The amazing mood switcheroo
Amagic trick, says Mawonga Gayiya, is like a gift lying under a Christmas tree: if it hasn’t been wrapped, the wonder and delight of opening it is diluted. And so it is with the art of illusion — half the fun lies in peeling away its layers and imagining how on earth the magician did it.
In a world of instant gratification and quick fixes, where the secret to almost every one of life’s mysteries can be found on YouTube, magician Gayiya (23) is reassuringly oldschool: he believes some enigmas are not meant to be revealed.
Magic is not about being fooled, he says. It’s about being surprised. And yes, people are also surprised (and sometimes unnerved) to see a black person practising magic. But this young Capetonian is no novelty act; he’s an ardent and hard-working professional magician.
His act relies on a simple blend of classic magic and stand-up comedy to fire up the imagination. There are no David Copperfield or Criss Angel pyrotechnics here, just good oldfashioned live entertainment with ample audience participation.
Gayiya claims to be the only black South African who does magic for a living full-time. He recently left his job at the College of Magic in Cape Town, where he will continue training aspiring Harry Potters part-time, to sally forth and seek his fortune in the fickle world of corporate and public entertainment.
He enrolled at the college over weekends more than a decade ago, as a keen 11-yearold, after his curiosity about magic was piqued.
“My older brother went to the college, and he would do a cool trick at home and I’d try to figure it out,” he explained last week during the National Arts Festival, where he was performing his one-man comedy magic show Astonish — his first solo production at the festival.
No slacker (a successful production is about 99% promotion and just 1% show, he asserts), he was taking a breather from his daily routine of distributing flyers and showing sleight-of-hand tricks to festival-goers at Grahamstown’s Village Green market.
Gayiya continues: “Sometimes I’d mess up my brother’s tricks, and steal his props out of his briefcase. So one day my mom said we should go and get my own props.” His brother’s fascination with magic soon waned, but his own gathered momentum.
“I wasn’t good at soccer like my friends, and gained recognition as a magician. It earned me street cred and helped me get liked at school.”
The road into professional magic was paved with small bit parts in magic gigs, which gradually became bigger and bigger. Soon, he graduated to corporate gigs and international appearances, supported by the college (“my second home”) and by illusionists such as Stuart Lightbody, whose show Devilish earned a Standard Bank Ovation Award at this year’s festival.
Having tested the waters in Grahamstown, he’s now ramping things up, intent on growing his Wonga Magic brand. Gayiya hopes to stage Astonish in Khayelitsha in August — the first time he’ll be performing professionally in the township where he grew up. He admits to being nervous and not expecting instant success back home. Besides, there’s the toxic cocktail of superstition and suspicion that he’ll be facing as a conjurer of colour, because for some, a “black magician” is synonymous with “black magic” or sorcery.
“For a while I couldn’t perform while I was growing up,” he confesses. “People were asking why I was doing magic, saying that it was wrong, and I’d kind of hide it away. I didn’t have the guts to stand up for myself. In our culture, you either believe in God or in sangomas and the ancestors. I fall somewhere between those two, and it confuses people.
“So it sometimes feels like I’m a loner, with no support — living in my own world. That’s why I try to do my job with respect for their thoughts and superstitions.”
“Respect” is a word that comes up often in this young man’s conversation. He’s no bolshy confidence trickster — far from it. He’s gently spoken and, well, nice.
He realises that people may have preconceived ideas about a young black man approaching them at the market or the local student watering hole with a determined look in his eyes. It’s a sad indictment of our society that their instinctive reaction is fear, mistrust or outright dismissiveness. That’s why he makes sure he’s presentable and doesn’t wear a beanie. He just wants to take out his sponge balls, show them a simple trick and hand them a flyer about his show.
Even during his act, he breaks the ice by telling audiences: “Yes, I grew up on the dusty streets of Khayelitsha — but relax, I’m not a tsotsi !”
Despite constantly having to swat away racial stereotypes and battle deep-rooted cultural prejudices, he still believes in the purity and beauty of magic. “Magic is a gift, and the person receiving the magic needs to unwrap it. We live in a world where people want to expose everything . . . but doing magic is about love for the art and for the people, about having that sense of wonder and keeping it alive.”
His mission is refreshingly simple: “I want to come and practise magic and leave [the craft and the world] better than I found it. After all, people never leave a magic show angry.”