Life and death matters: Author Khaya Dlanga deals with the loss of his brother and mother in Life is Like That Sometimes. Photo: Delwyn Verasamy
Khaya Dlanga is a storyteller of many forms. He’s authored several books, including the 2015 memoir To Quote Myself, which was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Alan Paton Literary Award. As a marketer, he’s held management roles at Coca-Cola South Africa, Heineken and Rain.
But he might be best known for what he has to say on social media platforms like X — about everything under the sun. One of his books, It’s The Answers For Me, is a collection of unique responses he received to questions he posted on Instagram during the Covid lockdown.
That willingness to experiment with different approaches to storytelling is part of what has kept his perspective fresh and compelling to so many readers, both online and in book form.
But despite the acclaim, it’s been difficult for Dlanga to consider himself an author.
“I felt like I was an impostor,” Dlanga tells me when we meet at the offices of Pan Macmillan in Joburg’s Melrose Estate suburb. “I felt like I was intruding into a space where there are real authors, people who do it for a living. I felt like I didn’t earn the right and the stripes to call myself that.”
On this occasion, he’s wearing a yellow short-sleeved shirt, dark blue chinos and his signature glasses. Dlanga has a comfortable air about him, even when he’s talking about difficult subjects, and he laughs often, revealing a mischievous grin.
He is the perfect drinking buddy, sophisticated yet irreverent, playful yet introspective and armed with a story for every occasion.
Being shortlisted for the Alan Paton prize, he goes on, went some way to easing his impostor syndrome.
“Maybe I needed that external validation for me then to say, ‘Okay, I can start calling myself an author now.’ But, even then, I was not saying it with confidence.”
Confident or not, Dlanga has released his fifth book, Life is Like That Sometimes, and it’s his most personal yet, reflecting on his childhood and the untimely losses of his brother and then his mother only a few years later.
“The book initially started as just things I felt like I’d left out or didn’t expand on in my previous books because a lot of people would say to me, ‘I wish you had written more about that.’
“And then it kind of evolved into a discussion about growing up as a child under apartheid.”
The book does feature a lot of stories about the nuances of growing up in a village in the rural Eastern Cape and the contradictions of being black middle class under the oppressive apartheid system.
But the heart of the book comes towards the end when he opens up about his late brother, Nganga.
“I had no idea that he was struggling with a gambling addiction. And I was like, ‘Wow, why was I so blind that I didn’t see how serious this was?’ The addiction eventually led him to taking his own life.”
Dlanga writes about this process of trying to support Nganga through his addiction, taking him to therapy, navigating living and working together at the same time, helplessly watching him backslide and eventually being forced to fire him. He relates the pain of getting to a point where he couldn’t trust his own brother and couldn’t even let him into the house out of fear that he would take things and sell them to feed his addiction.
“So, these are the kinds of things I was dealing with. And the guilt I felt when he took his life left me questioning if I had tried to push him to get better too fast.
“And also wondering if my family blames me for him taking his life, and obviously me blaming myself for all of that, going through therapy, and burying someone during Covid-19.”
Dlanga recalls his mother, a vibrant, healthy woman, telling him with uncharacteristic calm, on the day of Nganga’s funeral, that she would die the following year. He was taken aback by her words, his immediate reaction one of anger and denial. “Don’t say that!” he remembers shouting. “You’re not going to die. Why would you say that?”
But his mother’s prophecy came to pass. Her declining health was tied to the immense heartbreak of losing her youngest child and Dlanga saw her slowly deteriorating after the funeral. The grief she felt was so overwhelming that it seemed to affect her physically, eventually leading to her death a few years later.
This sequence in his life forms the most heartbreaking part of Life is Like That Sometimes, as Dlanga grapples with the deep grief that follows the loss of a loved one. Through the writing process, he found himself confronting feelings he hadn’t fully processed. He talks about the guilt that accompanied his writing — wondering if he was exposing too much.
“Am I making him look bad?” he wonders aloud, speaking about his brother. He describes trying to help Nganga in the midst of his struggles, and reflecting on whether those attempts were the right ones, or if they inadvertently added to his pain. “Am I going to look bad?” he continues.
It’s clear this book, while therapeutic, was not an easy undertaking. It forced Dlanga to confront uncomfortable truths about himself and his loved ones, making it a process of reconciliation for both his grief and his relationships.
Writing the book didn’t happen overnight. Dlanga speaks candidly about how long it took him, revealing that the process spanned years, time filled with grief, reflection and a lot of emotional stops and starts.
“I had to personalise the experience because I haven’t lived his life. I know him as my brother and that’s what I had to write from.”
He pauses and reflects on how his mother’s death affected his ability to write. After she died, Dlanga couldn’t continue with the book. He needed time to grieve. Eventually he returned to the project, taking his time with it and weaving in both light-hearted stories and deeply reflective moments.
When I ask him how he made decisions about what to include or omit from the book, Dlanga reveals the inner balancing act that every writer must navigate: “There are some things that people don’t need to know,” he says. “Maybe it’s interesting to me but not to someone else.”
The process of distilling his life into a story that felt both personal and accessible wasn’t easy. Dlanga had to decide what resonated beyond his own experience and what would resonate with readers.
Some stories were posted on Instagram before being fleshed out into more detailed chapters in the book, based on the positive reactions from his followers. Those stories, in particular, became the ones that felt most universal — stories that were relatable not only to him but to others who had experienced grief, heartache and the complexities of family.
One of the most touching aspects of Dlanga’s narrative is his reflection on his relationship with his mother. He speaks about how she would send him stories via WhatsApp, a way of connecting and expressing herself that he never fully appreciated until it was too late.
“I always wanted her to write,” Dlanga admits. “I thought I had time. I thought I had time to interview her and record her stories.” But time, as it often does, slipped away.
The regret of this missed opportunity lingers in his words, as he reflects on how easily we take time for granted, assuming there will always be more of it. Dlanga’s book, in a sense, is both an elegy for the stories that will never be told and a tribute to the ones that were.