s pulling a fast one, if she’s lying in any way, I’ll know, okay?’
CHAPTER 2
The Meeting
I think of addiction as the sacred disease … Very probably God created alcoholism in order to create AA, and thereby spearhead the community which is going to be the salvation not only of alcoholics and addicts, but of us all.
– M Scott Peck, The Road Less Travelled
The sky’s electric. Lightning flicks across the deathly empty restaurant. The thunder roars, boasting its power over its earthly dominion. It’s the kind of night I would imagine old William S had in mind when he had the three witches meet on the hearth in Macbeth. ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair.’ Wicked lines.
I enter Cappello on Grant. In the far dark corner I spy two figures. It must be them. Kelly Khumalo and Sarah Setlaelo. They’re bang on time. In fact they’re early. Black people, African time. So much for tired clichés.
Kelly’s much tinier in real life, out of the tabloids. She looks beautifully wasted, as though she’s just emerged from some personal tsunami onto a river bank where bone-hungry crocodiles are still snapping. My eyes fasten for a moment on her expensive snakeskin boots. There’s a huge silver Hummer parked outside. I notice the keys on the table. The Hummer must belong to her. Jeez, not bad.
Then my eye catches sight of a five-cent-piece-sized freshly formed scar on the right side of her face, just above her jawline. I assume this is a battle scar from her time with Jub Jub. Before this meeting I Googled her. The early images of Kelly are quite breathtaking: nubile, oozing just-turned-twenty sex appeal, banging body, face of a Zulu princess.
In screeching contrast I have been horrified by the more recent images of her: swollen lips, black and blue and bruisy, wasted, weave messed, and that hole in her face. That awful gash where Jub Jub bit her. Fucking monstrous. The images from the tabloids, the headlines, the blurbs: my mind is computing those tacky headlines trying to make sense of the girl I see before me. We greet, shake hands. She’s very quiet. Sarah talks a lot.
It’s damn awkward. Who are these people? What am I doing here? I am cold. I would rather be watching Come Dine with Me or Cheaters. We order coffee and Coca-Cola.
‘Kelly, I’m going to be quite straight with you: I only want to do this story if you’re clean. If this is just a publicity ploy I’m walking. And I have to say, right now, you look pretty wasted to me. This recovery stuff, it’s not for overnighters. It’s a process that takes a long time, a lifelong journey. I’ve been there, I’ve done it; I’m still doing it. I still struggle every day in some way. It’s not a thing to be taken lightly. If you’re lying or you’re playing games with me or doing this for the wrong reasons, I will know. I’ve got the best bullshit detectors in the business.’
She nods. Her huge brown eyes are pools that threaten to spill over. She’s close to tears. Thunder drowns my next line.
An hour later, we tumble out of the storm into a packed room in a recreation hall in Paterson Park, Norwood. The Narcotics Anonymous meeting started at 7.30 pm. We’re ten minutes late but no one really seems to mind as we stumble in – Kelly teetering on her snake heels – scraping our chairs to get seated. NA – the place that once saved my drug-tattered, sorry life – no matter where in the world I have found myself somehow, I always feel at home at an NA meeting.
Every night across town, NA meetings take place in spaces similar to these, across the city, across the country, across the world. I have been to ones in Boston, London, New York, and even India. In community centres, church halls, spaces like this one, usually unglamorous with a few info-driven posters, bare rooms comprising mainly a circle of chairs, addicts from all walks of life – doctors, lawyers, teachers, students, cleaners and the unemployed – gather to share their stories of addiction and find ways to stay clean and sober. There are countries where I have been to meetings where I haven’t understood a single word that was being said, like Tokyo, Japan, and Mumbai, India, but the message is always clear wherever one may find oneself: get help for oneself and help the addict who still suffers.
Today there are over 60 000 meetings worldwide in places as far as Iceland, Iran, Côte d’Ivoire, Kazakhstan and Kuwait.
NA’s almost six decades old. Cofounded in 1953 by Jimmy Kinnon, in the Los Angeles area of California, USA, its roots were in the Alcoholics Anonymous fellowship that was famously founded in the 1940s by Bill Wilson, more commonly known as Bill W. Over time, NA developed its own set of steps and traditions. The early days of the Narcotics Anonymous fellowship were not without problems. Initially, due to stringent Rockefeller laws, it was illegal, in fact a crime, for addicts to meet in groups. So getting together for an NA meeting often meant someone being on a surveillance watch, looking out for cops who were out to do their best to break up any suspicious groups. As a result, meetings were often held late at night or in members’ homes.
M Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Travelled, a book that’s become something of a junkie bible, regards NA meetings as the only real churches of our age. In this highly alienated, techno-crazy and community-shattered age we live in, he believes these fellowships are the only true examples of really effective community programmes, where people reach out to help each other, hold each other and walk through hard times with each other.
In my twelve years in the rooms of NA, I have consistently been surprised at the love and philosophies I have witnessed first-hand, the ones Peck propagated in his book.
As documented in my book Smacked, the book that inspired Sarah to contact me, I happened to stumble on my first meeting back in 1999 after I had lost everything – my home, my husband, my two little boys, my dignity and sanity – all in the name of getting another hit of crack and smack. NA was the last stop. For me, it was the only place left where there was still a door open. My family had had enough of my stealing and lying ways. I was literally at the rockiest rock bottom. Despite being on the other side of Loser Street, having lost all self-respect and dignity, when I entered the NA rooms and sat in ‘the circle’, all the judgements and blocks I had suffered in the outside world fell away. I was cleansed of my past and my sins without having to go through any religious diatribe, blackmail or dogma.
Without sounding all woohoo and cultish, in NA one could say I found redemption.
I knew that if Kelly was going to have any chance at all of digging herself out of the awesomely deep and dark hole she found herself in – scars, bite marks and all – NA would be the answer. I had seen NA work on far more desperate and seemingly hopeless cases than Kelly, me being one of them.
As we sit down, Kelly, Sarah and I, we tune into a blonde girl sharing about her middle-class experiences of the time when she was gap-yearing in London. She describes how she hooked up with the wrong crowd, how her eating disorder raged and how she spent most of the time with her head in the bulimic’s favourite haunt: the toilet bowl. I secretly wished that someone more relatable, someone with more synergy and similarities to Kelly would be sharing.
Like someone black.
But over the years I have come to realise that black people are far and few between at NA meetings, especially in Joburg’s leafy northern suburbs. There are mainly whiteys in the room; here and there a spattering of colour is seen. Location is still everything in SA. Despite democracy and some boundaries in our country dissolving, in many instances people have stayed where they were before apartheid was disbanded. Although NA South Africa has made huge leaps forward in reaching into communities like Lenasia, the Cape Flats, Soweto, and Phoenix in Durban, meetings in traditionally white areas are often just that. The night I took Kelly to Norwood NA, she and Sarah were the only black people there.
As the meeting rolls out, I am super aware of Kelly’s presence. I desperately want her to get the message. To hear something that sparks an awakening. If only I could zap into her brain, do the necessary shifting, igniting and reordering of thoughts, like jumpstarting a dead battery. I know, however, that my hands are tied.
And then, as if the gods of recovery hear me, the blonde begins to share about meeting Mistress Cocaine. She speaks about how she started off just using it to get high once a week, at weekends. How it slowly began to creep into her life until she was unable to get out of bed without a line, how she began stealing and lying, how she lost her family and friends and grew more and more isolated until there was nothing but the rolled-up banknote and white powder in her life.
In the background, the rain has become a symphony of sounds, banging demented beats on the corrugated roof. I glance at Kelly. In the stark, unforgiving light, she looks transfixed and every bit the fallen rock star. And then I notice it. A tear spills slowly past that cavity on her jawline.
The thunder cracks its whip.
That was the night I first met Kelly Khumalo. Although she hardly said a word at our first meeting, those tears shed were the beginning of her burrowing her way into my heart.
After the meeting ends, we hug in the parking lot. Somehow, that circle has dissolved the awkwardness of unknowing. We arrange to meet at NA, same time same place the following week.
Sarah and Kelly drive off in the giant Hummer. The little fallen kwaito star can barely see over the steering wheel of her tank.
CHAPTER 3
Abandoned
We spent the next four years walking about 15 kilometres to school – it was hectic. There just seemed to be so many of us, too many of us, struggling for space and food. It was there that I learnt about a thing called anger.
– Kelly Khumalo
Gunshots ring out on the streets of Thokoza. It’s early November 1990 and bullets explode into the night like rapid rain on a tin roof. The East Rand township is in the grip of unrest. It’s carnage in the hostels, down Phola Park way. They say in the newspapers that Zulus and Xhosas have turned on each other. Word on the street is that the police, heavily armed in sinister Hippos that do nothing to stop the violence, are in fact behind it. Everyone knows it’s the Boere, the pigs, who are the real killers.
Kelly Khumalo, eight years old, covers her three-year-old sister Zandi’s ears. They haven’t been to school for days; it’s too dangerous to go outside. When their mother Ntombi leaves for work in the early hours of the morning, she always tells Kelly, in Zulu, ‘Unakekele udade wenu. Ningaphumeli ngaphandle.’ (Look after your sister. Don’t go outside.)
Born on 11 November 1982, in Natalspruit Hospital, Katlehong, on the East Rand, Nonhlanhla Kelly Khumalo hardly made a sound when she came into the world. She would make up for that later.
Her mother, Ntombi Khumalo, remembers Kelly as ‘a very good baby. She was not crying for anything. She was very soft, soft, soft.’
Her father, a Mr Titus Makhatini, pulled a disappearing act before she was born. The disappearing-dad syndrome will play out later in Kelly’s life, through a string of somewhat suspect men she’ll fall in love with. Loser men: scrubs to whom she’ll give her heart, soul and cash. In fact, those early seeds of abandonment will grow like overzealous weeds in all areas of Kelly’s life, and nowhere will it be seen more clearly than in the way Kelly will let herself down, feed her own soul, body and mind to the pack of parasite dogs.
The night before, Kelly had overheard her mother talking to the man with the funny eye at the taxi rank. She had whispered something to him about the police and the shooting near the hostel but Kelly’s ears were sharp, she was sure she heard her mother say something about ‘Ntinini’. Where or what was Ntinini? Kelly had never heard of such a place, but by the way her mother whispered
Vous avez atteint la fin de cet aperçu. Inscrivez-vous pour en lire plus !
Page 1 sur 1
Avis
Avis
Ce que les gens pensent de The Kelly Khumalo Story
0Évaluation : 0 sur 5 étoiles
0 évaluations / 0 avis
Qu’en avez-vous pensé ?
Évaluation : sur 5 étoiles