Every year, more than a million people leave the rural areas for the bright lights of the big city, but it is doubtful that any of them arrive with Miss KwaKwa’s ruthless determination to launch her glamorous self on to our television screens.
For that is Miss KwaKwa’s dream: to move beyond her success as a beauty queen in the dusty, racist and, above all, limiting dorp of KwaKwa and achieve national acclaim as a celebrity in Johannesburg.
Behind the book is a wickedly funny play by Stephen Simm entitled KwaKwa: Traditional Weapon. Makgano Mamabolo shone as Miss KwaKwa, a character she had devised, in this one-person play that debuted at the National Arts Festival in 2004.
At the festival, Mamabolo’s larger-than-life appearance in a ridiculous tiara, excessive glitter and garish dress stole the show at an hour of several performance previews known as the Sundowners. This brief glimmer of Miss KwaKwa left a strong impression of an overwhelmingly energetic character, convincing me to see her show.
Her pronunciation of “Miss KwaKwa”, nasally drawing out the vowels in a larney accent, found humour in the tension between aspirational refinement and the confines of a homeland backwater. The play used the contradictions that emerged out of this tension to develop a hammed-up, satirical and highly amusing take on contemporary South Africa.
But while I recall the play loosely fitting the structure of a kunstleroman — the story of how Miss KwaKwa came to be an artist of manipulation and command a platform to tell her story — the novel Miss KwaKwa (Jacana) consists of interwoven narratives that crash into each other at the end.
In the book, Miss KwaKwa is determined to leave her isolated hamlet, but to do so she steps on the toes of a local hero. Unaware that forces are bent on stopping her in Jozi, she tries her hand at children’s television and a number of other entrepreneurial activities that are equally unsuccessful.
The book is peppered with troubled characters from a cynical portrait of South Africa today. There is the struggle politician whose wife is addicted to luxury cars; the dreadlocked, dope-smoking white boy who speaks “in an affected voice meant to reflect a childhood in Soweto that he never had”; and the paranoid white prostitute who feeds her drug addiction and cringes at narcotic-induced, imaginary wriggly things in Hillbrow.
But, while the novel tells Miss KwaKwa’s story through multiple voices, our heroine drives the action and we come to know her more intimately than the rest through her diary entries, her thoughts and her superstardom lessons sprinkled throughout the story.
It is an entertaining and neatly crafted romp that occasionally loses sight of its main character and her world experience to poke fun at the world around her from a different perspective. Don’t read it for a measured, deeply insightful, artful or poetic picture of our society. Read it for a rollicking, action-packed adventure with a cast of unusual characters.