While writers may take years to write and perfect a novel, 28-year-old debutant Kgebetli Moele surprisingly did it in the space of three days with Room 207 (Kwela Books). And he claims it was no big deal because “I was giving an account of my actual experiences” — akin to a Jim Comes to Jo’burg for the late 1990s.
Having lived in Hillbrow, Berea and Braamfontein, Moele describes Jo’burg’s inner city as a nucleus of anticipated disappointments and dreams yet to be lived. He speaks of a Jo’burg that has seen so many immigrants crowd her constantly fast-paced avenues, suck her economic wealth and leave her on the brink of decay.
“The inner city is dead — the only people there are those who still make money out of it or those who cannot get out of it,” says Moele, recounting the dangers of living in Jo’burg’s dingy apartments and surviving her pace. “All people living in Hillbrow now, I mean today, will eventually leave it for a better place somewhere.”
Penning Room 207, he says, started with a feeling he woke up with one morning and, as the details were familiar to him, he planned to write them down and keep the text for “self-reading”. “I wrote this book as a way of introspecting. I was trying to find out where I was from and where I was going with my life,” he says. But then a friend “fiddled” with his writings, beginning the process whereby his 53Â 000-word manuscript became a 253-page novel.
Moele had written plenty of material before. There were plays for SABC’s Thobela FM and he has been involved in theatre, featuring in Sello Maake ka-Ncube’s Call Us Crazy and Koeksuster in 2000. He did not make the big breakthrough, however, and he still wonders, privately, whether he is a failure.
Room 207 is set in a dingy apartment on the corner of Hillbrow’s Claim and Van der Walt streets in Jo’burg of the 1990s. A group of six university dropouts from different walks of life meet — all with aspirations to strike it big in the City of Gold.
Matome, Modishi, Molamo, D’Nice, Zulu-boy and the narrator share a flat. Just like their forebears, they came to Jo’burg to extract her wealth. But it takes them 13 years to realise their dreams, and then only partially.
Their inner-city lifestyles are reckless and crammed with sex, drugs and heavy drinking. Despite this, the dream to get out of Hillbrow remains intact. Throughout, Room 207 remains a place for late-night parties, electricity cut-offs and countless sexual encounters.
The six friends all harbour an interest in music and the sound production industry. Matome leads the pack and, in line with his sexual discipline and determination to succeed, he is the first to achieve his goals. Two others follow, but the last two fall into the cracks. Zulu-boy contracts HIV and the narrator boards a taxi home with nothing but gruesome stories to tell and luggage full of shattered dreams.
Moele wanted to write a book that did not focus on where people were coming from but on where they were going and how they planned to get there. The highlights are the protagonist’s relationships with women of different class and taste, the Hillbrow community and their friendships.
Moele says his book also reflects on the “tenacity and tolerance of desperate young men who put reservations aside and share things beyond sharing”. He succeeded in partially documenting his and his friends’ lives and complementing that with fiction.
The narrator’s character and that of Moele are identical. The author agrees not to disagree and blows away suspicion by saying: “Failure is not what you put in the front, but what you keep in the back.”
Room 207 puts him on the platform as a new voice in black South African literature. He possesses all the rawness of a good self-cultivated young writer, although he could use some experience.
Born in Bushbuckridge in Limpopo, Moele is a descendant of the BaPulana tribe. He reveres Northern Sotho writer DH Bopape and among Moele’s favourite African writers are Bessie Head and Zimbabwe’s Dambudzo Marechera.
Moele is a proud and talented twenty-something, hardened by the circumstances of growing up underprivileged in the former Transvaal. He possesses the street slickness of a street urchin beaten by the storms and harsh cold of the Highveld. “I consider myself a hustler because I take every situation as it comes,” he says.