Stand-up gal still standing
Why Tumi Morake refuses to back down
● Rewind to September 2016.
Comedian Tumi Morake, in slinky leather pants, does a hip thrust on stage at the Sandton Convention Centre.
The set is about how her weight loss was inspired by “side chicks” who would steal your husband while sitting next to you at a wedding.
With a cheeky grin, she says: “Don’t worry. A team of female archaeologists found
Homo naledi who had been buried for hundreds of thousands of years, which tells you one thing: guys, if you are hiding a side chick, we will dig, and we will find her.”
Later, Morake is basking in the glow of her comic of the year award, the first woman to win it. “Don’t say glow,” the mother-of-three tells a TV interviewer. “It might mean I am pregnant again.”
Her comedy, and the TV career that followed this year, was all about telling it like it is. Everyone lapped it up.
Static on the airwaves
September 2017.
With two popular TV gigs — on the latenight talkshow WTFTumi and as host of Our Perfect Wedding — as well as a foray onto radio on the Jacaranda FM breakfast show, Morake was trending.
But one morning, somebody missed the joke.
Her Jaguar was defaced, she was labelled a racist and her family and friends became the target of hate mail, or the social media equivalent. She faced a hearing at the Broadcasting Complaints Commission of South Africa, accused of inciting hate speech.
Her fan pages were defiled. “You are the most annoying person on radio . . . please resign and go to the bush,” someone wrote. “You must resign and leave our land alone. You black South Africans mess up everything in our beautiful land‚” said another.
The problem?
An analogy she made during a discussion about Steve Hofmeyr, comparing apartheid to a bully taking a child’s bicycle, and then the child being made to share the bicycle.
The audience was not happy. The fuss escalated to the point that her co-presenter, Martin Bester, was dropped by agencies and from gigs, due to association.
“People are happy with your being a clown, but as soon you take off your makeup, they’re not happy,” Morake tells me.
“That fun, light-hearted Tumi, everyone’s friend, was gone. PS . . . I am 3-D. I am about where I’m coming from and where I am going.”
She says that for 10 years, her shtick was about telling people what they were doing wrong.
“All of my race material was saying . . . ‘What you are doing is stupid’ without saying: ‘You are stupid.’ . . . You would laugh but then you would think: ‘Oooh. That is not right. I am being stupid.’ ”
Morake, 36, was born in the Free State. For most of her childhood, her father was in jail for treason, and her activist mother was also locked up.
She sighs, looking exhausted.
“Honey, I did some growing up between September and now. And in that growing up, I realised timing is everything,” she says.
“There are some things that won’t ever happen at the right time and there are places where you can spend your energy. I realise I will only have that [race] conversation if I see there’s movement and a point to it.
“At the same time, I went to Jacaranda FM for a reason. I am all about shaping the story of South Africa. The station is viewed in a certain way. I mean, the first reaction to me announcing I was going to work there was: ‘What? So you are captured. Why there? The Afrikaners!’
“But I am Seffrican. I don’t need permission to fit into a space, and that’s why I am here. We belong everywhere. You don’t have to wake up and say: ‘Oh, where are the brown spaces that I can go to today?’ ”
Morake says it felt as if the traditionally Afrikaans listeners — the station’s audience is changing, though — had been waiting for her to step out of line because race tension was at a peak.
“It was as if groups with all that packedup baggage came out. As much as the extreme right came out and started a fire, the extreme left also came out,” she says.
“We can’t let those flare up, either of them. I had ‘support’ from people who didn’t know me, or what I was about, but added to the fire because of their baggage. Logic and sense were drowned out.
“On some level, it felt like some people were never interested in giving me a chance, they were waiting for an opportunity to shut me down.”
Wrong space, wrong time
Morake, it seemed, became the lightning rod after a year of race-fuelled dramas — the heated incident at the Spur restaurant in the Glen shopping centre in Johannesburg, the save-the-farmers-from-crime marches, the complaints over Eldorado Park school appointments.
“I’ve never been branded like the way I [was]. But you develop a thick skin from dealing with trolls because they want attention or they are sad, miserable people whose mothers never hugged or breast-fed them,” Morake says.
“People who had never heard of me, but the first time they hear I am racist, their mind is made up. That does something to you. It changed something in me.”
It all goes back to why Morake won the biggest comedy award in South Africa.
In stand-up, she was raw, uncensored, hilariously pointing out the backward nonsense, as comedy does. It lays bare truths that make you wet yourself laughing. At yourself.
Comedy audiences loved it. But a radio audience, particularly this one, was unforgiving.
“I’ve said everything and got away with it because people understood what I meant. There is nothing worse than a comedian who has been able to talk about everything and anything, to then step into a censored space.
“Learning the level of self-censorship that needs to happen apart from the existing censorship, jinne. Sometimes we put ourselves into spaces that erode our selfworth and leave us questioning ourselves.”
Morake questioned her own material. She wondered about perpetuating hatred; could she possibly be racist?
So she went back on stage, and killed it. “Everyone loved it, except me. I was drained.”
But the stand-up gig gave her the ammunition she needed.
“Going to work at a radio station, this was trying to change the shape of things . . . there was a point when I wanted to say: ‘Ja, Tumi, you want to change history. Changing history doesn’t mean landing with your ass in butter.’
“Some people still resent me because I won’t apologise. And some said I should apologise for the offence. No. Don’t mess with me and the English, I know English very well. If I didn’t offer you offence and you’ve taken it, you’ve stolen from me. Maybe you should apologise to me for taking offence when none was offered.”
She won’t be leaving the breakfast show role, and Jacaranda FM was openly supportive of her. The BCCSA also dismissed the notion that she was inciting hate speech.
“I stayed because you don’t wake up in the morning and wait for a comfy brown space. This is our space, our South Africa, we all belong in it.
“I said it before, don’t claim to love this country if you don’t love the people in it. Don’t call yourself South African. You are not. Your lineage caused you to be here, you are just here and using this country.
“Running is agreeing, and I’ve never been one to run away from a challenge.”
Tumultuous year for women
Morake says she now understands the intimacy of radio, of stepping into “people’s cars, home, shower and making them uncomfortable there”.
It has been a racially sensitive 12 months, but it has also been a momentous year for women, particularly those in the entertainment industry, who Time magazine named The Silence Breakers as its person of the year.
Morake says it is a daily battle, and one that she has seen women handle by popping pills, “because they take care of everyone else but not themselves”.
She says: “I am a stand-up comedian in a country . . . in a world . . . where female comedians are far fewer than males. It is an adrenaline- and testosterone-driven industry. To place me in a position where I am afraid, you must work hard. I go for the fear, I don’t run away from it.”
She switches into comic mode: “You know this woman had three children via caesarean and still worked. It was this woman in a boardroom with the breast pump. She was pumping and saying to anyone: ‘If you uncomfortable with boobs, I might cover up, but don’t stop me from feeding my child.’ ”
Time to acknowledge the race beast
The brouhaha over Morake’s “bully” remarks is an indication that tough discussions need to happen. “We are now at a time in our country that is totally new to everyone, eh-very-one,” she says.
Twenty years ago, she says: “It was new to different people at different times. Now we are seeing how unsustainable racial division is. Our voting. Politics. Thinking . . . Something people are saying is: ‘What am I doing to help my South Africa?’ We are in a weird space where we are empowered but disempowered, we want to hate each other but realise it’s unsustainable.
“And then the new generation that says” — in a kugel accent — “We weren’t even there.”
But Morake is earnest when she adds softly: “I had a strong-headed mother and my father sacrificed our relationship in this fight. They were both outspoken about apartheid. Our relationship is wonky now because he was away.
“If I allow anything that mildly smacks of the time to derail me, then I am undoing anything they did. I won’t allow it.”
People are happy with your being a clown, but as soon you take off your makeup, they’re not happy Tumi Morake Comedian