Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Insiders’ view of an SA tragedy
IN Mr Entertainment, we hear the voices of the people who knew Taliep Petersen best: his family, friends and collaborators.
Their stories bring to life the spaces he inhabited, vividly recounting scenes from his childhood, his rise to fame from the Cape Minstrels Carnival stage to the
West End, his artistic collaborations, most notably with David Kramer, his family life, and his tragic death and its aftermath. In this pioneering biography of one of Cape Town’s most beloved entertainers, we encounter Petersen as a complex and many-sided personality whose influence continues to reverberate in national life.
Mr Entertainment evokes not just Taliep’s life, but also the music and entertainment worlds of the 1950s to 2000s and their diverse and irrepressible cultural traditions. Along the way, it brings us to the front row of South Africa’s difficult history. Drawing on the musician’s personal archive and on more than 50 interviews conducted over a decade, Paula Fourie has pieced together a fascinating portrait of Taliep Petersen, acutely observed and poignantly captured.
Extract
“IF YOU could say one thing to your father today, what would it be?”
In my interviews and email exchanges with Taliep’s six children, Natasha, Jawaahier, A’eesha, Ashur, Fatiema and Zaynab, I ask them all the same question.
“Obviously, there’s a gazillion things that I would have wanted to tell my dad,” Natasha begins.
“But I must be honest, when you posed that question to me, the first thing that came to mind was, ‘You should have listened to me.’ This speaks to discussions that I had with my dad about Najwa and me feeling that she is, simply put, evil. And that she’s playing him, and that he’s not looking at this whole situation clearly. It was as if he was blinded when he came to her. I told him that. And the funny thing is, just before his passing, we had had another discussion. I don’t want to call it an argument, but that’s always what it ended up being. But I had said to him that – and this will stay with me forever, because it became quite heated – and I had said to him,
‘Are you gonna decide to listen to me when you’re six foot under?’ And it’s one of the things that I wish didn’t come out. You know, my belief is that your time is your time and God decides when that time is, because he gives life. But at the same time, on the human side of me, I’m like, if my dad had only listened to me, he would still be here.”
Jawaahier, meanwhile, has a very simple and disarming reply: “Dad, you’d be proud of us.” When I press her to elaborate, she, too, points out, “To expand on that one sentence would be
tricky because there’s so much I would want to say. I would say, ‘I told you about that woman!’ I’d maybe add: ‘You definitely taught us how to live with you as such a significant part of it, but you failed in preparing us to live without you. But, boy, did we have to learn on the job!’”
A’eesha’s answer is much longer. She remembers that one Sunday following a week at their mother’s house, she and her siblings hadn’t felt like moving back in with their father. So they decided to stay put. When Taliep called at five minutes past six, A’eesha told him that they were not coming home that week. He asked to speak to Jawaahier but, when she started crying, spoke to their mother instead. Angry words and cusses were exchanged. The next thing they knew, Taliep showed up at the door with the police.
“And then we all had to tell him, to his face, that we don’t want to come home. And then he said to us, ‘If ever there is a time where you hurt me, you have hurt me deeply now.’ And, like, I never got the chance to apologise to him for that,” A’eesha says. “So, when I meet him, one day, Inshallah, that’s the first thing. I’m going to apologise, deeply, sincerely, for hurting him so badly that day.”
Ashur responds with a simple “thank you”. “Because of him, I am who I am,” he says. “Ultimately because of God, but, I mean, DNA and genes, scientifically speaking, I am who I am because of him. Yeah. I don’t see myself being anyone other than what I am, or who I am. I don’t see myself working on someone’s body as a doctor or defending someone in a court of law. I don’t. I wake up, and it’s music. I sleep, it’s music. I dream, it’s music.”
Fatiema joins her eldest sister in asking, “Like, ‘Couldn’t you see it coming?’ It’s the truth. And for a lot of years I was angry at him because, ‘You made yourself seem so perfect, but you couldn’t see the imperfections. You couldn’t see your children were damaged. You couldn’t see your wife was mentally unstable. You couldn’t see that she was gonna murder you. Even after she stabbed you, you didn’t go, “Oh, hell, no. I’m not doing it.”’ He was more or less, like, ‘No, but Zaynab.’ And I understand, like, he didn’t want Zaynab to come from a broken home, but I mean, my goodness, if she’s gonna, if she attempted to kill you, I’m sorry. Fight or flight, I’m fighting for me. Because Zaynab is now without a daddy.”
My interview with Zaynab is one of my very last. In 2011, at the start of my research, she was a minor, only twelve years old. I never thought I would be able to speak with her. Seven years later, I am trying to find the address of her home in Athlone where she lives with her older half-brother. It is only now, minutes before we are due to meet, that I register its address: 101 Grasmere Street. It feels very unreal to drive inside the house’s high walls, to park in its generous front yard and to be met by the nineteen-year-old Zaynab. She leads me upstairs to a little landing. She brings me a cup of milky tea and settles down in a chair next to me.
Not long into the interview, I murmur, “This is the house where it happened … ?”
Zaynab nods. She clears her throat. Gesturing to the top of the stairs a few metres away from us, she says in a barely audible voice, “Over there.” “On the landing?”
“Ja,” she says, indicating a spot even closer to where we are sitting. “Oh.”
“But they changed the tiling.” “They changed the tiles?” “Uh-hm.” She whispers, “It’s supposed to make a difference.”
When I finally ask her if there is anything she wishes she could tell her father, she is silent again, for a long time. Then Zaynab speaks her two words: “Come back.”
Mr Entertainment is published by Penguin Random House and retails at R360.