Jane Rosenthal
THE TIKIELINE YUPPIE by Mehlaleng Mosotho (Vivlia)
NIGHTS OF IMMORALITY by Colin “Jiggs” Smuts (Vivlia)
In their different ways both these books indicate that more than a decade ago change and transformation were alive and well in downtown Johannesburg. Both have dark- skinned protagonists, booze flows freely, women abound (not only as objects of desire) and both leave one feeling that the struggle continues. What the struggle is about is entirely differently defined.
M-Net Book Prize finalist The Tikieline Yuppie, a deceptively easy and engaging read, may be seen as a cautionary tale about materialism. It describes the progress of Tseke Msamane from job seeker in a shiny borrowed suit to trainee manager. He has been seduced by what the author calls “one of the anthems of the Eighties” among the upwardly mobile, the notion of “excellence”, defined not in any vague intangibles to do with performance or morality, but simply in material terms: “a BMW, a white secretary and a big salary”.
>From the outset it is clear that Msamane, who carefully avoids any moral commitment, is tempting fate. But the author does not condemn him for stumbling on after the chimera of the tikieline yuppie, whereas the racist old-boy networking white management, as well as the one “liberal” on the staff, are bitterly condemned. The denouement reads like a stilted case study from a management studies textbook, but this was the Eighties and dispute resolution then in its infancy. Although it has all the ingredients for a powerful novel, and one close to the hearts of South Africans, the issues are not deeply enough considered, and Msamane remains too much a cardboard Everyman.
Nights of Immorality is charged throughout with irrepressible energy and irreverence, and -despite its title and the racy blurb, which are part of the larger joke – it deals with various aspects of the struggle as they manifested in the Eighties for those who remained in South Africa: sex across the colour bar, internal NGO issues, terrifying confrontations with cops and the Special Branch and being there for the post-1976 black youth traumatised in the townships.
Arnie Botha (alias Smuts) relates, in a series of loosely connected yarns, a fictionalised memoir of those years, rollicking from youthful sexual escapades to maturity with wife and child. Along the way one meets the easily shocked Canadian intellectual, the spoilt white girl who tries the patience of the comrades, the Youth League members whose behaviour is at least as bad as that of some of the adults around.
Some folk may recognise themselves and others in these stories, and enjoy the accumulating hilarity which results from sharp observance and many ascerbic asides.
The Tikieline Yuppie charts a difficult path in which escape from poverty and hopelessness seems to involve moral compromise – it’s up to the reader to decide. Nights of Immorality is an exhilarating celebration of surviving in good faith and high spirits under the nose of the apartheid regime and in a time when it was perhaps easier to know where right action lay than it is today.