‘Slikour: The Life Story of a Hip-Hop Pioneer’ by Siya Metane with Helen Herimbi-Moremi:
CHAPTER 18 WISDOM
The easiest way for a young black person to limit themselves is to only gravitate towards and work with other young black people who share their interests. It’s human nature to want to stick with people who are like us. There is power and protection in a tribe. But there is also the danger of being stunted by it. I wasn’t swayed to stay in a place because of a tribe. I was always driven by the energy that came from feeling. For example, the CBR guys were strangers to me, but I signed a monumental deal with them based on a feeling. I trusted my gut.
To me, it doesn’t matter if we are the same gender, race, age or whatever, you just need to have the ability to see, place and receive energy. You must be able to feel it. That’s what attracts the people who need to come along on your journey. That creates connection. Energy is big for me because it’s how I know I am being myself. It’s how I stay open to giving as well as receiving. Sometimes, what you receive in life is betrayal, but you have to be open enough to risk being played. That’s challenging. I accepted a long time ago that I start each day at zero and I only become something when I actively seek or give out something positive. I am diminished when I seek or give out negative energy. Who wants to be less than zero?
In some ways, when you have nothing, it’s easy to be positive. It’s when you have been blessed with a lot that it gets tricky. There have been times in my journey when I have felt more powerful when the stakes were lower or the scale of an operation was smaller, like when it was just me, Loyiso and Thandow run ning SlikourOnLife from my small apartment, compared to when I was running an award-winning company with many employees.
I know this may sound strange, but I believe that you have to have empathy for very successful people. Think about what it took for them to become successful and the lengths they are going to go to to protect that success. And although it goes without saying, you also have to have empathy for people who aren’t successful. Empathy is also an energy, an energy that connects the dots. When you straddle the middle, you become empathetic to both sides and are able to see how to be a bridge that brings those two worlds together. That’s my definition of energy. I was that bridge when I brought Skwatta Kamp to the mainstream, and I did it with the many careers I helped start through Ventilation and Buttabing. I am still doing that with SlikourOnLife.
When I started working on my memoir, I didn’t know that I would eventually figure out how to describe what SlikourOnLife does. Put simply, we are a culture agency. We bridge brands and the culture. We don’t know everything, but if there’s a question that needs answering, we always know someone who can answer it. And if we don’t, we go out and find them. We’ve been connecting ing culture for many years now.
It’s human nature to want to stick with people, but I also had to realise when it was time to buy CBR out of my company. Like every relationship or activity I’ve been involved in so far, we became too familiar and I felt I was becoming stunted. There was an exclusivity clause in the partnership, so I traded my freedom for growth. I could’ve swapped one partner for another, but I felt like I would be losing who I was by selling shares to another company.
To be a black-owned street company in conversation with established agencies and wealthy people who want to buy the company is gratifying. But it’s external validation. It’s not who you are. And there’s no price on that. I focused my efforts on buying back my shares. In doing so, I was buying the skills I learnt from them, along with my energy to connect anyone in any way. The energy is pure. On 3 June 2020 – see, there’s that number three again – I became the sole owner of the business I started. I would otherwise have lost who I am. SlikourOnLife is now a 100 percent black-owned business.
The business has challenged me to find my place in this world and consistently do good with an open heart, with love, with consideration, with care and with politeness. It’s important to learn how to stay that way in environments that don’t have any of those five things.
I had to bet on myself because I understood the impact that I had on people’s lives. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world, it hit my business too. I had to cut back on salaries and, in some instances, let go of staff. It would’ve been tougher had I not owned the company outright. The pandemic helped to highlight the people whose energy was complementary to the business and forced me to be a more focused leader. I could do that because I’ve learnt how to find the power in myself and cultivate my energy, give it to others and encourage them to foster their own energies, despite what’s going on around us.
In an instant-gratification world, we’re told the only way to survive unscathed is to know your authentic self. Who are you? I got to that answer by making mistakes and by writing. I accepted my quirks and allowed them to lead me to what felt right. I had to learn how to package my energy – the energy of being a bridge – for good. Your energy may be different. But how do you find it, and, in turn, find out who you are?
Step 1: When you receive other people’s energy, discern which ideas resonate with you and which ideas make you uncomfortable.
Step 2: Consistently curate the ideas that make you feel happiest.
Step 3: Improve upon those ideas – they create a unique position for you in the world.
Step 4: Understand how people label your unique position, then get the best out of the label from those people.
Step 5: Once you’ve got the best out of the label, give it a name that is unique to you.
Step 6: Live up to that name. Consistently.
That is your energy and the service you provide. Service isn’t charity. It’s how you give back in a way that is unique to you and to the world. That becomes your brand. It’s what Henry Ford was doing when he created a car despite the automobile industry not existing. It’s what I am doing with SlikourOnLife. That’s energy, and it’s fucking powerful. We’re born with abilities specific to us, and part of our path includes discovering them. I have been a bridge since the day I saw Shugasmakx playing M. Bison in an arcade game, but it’s only now, in my forties, that I’m figuring out that’s been my specific energy. I wonder where that energy will take me next.
Cannibalism haunts the ruins of capitalism:
Cannibalism is macabre but it is everywhere. In colonial Congo, the Belgian empire ate the labour, timber, hands and cocoa of the Congolese. Writing more than 60 years ago, Aime Césaire recorded the bloody massacres by European foot soldiers on the African continent. He reminds us that in the European quest to civilise the “barbarism” of Africa, colonial adventurers diced African bodies.
He quotes one of the conquerors of Algeria: “It is true that we are bringing back a whole barrelful of ears collected, pair by pair, from prisoners, friendly or enemy.” Césaire describes villages as hideous butcheries, and colonisers as collectors of heads and ears who found sadistic pleasure in warm blood.
Now, we see increasing reports of mass cannibalism recorded on Instagram in Haiti, the discovery of mass graves in Kenya where a pastor had starved his congregants to death, an uncle who ate the innards of his nephew in Port St Johns, and a Soweto grandmother who has been apprehended for allegedly mutilating the bodies of two young boys including her grandson.
In the plantation areas of Malawi, wealthy people were accused of being vampires and sucking the blood of the impoverished. The cult murders in Krugersdorp were immortalised in the television series Devilsdorp.
Meanwhile, the Mediterranean Sea and European foreign policy swallow entire boatfuls of Africans. In the first three months of this year, 661 Africans have perished in the waters dividing Africa from Europe.
There is a lineage here. These forms of consumption are not random or even spectacular. We can thread the genealogy through our long history that is imbricated in ongoing racial capitalism that literally eats our bodies to feed wealth and deepen inequality.
My recently published book, Riotous Deathscapes, explores this phenomenon by pointing to its pervasiveness. But it insists that cannibalism and related occult practices are not an index of African barbarism and backwardness. Instead, it suggests that as participants of global racial capitalism, we are all guilty of different iterations of cannibalism.
An edited excerpt follows from my book where I think about cannibalism on South Africa’s deathscapes.
A 2017 news report that had people aghast told the story of a young man who had eaten his nephew at a seaside village on the outskirts of the Emampondweni seaside town of Port St Johns. He had reportedly cooked and consumed him. The boy’s grandmother discovered his arm near the homestead. Upon investigation, the uncle confessed to having cut him up and eaten him. Community members reported that he consumed the liver and heart as these are softer body parts that cook more easily.
This story has been linked to the Vondo gang. The Mpondo vampires.
Months before the young boy was murdered and eaten, the Vondo had reportedly been running riot in Lusikisiki. Their modus operandi were violent masculinist rituals. Their victims were mostly women who were raped, butchered, and whose blood was consumed. The blood sucking marked them as vampires.
These are young people whose lust for survival requires them to butcher living people. Since black flesh belongs to the surplus bodies of the barely human, vampires are a part of the deathscape.
A woman who had been a teacher at my primary school was allegedly killed by the Vondo. I remember her thin frame and hoarse voice well. In my recollection, I see the smoke from her cigarette form rings around her head. One of her shoes was found at the gate of the outside perimeter of her house. Her frail, brutalised body was not far away.
The Vondo appear to have been most active near the technical college. The students from the college and surrounding community lived in fear. Tired of the terror and havoc wreaked by the Vondo, young people decided to look for members of this gang. Through means that remain unclear, they found two young men who were reportedly vampires. They proceeded to set them alight in a public demonstration of revenge.
The fiery Vondo killing was recorded on cell phones. The images circulated on social media and were shown by an investigative journalism programme on television. I watched the killing from my Johannesburg home. The Cutting Edge: Vampires — Vondos programme can be watched on YouTube. As of mid-2022, it had been viewed 144?100 times. Murder on demand.
A few months after the cases of cannibalism and Vondo activities, the news erupted with reports of rampant cannibalism in the rural hinterlands of Escort in KwaZulu-Natal. The story broke because a self-confessed cannibal handed himself over at the local police station claiming that he was exhausted from living the life of a cannibal. He presented a human hand and a limb to assure the police that the story was credible. At his residence, they discovered eight ears in a pot.
Cannibal confessions are not new, and they are particularly common in times of turbulence. Following the cannibal confessions, investigations revealed more human remains in the village of Rensburgdrift. Accusations circulated of heart eating, raping, murder, cutting women open and eating their flesh. So too did claims that human remains may have been dug up from graves.
The Ladysmith Gazette reported that at least 300 people confessed to knowingly eating human remains served to them by a traditional healer in the Amangwe area.
The sheer number of people knowingly participating in cannibalism further links the inequalities wrought by consumer capitalism to aspirations to the good life and invention through the occult. The logic of cannibalism is both seamless with that of the inequalities of capital accumulation and parodies the failures of capitalism. It is the logic of the postcolony and a mockery of the corrupt state.
Everyone is trying to eat themselves out of their abjected position. The rural poor eat to counter the violence of abstraction and impoverishment.
As David McNally, the author of Monsters of the Market, notes, the fetishes that torment sub-Saharan Africa are a consequence of continued plunder for natural products, including diamonds, gold, cotton, cocoa, ivory and rubber. He contends that “with each manic effort to seize their continent’s wealth, Africans have been captured, whipped, beaten, worked to death, structurally adjusted — all so that … people might be downtrodden, and capital might accumulate.” In causing mass debilitation, forcing people off their land, grabbing their resources and stifling self-sufficiency, primitive accumulation occurs.
People become dependent on paid work, but with soaring unemployment, desperation grips the countryside.
Global, national and local capital circulates and is accumulated illicitly. Wealth is a magical force characterised by unfair competition, historical inequalities that privilege some and marginalise others nationally and in the local community. But capital accumulation is always elusive for the local communities. Those who want good fortune and wealth must consider occult means.
But cannibalism has material effects. Those of us who live with this practice must confront its truths. What is the smell of burned human flesh? What is the residue of dead Vondo left in the street after public burning? What do public burnings represent in South Africa? How do children remember the spectacle of death?
What do flames conjure for those who have witnessed the furnace of death? And when the dead were encountered in the woods, what of the smell of decay? How does the smell live on in sensorial memory? What hauntings and traces do the dead leave behind for those who touch and smell them?
What does facing the open casket reveal about the trail of neoliberal failure and devastation? What mourning effects emerge from the grave and how do these live on as an energy upon which future generations draw? What energy emits from the debris in the deathscapes?
Parts of this article are an edited excerpt from Riotous Deathscapes published by Duke University Press and co-published by Wits University Press. Hugo ka Canham is a writer and professor at the Institute for Social and Health Science at the University of South Africa.
Tax attorney Alan Allschwang, who for a limited time was part of the legal team of murdered Teazers boss Lolly Jackson, is set to appear before regulatory body the Legal Practice Council for allegedly being the accomplice of a disbarred attorney accused of swindling people out of millions.
The Mail & Guardian reported last week that disbarred attorney Ben van Heerden is continuing to pocket large sums of money by misappropriating funds paid to him for services he cannot legally offer. He has allegedly defrauded several people since his suspension as a legal practitioner by the council in May 2016.
Van Heerden, who was finally struck off the roll in November, maintains his innocence although court documents, financial statements and former clients suggest the opposite.
Now, further evidence suggests Van Heerden has not been acting alone but with Allschwang, a registered practising attorney in Paarl in the Western Cape. When the M&G contacted Allschwang, he said he would refer the matter to the council and deemed it “inappropriate” to comment on it further.
“To the extent that allegations in your email under reply remain unaddressed, this must not be construed as an admission, or as a waiver of our right to deal with [the] same in the appropriate forum at the appropriate time,” he said.
Allschwang previously practised at Alan Allschwang Associates in Bryanston, Gauteng. He acted as Jackson’s estate lawyer after his death but left under a cloud, sources close to the Jackson family told the M&G.
Allschwang left the country for Mauritius between 2012 and 2014, not long after the Jackson family lawyer Ian Jordaan was murdered in late 2011.
It is unclear when he returned to South Africa but three separate sources who dealt with Allschwang before he left the country were surprised to learn of his return when the M&G contacted them last month.
Allschwang and his wife were sighted in April 2019 when they led Porsche Club of South Africa’s branch in Cape Town on the first Porsche drive of that year.
Residing in the opulent Val de Vie golf estate in Pearl Valley, Allschwang runs Alan Allschwang and Associates Inc Attorneys at Law.
The matter between him and the legal regulatory body dates back to 2020 and relates to Fidelity Fund, a fund for legal practitioners, the council confirmed to the M&G. Another matter had been closed in 2015.
The council is also investigating Allschwang after one of Van Heerden’s alleged victims submitted a complaint. The complainant argues there was a fee-sharing agreement between Allschwang and Van Heerden when he put over R3 million to a trust account he believed was managed by Van Heerden.
The complainant, Marén de Klerk, is the self-confessed paymaster in Namibia’s ongoing multimillion “Fishrot” corruption saga in which the country’s former fisheries minister Bernhardt Esau is embroiled.
Paymaster-turned-whistleblower De
Klerk admitted in an affidavit to having unwittingly committed crimes linked to the Fishrot scandal. Fearing for his life, he left Namibia and acquired legal services in 2020, when he was introduced to Van Heerden and subsequently to Allschwang.
It was only months later that De Klerk learned Van Heerden had been suspended in 2016 and efforts to retrieve his money had failed.
De Klerk claims that Allschwang wrongfully transferred money belonging to him to Van Heerden in 2020 and that Allschwang employed Van Heerden while he was suspended and legally not allowed to practise.
In his statement to the council’s investigative committee, Allschwang denied his firm had employed or shared legal fees with Van Heerden.
“Mr van Heerden to the best of my knowledge is an attorney who resides in Paarl. I have never asked Mr van Heerden for proof of his admission as an attorney or for a copy of his Fidelity Fund Certificate,” Allschwang writes.
At that time, Van Heerden was suspended for nearly four years and his Fidelity Fund certificate had expired in 2013. Allschwang’s Fidelity Fund certificate had expired at the time he met De Klerk. However, it became valid again last year.
Correspondence on 24 January 2020 between Allschwang and De Klerk, which the M&G has seen, contradicts Allschwang’s claim he had never shared legal fees with Van Heerden.
“In the circumstances, Ben (Van Heerden) and I are ethically bound to take counsel off brief without further delay, and to withdraw as your attorneys of record with immediate effect, which we hereby do,” Allschwang wrote in an email to De Klerk after the latter failed to pay for legal services.
Additional information gathered by the M&G suggests Van Heerden acts with the endorsement of Allschwang. Sources believe Allschwang plays a more supervisory role in the wider allegedly fraudulent scheme. One, who agreed to speak to the M&G on the record, is attorney Mzikayise Klaaste, to whom Van Heerden owes legal fees of about R35?000.
Van Heerden referred to Allschwang as his business partner, according to Klaaste, who did a large amount of legal work for Van Heerden from late 2018 until last year. Klaaste said he assumed back then that Allschwang was the “big boss” managing Van Heerden.
The M&G has seen several documents, including invoices, emails and conversations, where Van Heerden references Allschwang at Alan Allschwang & Associates Inc Attorneys at Law. According to De Klerk, he also visited Allschwang at his home with Van Heerden.
Last year, Van Heerden admitted to a former client in Stellenbosch, Rhys van Wyk, that he was not lawfully allowed to practise but assured him that it was not a “big deal”.
In correspondence in September 2020, between Van Wyk and Van Heerden, the latter requests to “seek” Allschwang’s opinion and advice on the relevant matter. Van Heerden assured Van Wyk that Allschwang “is an expert on corporate and tax law”.
In the correspondence, Van Heerden asked for a deposit of R25 000 to initiate the legal process after, he wrote, informally discussing the matter with Allschwang. He concluded: “Once instructed to open a file I shall present you with a formal Fee and Mandate Agreement”.
Van Wyk claimed he paid a total of R280?000 to Van Heerden to assist him in a settlement agreement with Rank Property Administrators during the Covid-19 pandemic. He paid Van Heerden his legal fees and was under the impression that a settlement had been reached when, in fact, it had not. Fortunately, Van Wyk managed to retrieve R210?000.
One person, who paid Van Heerden close to R2 million to manage a trust account, which does not exist, was also aware of a partnership between Van Heerden and Allschwang.
Allschwang having an accomplice could have significant implications for victims’ chances of applying for ancillary relief. The Legal Practice Council told the M&G: “Members of the public have cover when the legal practitioner they are dealing with is in good standing with the LPC and has a valid Fidelity Fund Certificate — if it is an attorney or approved trust fund advocate.”
While Van Heerden’s Fidelity Fund certificate expired in 2013, Allschwang holds a valid certificate, according to the verification portal.
De Klerk was arrested on Thursday at a home in Paarl. The South African government received a request from Namibia for De Klerk’s extradition on 15 October 2021. At the time of publishing, the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation had not confirmed the charges.
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