Room 207 charts the lives of six young black men over a couple of years in the inner city area of Hillbrow. Since the 1940s this has been the most densely populated residential area in the country, and has always been associated with cosmopolitan living, flexible social mores, the artistic avant garde, and high crime levels. It is full of high-rise blocks of flats, with a busy shopping area at street level with many restaurants, cafés and clubs. In the 1970s it was already cosmopolitan and multiracial, attracting many immigrants, legal and otherwise, from the rest of Africa and the world.
Moele shows us Hillbrow in the 21st century; it is now a place that even wild young men, bent on sowing their wild oats, cannot wait to leave. They plan a momentous “out of Hillbrow” party. The narrator is one of the six and we get to know him and his friends rather well. For they are, remarkably, friends. This is despite the fact that they share one room, with a balcony and a bathroom.
The tone is direct and engaging, informal and chatty — reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut. The reader is addressed and invited in — first to a tour of Room 207, which the narrator says is their haven and their refuge. He has an amusing way of putting things in a sort of student or city-boy lingo that imparts a certain stylish objectivity to rather sordid environs. And he skilfully delineates the kind of guys he is living with by elucidating the pictures stuck on the walls — from Boom Shaka to Che Guevara.
Then he introduces us to individual roommates, who despite many differences of origin and opinion, are all bright and talented, and all bar one have dropped out of Wits or some other “great institution”. All of them, even the one who graduated in economics, are in the world of film and music, freelancing and living from hand to mouth. Though these are the scholarship boys, in whom the hope of their families is invested, here they are, living it up in Hillbrow, drinking and smoking the rent money, and bedding girls as if there were no Aids epidemic.
Many issues arise in this densely lived narrative. Concerning racial and tribal identity: Zulu Boy hates the makwerekwere; the Pedi narrator declares all Zulus are violent; there is considerable resentment against a Xhosa-dominated government. And they examine why Hillbrow has deteriorated so far so fast.
Women are mostly referred to in the most disrespectful and crass way. But despite this very bad language, no woman is raped in Room 207. The author speaks kindly of the local prostitutes, whom he calls “the angels of the night”. Their girlfriends in long-term relationships (Lerato, Tebogo, Lebogang and Basedi) are treated as serious people in their own right. Lerato’s abortions and her rights are discussed openly. Tebogo is a lawyer and Basedi a doctor and these women eventually pull their guys into a better life out of Hillbrow. Perhaps most shocking in the novel is the lack of privacy, especially when it comes to sex and nudity.
And friendship is evoked; the men learn from each other and coexist with kindness and a fair degree of tolerance.
This is fresh and vibrant writing, deceptively artless and not as formless as its free-flowing style makes it seem. There is considerable dramatic tension; to most readers life in Room 207 would seem unbearable, and one expects something bad to happen there. But it doesn’t, at least not in the way one might expect. They all, except the narrator, do move on, but nothing is resolved, nothing is certain. And all of them have had a terrific struggle to survive. Young white men, the author seems to be saying, are not the only ones riding the rough waves of transformation. Young black guys are also battling — that’s life.
This is no morality tale. But the final scene when the narrator has found himself the only one left in Room 207, and has given up on getting one of his 10 film scripts into “reel life”, and spends the day at the bus station weeping, unable to board a bus, the reader knows that he is blaming only himself — it is a bitter moment, and haunting. Now, a failure, he has to return to join the other unemployed men in his village. It is left to the reader to ponder how this talented young man came to this.
This is an important novel for young South Africans, as it articulates present issues in an authentic and highly intelligent way, appealing to post-1994 readers with its racy language and honesty, as well as its combination of devil-may-care humour and pathos. It’s quite terrifying but also exciting and challenging.
Jane Rosenthal was a judge for the M-Net English Fiction Award (2007) and a writer and long-time fiction reviewer of the Mail & Guardian