The Angella Johnson Interview
Soli Philander’s patience is wearing thin. It is 3pm and he has been on the phone virtually non-stop all day, asking anyone and everyone for advice on how to clear his “baby brother” Anwah (18) of charges connected to a vicious gang rape. The present target is some poor lackey in the office of Jessie Duarte, Gauteng’s Safety and Security MEC, who is getting an ear- bashing for her comments on radio that the teenager should not have been granted bail.
“How can she go on air and say that?” bellows the usually cheery entertainer down the line. “The police have no evidence linking him with any crime, yet people are talking as if he’s a hardened criminal.”
Philander barely looks up to acknowlege me as I enter the room. “They are making scapegoats of us,” I hear him complain.
His wife, Toni, is carrying the youngest of their four children, who is demanding a nappy change. The house, with a “For Sale” sign hanging as if at half-mast, has a hollow, empty feel. Children with big brown eyes and honey-coloured skin are running around, unaware of the drama being played out around them.
“Things are rather chaotic because we were in the process of moving house when all this blew up,” Toni apologises. Anwah is being kept out of sight in another room, supposedly to prevent anyone from the media seeing him before the identity parade.
It is some time before the actor-comedian emerges from his telephonic mission. Eyes blazing and lips chapped from talking too much, he looks like someone on the edge of a breakdown. His wife’s soothing fails to halt a rant coupled with restless pacing of the room.
“I know that a terrible crime has been committed, but police in their urgent need to look as if they are doing something released information about myself and my brother. The media got swept up in the feeding frenzy and now politicians are jumping on the bandwagon and baying for blood.”
He is interrupted by the phone. Someone from Lawyers for Human Rights is returning his call, but is unable to offer any help as the family already has legal representation.
“This is victimisation and the denial of our human rights,” Philander cries in desperation down the line. “No one can prove to us how my brother is connected to this case yet our names are being plastered all over the papers. What am I to do?” He settles for the phone number of another organisation.
The pacing commences again in earnest. Like a caged beast Philander pounds the huge reception room littered with half-packed suitcases: round and round, back and forth, flinging his arms about and talking virtually non-stop as if pumping himself up for one of his stand-up comedy performances.
Will his popular female character and alter ego, the sibylline virago Rosie September, reveal herself in full vituperative glory? As if reading my mind, he stops suddenly: “I’m not performing. It’s the only way I can cope with this nightmare.”
It has been the worst possible beginning to 1997 for this refugee from the Cape Flats. A week into the new year he and his wife were sitting with his mother and brother (both up from the Cape for a holiday) on the back stoep of his Berea home when the dog started to bark wildly at the front of the house.
“The kids were asleep and my mum had been entertaining us with stories of her youth when she was a ‘girl about town’ and we were a having a good time because she’s so funny. Suddenly all hell broke loose.”
As they rushed to see what was causing the fuss, he almost collided with two armed men jumping over the garage gate. “My first thought was that I was watching the wrong channel, so I blinked my eyes.”
When he opened them Philander realised the two were being joined by several heavily armed uniformed officers pouring over the garden wall. “I shouted for someone to phone the police and one of the men answered: ‘We are the police.’ He was pointing a gun at my dog and threatening to kill him.”
After ushering the family into the house the police explained that they were investigating a double gang rape and asked if there had been any strange phone calls to the house that day. “I told them we had had a call from someone which Anwah had answered but the caller did not identify him or herself.”
Anwah was arrested for alleged car theft and possible accessory to rape, and Soli found himself, as de facto head of the family, trying to make sense of the situation. “I’m like an obsessive parent and my brother, as the baby of the family, is very precious to us. He’s a good kid and he was with us and a friend at the time of the rapes.”
To understand how the trauma of this scandal has affected Philander one must know he grew up in Elsies River, which then had the highest crime rate in the country and was riddled with gangsters. The family kept its distance from such activities.mmmmmm
Despite his mother’s Muslim faith – her first two sons were brought up as Christians and the other two as Muslims – the young Philander went to church and even sang in the choir. “My mother brought us up with a tremendous sense of right and wrong. We may not have had much money, but none of her kids would commit a crime.”
Philander – real name Silamor – spent a year at the University of the Western Cape before turning to acting. He got his first professional role when the lead actor in a play fell ill and he stepped into the breach. He was an instant hit.
He was on his way to becoming one of the country’s leading comedy performers. But he says his really lucky break was starring in Waiting for Godot with Pieter-Dirk Uys and John Kani. It toured Britian and the United States. “It was lekker. Here [in South Africa] I was being paid less than everyone, but overseas I got the same money.” And he saw the outside world, staying in San Francisco for several months afterwards.
On his return home he launched himself into cabaret, did stand-up comedy, won several awards for his acting and met Toni. Because she is white, they lived illegally under the Immorality Act for seven years before marrying six years ago.
Although often quoted as saying: “I didn’t have a father”, his biological dad died only a year ago. They had met only five times over the intervening years, so many of his early influences were feminine, until his mother married a prominent Muslim hawker.
Philander has a tremendous sense of family responsibility, perhaps embedded in his psyche from childhood memories of his mother left alone to care for two young boys. So when Anwah, “a sensible kid and the pride of our family” failed standard eight three years ago because he was scared at school, big brother paid to move his mother from Belhar to Woodstock in Cape Town. It nearly bankrupted him. Now he is ready to use his fame to help clear Anwah’s name.
He was himself in the process of moving from Berea, Johannesburg, because of crime. “Our neighbours have been robbed at gunpoint and so the threat is ever- present,” he says. So they found a pretty 100-year-old house in McGregor, near Cape Town, from where he can commute to his job as a radio presenter.
It is Philander’s 36th birthday on Sunday. What does he want for a present? “That my brother is exonerated and the police apologise for dragging our names through the mud.” Then he can look forward to putting it all behind him and starting life “in a beautiful town where my kids can grow up with a sense of community”.
After this, I doubt that he will be sad to see the back of Johannesburg. Whether the incident will taint his career remains to be seen, but at the moment offers for television and other work continue to pour in. Many people are even phoning to confirm bookings as a sign of support.