D but Botsotsos rule the tar
cism and a macho appreciation for the car’s brawny characteristics.
Take long-time spinner Eric Maswaya. “This is a unique car: it has its own sound. It has a Botsotso sound, that’s a 325. Even if it’s converted to a multivalve I can hear, it’s still a BM engine. You drive down in the street, it draws attention. Even a small child can tell you.”
“The way it looks [the Botsotso], what people do with it, it just leaves people with a question mark,” says Baba. “It’s just made for it, there’s no other car like the box shape. It’s the torque, it’s the power, it’s everything, the adrenaline. It’s a stress reliever, put it that way. It’s a huge stress reliever. That’s why a lot of people do it. When you spin a car it’s just, ja…”
For Leng, a Reiger Park resident and an expert spinner of a red Botsotso, there is a beauty born of physicality at play. “The way it tones and beats, and its looks. Look, it has looks, this car.”
Of late, however, the hypermasculine narrative of the car as an appendage to outlaw power and all that comes with it is up for interruption. On the track, someone like Stacey-Lee May breathes a nonchalant femininity into the sport. She spins in a pink and grey Botsotso labelled “Team Stacey”, sometimes with her sister in tow, upsetting the historical visuals (still present in the world of spinning) of women being the eye candy to the technical wizardry of the male spinner.
Her mechanical team is all male and includes her father, although visits to the track are more or less a family affair. Her mother, Lizel, functions as May’s press agent. Although May plays into a heteronormative femininity (“We sprayed it pink to represent me and my grandmother, who passed away from breast cancer”), it is perhaps disingenuous and counterproductive to women’s equality to set her up as a cat among the pigeons. But there are wider signs that, outside the track, and in the wider public space, there are slow, steady moves to claim more than just the passenger seat.
Enter The Honey, the Tumblr photonovella by Rendani Nemakhavhani who also plays the part of Honey. In short, Honey is a feisty and persuasive partner to the thugged-out Gavini, played by Kgomotso Neto Tleane, who also photographs some of the scenarios. Specific scenes have paid homage to the popular TV series Yizo-Yizo, particularly in the way the iconography and street cred of the Botsotso has been dispensed.
Yes, Honey occupies the passenger seat in a chapter where she and Gavini discuss taking their thug passion to new heights. But the way she is framed and styled (popping through the sun roof in a bright red dress) suggests her to be more than just an appendage. In other chapters, she perches proprietorially in front of the vehicle in All-Stars and with a seethrough handbag.
Taken in the context of her and Gavini’s relationship, one can argue that Honey is in the metaphorical driver’s seat, although seldom photographed that way.
“It’s always been a fantasy of mine to be in that car and to be a certain way in that car,” she says. “It gives me some kind of power, I feel invincible. Everything that is translated on to the character [Honey] starts with me and what my fantasies are. The car for me is a symbol of power.
“The Yizo Yizo thing, as well, was that there was a certain type of power that was related to the people who drove that car in the series. They looked invincible, making me feel like, ‘hey, that’s how I want to look and how I want to feel as well: invincible.’ When they are seen in different spaces, outside of those cars, they had to try to prove really hard that they were powerful people. When you are in the car, all you need is for it to arrive or spin it a few times and then, hey, that person is like the dog of the moment.”
Botsotsos abound in The Honey. In recent chapters of the series, Nemakhavhani has started featuring Stacey May’s car and May herself, in cameo roles, suggesting her to be restless with the association cars have with masculine power. A recent photoseries on her Tumblr has her perched authoritatively in front of a minibus taxi while a man kneels to the side of the frame, washing the vehicle. Other shots have her in the driver’s seat.
“That car [the box shape], in particular, has created such a strong aesthetic for itself in the association it has with gangsterism and how that community works,” she says. “It has become like a thing that almost everyone associates that car with. I don’t see it being placed in a different environment and being associated differently.”
Nemakhavhani’s intervention represents a distant shout across a windswept valley. Perhaps inaudible to an ossified chauvinism, but a shout nonetheless.