Chapter 16: Meet My White Friends

…continued from 25 May 2026...

Wasiela, his wife, was out for the evening. She had insisted on joining the book club, and the pottery club and the gardening club and who knows what else. It was her way of maintaining her own sense of the world. It helped that the classes were all the way in the city. And her new, white, friends were impressed with her chauffeur-driven BMW. Little did they know that the chauffeur was actually her bodyguard and that the BMW was bomb proof.

Wasiela was no fool, she knew what her husband did and she did not begrudge him their success. But she had elevated herself above the quagmire of the seedy gang life. She started reading and became seduced by the lifestyles of the heroines she read about in the romance novels. All the women were snow white and all the men were all prince charming.

She was surprised at how easily she was accepted by her new white friends, some of them even insisted on her and Malik playing tennis or having dinner with them. Sometimes she accepted their invitations, but always having to make the excuse of Malik being away on business.

Malik had no time or patience to pretend to be in their league with their social airs and graces. The first, and last, time he went, he nearly stuck a knife into the host who kept roaring with laughter every time Malik spoke. Apparently, he found Malik’s Cape Flats’ accent hilarious. Wasiela barely managed to get him out of there in time. The host of the party in Constantia had no idea how close he had come to dying that night.

Malik thought about her now, as he so often did when he looked at their beautiful kids. He remembered her when they met. She was such a bitch! Loud and coarse! The way she spoke was scary in itself. She spat out her words with such venom that no man worth his salt dared venture near her. But Malik was the proverbial, or rather literal bad boy back then and nothing would stop him from getting close to her, not after he had seen the way she looked at him. The attraction was mutual and instantaneous.

Malik was 18 and he was walking down Halt Road at 13:00 on a Saturday afternoon. His Crocket and Jones shoes were honed to a dazzling black shine. The Nevada slacks he finally managed to collect from the lay-bye store was complemented by the hideously expensive Pringle shirt he wore. All the guys wore those brands back then. That was the only way to advertise your status in the face of the dreadful poverty on the Cape Flats. Malik already stood out as a leader, and his friends automatically accepted him to be theirs and deferred to him naturally.

Their journey on this day was towards the Gemini night club for the Saturday matinee disco. It was a popular destination in the impoverished Elsies River area and some kids traveled great distances by taxi to get there. And despite it being a matinee aimed specifically at teenagers, alcohol and cigarettes were sold openly.

Wasiela and her friends arrived by buss and stood on the opposite side of the road smoking cigarettes. They were loud and brash, chewing gum open mouthed and making sure all the right boys heard or saw them.

It was early, the doors only opened at 14:00. Malik and his mates noticed Wasiela’s clique across the street and casually glanced their way. Wasiela was surrounded by her girlfriends, they seem to be talking animatedly and laughing continuously. Back then break-dancing and Michael Jackson was all the rage and most of the guys engaged in dancing challenges on the dance floor.

Instead of fighting, guys would compete against each other in the middle of the dance floor with the rest of the patrons forming a circle around them. Individual or group dancers could challenge each other. Malik and the guys were practicing a routine on the pavement, something from the new Michael Jackson Thriller music video. The routine looked good and some people stopped what they were doing and watched Malik’s group with interest.

Continued tomorrow 27 May 2026, before 12pm