Actually, no
Bored? Tired? Gatvol of your day job? There is a way out — if you have guts, a plan and some savings. Shanthini Naidoo met some fearless souls who told the system to ‘shove it’
MMAMOTSE Maloka looks like a cockatiel on MDMA. Her blonde coiffure thrashing about, the tiny woman twerks, flaps her arms, and squawks for her exercise class to keep up.
“I am aliiiiive when people are happy and the energy is good,” Maloka says after her Zumba dancercise session.
She has a frenetic routine — kwaito dance meets Charleston meets marimba, all while her toned behind cha-chas to the music.
Some exercisers follow somewhat awkwardly, others do well. But she tells the class that they are there to dance. “Don’t worry about the steps, have your own little party, we’ll find each other on the way.”
It is hard not to jump up and join this contagiously hyperactive person. And it is hard to imagine her and her feisty hairdo behind a desk.
But it was just two years ago that she was a radio professional, “depressed and miserable” in her high-level job in government communications.
Over ginger tea and a cupcake — she has no issues about working off the sugar — Maloka, 38, says she has never been as relaxed as she is now.
“I loved radio for most of the years that I did it. Then with my communications job, I was waking up in the morning and dreading where I was going. I could do it with my eyes closed. I even studied further to add some excitement, but I had reached a ceiling.
“Working with politicians, travelling with ministers and occasionally a president — but doing the same thing over and over. I felt like I was losing myself.”
So she went home, to a small village near Hammanskraal, to figure it out. “I spent time alone, praying. At the end of it, I told myself ‘Mmamotse, now it is time to move.’
“My resignation letter was ready for six months. I was scared to leave the comfort of a salary. But I figured, what is the point of security if you have no peace and happiness?”
Maloka quit her job, put her home up for rent and moved into a tiny flat. “I decided at age 36 to start from scratch, living like a student again. My son was at school on a scholarship so I was not worried about anything else. Every time I think about what might happen next week or next month, I
MY RESIGNATION LETTER WAS READY FOR SIX MONTHS
shut it down and tell myself that tomorrow will take care of itself.”
A fitness freak until her work limited it, Maloka decided to get professional accreditation in fitness training. “Ferdinand Foch said: ‘The most powerful weapon on earth is the human spirit on fire.’ In my case the fire comes from exercising, making a change to someone’s life, seeing someone smile because of my good work.”
Apart from Zumba classes at a Lonehill gym, she holds mass fitness events locally and in Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland. Maloka trains reality television contestants in the Big Brother house, and was recently asked to join a major mayonnaise brand’s fitness campaign.
“I didn’t go looking for opportunities but they have been coming. I work as a lecturer part time, because fitness doesn’t pay the bills just yet — but I am not even going to stress. One of my friends told me that I’m not young anymore, and I’m not! But I am not going to waste time worrying about it. There is a saying in Setswana, ga lena motloga pele. It means: ‘I may start after you, but I will beat you.’”
As a young girl, Cammy van Rensburg took art classes and horse-riding lessons, as a proper lass should. But she ditched the mink and went straight for the manure.
The 33-year-old organic farmer was groomed to be Camille. Tall, attractive, with good bone structure and a healthy mane of hair, Van Rensburg could fit in with the soccer-shopper-Pilates mums. Except she seldom wears shoes.
A self-confessed Northern Suburbs “Bryanston chick”, with an art career ahead of her, Van Rensburg took the horsing around so seriously that she also studied equine science. She didn’t quite fit into the “suburban Joburg vibe”, and found some grounding after meeting her husband-to-be, Sarel, during a stint as a cattle-herder in the Eastern Cape.
“I don’t do coffee. I don’t do clothes. I don’t have a shoe closet. In fact, I only wear shoes in winter, when I have to.”
Some might think she is slightly kooky, especially when she talks about the spells that protect the farm. But she lives the talk. The family lives off the farm and off the electricity grid. They supply vegetables to the Bryanston Organic Market, where she also runs an organic catering business.
“We do prepared organic veggies because the Bryanston mummy doesn’t want to cut up her own vegetables. But I also try to get people to eat seasonal vegetables, and things they might find unusual, like okra, which is fantastic.”
It is a simple lifestyle, with little worldliness allowed. “My life used to be about driving a big-ass car that my husband paid for. That was the first thing to go. And I shopped a lot on his credit card. No, I don’t miss it, not a sausage. I am very real. We are doing something good for the planet.”
She says something soporific about purpose and meaning, then exclaims: “When you are a farmer you are forced to be authentic. We have got to return to that time when humans were self-sustaining.”
It can be hard, she says. “There was no rain for the first few months of the year. What can you do? We always seem to manage. We have an ideal life here because of the respect we give to Mother Nature.”
‘ Dit raak soos biltong en val af,” Tertia Alkema informs a young mother about her brand new baby’s squidgy umbilical cord.
She would have been unlikely to discuss such things in her previous profession as an insurance broker.
Alkema, 43, is a doula. In ancient Greece this would have made her a female slave, but in today’s world, she is a birth partner. Not the person who breathes heavily and squeezes the sweaty palm of a woman in labour, sometimes faints and often panics, commonly known as “the dad”.
A doula is a non-medical assistant who guides a woman before, during and after childbirth, emotionally and physically. Clients might describe her as guardian angel, fairy godmother or a really intense personal assistant.
“Some men are born to support their wives but others aren’t comfortable in that space,” Alkema says. “It plays on the mom’s mind and some just want their husbands far away. It doesn’t mean they don’t love each other, but birth is so graphic. If the dad is there, I don’t take over that role. A lot of the time can be spent reassuring them that this is all normal and knowing when to step back.”
She is right; there are no masks in the
I SPENT SO MANY YEARS HELPING PEOPLE PLAN FOR THINGS GOING WRONG
WE GOT OUR FIRST PAY CHEQUE AND WE LAUGHED
birth process, there is nothing to hide, no more human an experience. Which is why many people stay as far away from it as possible.
So what made a person who helped people plan for their deaths, decide to help bring lives into the world?
“I spent so many years helping people plan for things going wrong. It paid well. But there were these strong emotions that go with losing and gaining money. People seem to value possessions more than anything else.”
It still does not explain why she left a 9-to-5 job in an air-conditioned office so she could be with women who spend up to 15 hours in labour before giving birth at 3am.
“I was in Paris with my sister, who is a midwife, which I had no interest in at the time. She went to a lecture on water birth during our trip and I joined her. It was new, unheard of in South Africa at the time.
“It changed my life. I was not married yet, and had no children. But I decided then and there that I was ready to be a mother. It showed me how birth is empowering, not something to get over with. And it shows the strength that women possess.”
The first birth she attended as a doula was “amazing”. “The baby was born still in membranes, with the veil, which people believe is special. The couple named their child Merlin.”
Fast forward 160 new babies, and Alkema says: “There is little more natural and real that crosses race, beliefs and culture, than having a child. The hormones and excitement are like being on a high.”
She shrugs off the reduction in income that came with the career change. “No more buying silly things I don’t need. I would spend on my hair and clothes, because the image was so important in my old job. Now it is just about how much I can be there for people.”
It is difficult to politely ask a person how rich they are, or were. “Let’s put it this way. We spent half the year in Joburg and the rest in the south of France,” says Nina Scott, 43. “We had a crew of say, 40 friends, who were similarly multinational, and we spent our time eating at superb restaurants, weekends in Cape Town or at the country house. We often took holidays, skiing or whatever. And we shopped, at markets. Always lots of markets.”
Her husband Don, 44, adds: “Don’t forget auctions. The house was full of stuff, some in storage. It was all a bit ridiculous.”
It sounds ridiculous — and fabulous. So what made them give it up? “It was poisonous,” says Don. They were both in the aerospace industry, he as an engineer and Nina, who had a background in hotels, in marketing.
“In 2001, we decided to foray into the hospitality industry, to try to work together,” Don says. “We ran a bush camp for four years. It was really rough, we used oil lanterns for light and had to heat water on wood fires.”
Nina says that initially their new lives felt like a sacrifice. “We got our first pay cheque and we laughed. It was less than 10% of what we earned in Joburg. But we lacked for nothing and ended up having a richer life for it. We learnt to spend time together and use what we had to the max. When you earn lots of money, all you do is run elsewhere to spend it. We had sickened ourselves with spending and we were so ready to let go of it.”
Then they had a child.
“Roscoe was seven months old and we were living without electricity, it was a bit mad. We said we go back to Joburg for five years,” says Nina.
She ran a hotel and Don went back to his old firm. “We were fine for a while,” says Nina. But then Don had his traffic jam moment.
“Two years down the road,” he says, “I was sitting in standstill traffic between Joburg and Pretoria for an hour and I thought, ‘This is the peak, the height of what the city has to offer? There is just no comparison to our life in the bush.’ I phoned Nina and said, ‘Pack your bags.’ She said, ‘My bags are already packed.’”
The Scotts managed, then bought, the Tanda Tula luxury game camp in the Timbavati where white lions roam and elephants sometimes drink from the swimming pool. Their two sons go to a nearby school.
“With technology, the kids don’t miss much of the city life,” says Don. “The difference is that we are limited as to what we can spend money on.
“There are no boutiques, coffee shops. Time is limited, and we spend most of it outdoors.”
When they do go to Joburg with the boys, they feel like tourists as they ride the Gautrain or visit Constitution Hill and the city’s museums.
Don says: “You have to have strong convictions to say goodbye to the city life. But when you are out here, it is easy to feel privileged, not like you are missing out.”