Gqimm Shelele , livre ebook

Pan Macmillan South Africa - Mandy Wiener

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165 pages

English

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Description

As a young, soccer-mad boy living in rural KwaZulu-Natal, Robert Marawa listened to the commentary of local football derbies on a small, crackling FM radio. As a teenager, he spent hours practising his presenting skills on his family’s home video recorder, reading from newspaper clippings his mother had carefully kept for him while he was at boarding school in Hilton. Marawa’s dream was to be a sportscaster who would be beamed into the homes of South Africa’s footballing fans.

Robert Marawa’s career has exceeded his wildest imagination. ‘Madluphuthu’ has become arguably South Africa’s most popular and most recognisable sports broadcaster. With his quick turn of phrase, his baritone voice and his direct, no-nonsense approach, he has earned a loyal following on radio and television over the past two decades.

In Gqimm Shelele, his signature sign-off phrase, Marawa shares his broadcasting journey from hosting World Cups and interviewing presidents to his multiple firings, controversial suspensions and what he believes are the political forces behind attempts to end his career. He confronts the cabal that has repeatedly driven him off air, the tabloid reports about his personal life and his multiple near-death experiences and health scares.

With his trademark passion, Marawa addresses issues of transformation, sports administration, mentorship, political leadership and why Bafana Bafana keeps failing to win. He also shares his insights on what has made him a successful and popular radio and television broadcaster, giving a much-anticipated, behind-the-scenes look at his career.

Sujets

Sport

Autour du sport

Histoire du sport

Personal Memoirs

Sports

Philosophie et théologie

Republic of South Africa

21st century

South Africa

Memoir

International English

Afrique du Sud

Informations

Publié par	Pan Macmillan South Africa
Date de parution	03 octobre 2022
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781770108264
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0652€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Sin’bingelele emakhaya, e’koleli, e’bhedlela naphakathi emajele.
Greetings to everyone at home, at schools, in hospitals and even inside the various prisons.

First published in 2022
by Pan Macmillan South Africa
Private Bag X19
Northlands
Johannesburg
2116
www.panmacmillan.co.za
ISBN 978-1-77010-825-7
e-ISBN 978-1-77010-826-4
© 2022 Robert Marawa and Mandy Wiener
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
All photographs courtesy of the Robert Marawa personal collection.
Editing by Tlou Legodi
Proofreading by Sean Fraser
Transcription by Qhawekazi Phelakho
Design and typesetting by Triple M Design
Cover by publicide
Front cover photograph by Xavier Saer

Prologue
I ripped off all my clothes and threw myself onto the cold tiles in the apartment, desperately trying to cool down my body temperature. I was sweating, overheating, anxious, irritable. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I stood up, bouncing between the couch, the bed and the floor. The pain was getting worse, a shooting pain. I could handle pain but this was something else. This wasn’t normal. I lay down on the tiles again. Anything to help soothe the heat.
My phone rang. It was Pelisa, one of the PAs from SuperSport. Where are you? You are late for the meeting with the advertisers.
It sounds like you’re dying? Yes, I think I may be dying.
I was going mad. I was 35 years old – surely, I couldn’t be having a heart attack. But this wasn’t normal. I had to do something. The heat. The anxiety. The pain. I reached for my phone and called S’thembiso. I need an ambulance, I told him. At your apartment in Rivonia. Urgently.
At the hospital, there was a team of doctors and nurses holding me down, numbing my groin area. They had done X-rays and were trying to push through a stent. The monitors were beeping. I could hear absolutely everything happening around me. At one point I heard a nurse say, ‘We are losing him,’ and the beeping on the monitor slowing down. I could hear them arguing about what should happen next.
I thought I was dying. All I could think about was that I hadn’t told my family what was happening. All those things that you are taught about the Angel Gabriel coming to pick you up, all of that started racing through my mind. How was I going to leave the earth like this?
I was listening to everything going on around me but I couldn’t say a word. The minute they started inserting the stent, I could feel it moving up through my body. There was a sense of hope that the stent would get to the blocked artery in time for it to open and to get the blood circulating. The clock was ticking.
As the stent was about to reach my chest, the doctor warned that I would experience a sharp pain and the nurses literally had to hold my arms and feet down. The pain was so severe. You can stab me a gazillion times and I’ll be okay. The pain of a heart attack is unbearable.
Then there was just relief. The artery was open. It felt like I had won the jackpot. I took a deep breath and thought, thank God. I had come so close to death.
My 2008 heart attack was a wake-up call about my future, but it also gave me a chance to stop and reflect on my life.

1
Farm life
A t the meeting of two roads that descend from either side of a valley, deep in rural KwaZulu-Natal, is a small homestead made up of a few simple structures. The paint is peeling, the signs advertising Coca-Cola, washing soap and mealie meal are faded, and there are potholes on the streets.
Grassland stretches in every direction, punctuated by the occasional knot of trees or family compound.
Fort Louis is a trading station set on a quiet farm in eNkandla. The sounds of animals are heard more than the voices of humans. The air is clean, crisp and fresh at night and during the day.
A stream runs through the valley and each road out of the settlement leads uphill.
This is where I lived with my family from the age of three. My parents owned the convenience store, a general dealer on the farm, serving surrounding districts. The nearest large town was Vryheid, about an hour and a half’s drive.
Our home was nothing special. It was an asbestos and tin-roofed structure. It’s what we made of it that ensured it was special, working the land. But that was home. That was where we lived.
My parents had their own bedroom. As did my oldest sister, Nomvula. And then there was a double-bunk bed in a separate room. Gugu, the second-born, was on the bottom of the bunk bed and I was at the top. One Christmas Eve when I was about seven I fell off that top bunk and cut my chin open. There was a spare room for visitors before my younger sister, Vanessa, was born, after which she relocated to the carpet in my parents’ room, initially. We ended up swapping because I was the only boy and I got my own room.
Farm life was simple. There were cows, sheep and chickens. We subdivided the chicken run to have some for home and others for sale. The ones with the white feathers were the ones we sold and the rest we fed and kept for our own purposes. We sold chickens at the shop but on Sundays people could buy from our house. I had to run out into the rain, catch one and hold it, tie the feet, catch another one and then sell it for five rand, ten rand or whatever the chicken was worth at the time. I also had to learn how to milk the cows. I went into the stable with the farmhand. His name was Cadalo, like the blackjack plant, and I grew up under his guidance. He looked after the farm and made sure that I knew how to milk a cow and shear a sheep.
I would take the bucket full of milk back to the house and cover it with a white tablecloth, which was then used to sift the milk so that all the dirt remained behind on the cloth, and then we would make cream. We would put the wool into sacks, tie them up and send them off to the factory.
That became part of every day. It wasn’t even a chore. Milking happened at a certain time. I rounded up all the cows, brought them back and counted if all of them were present. Then I reported to Dad how many calves had been born so that we could increase the headcount. We took the livestock to the dip. It was a little journey on the road. We needed to make sure that none of the cows ran off and that the same number returned home.
There was also planting of mealies, vegetables and fruit. We grew everything.
That was farm life.
Families were very scattered in our area, so I didn’t have many friends. eNkandla is vast; you don’t have next-door neighbours. If you have a neighbour, you’re pointing somewhere, there up on the hill, at a homestead far away.
I also found that because my family owned the local store, other kids tried to be nasty because I was that boy from the family that was running the shop. They caused trouble with me and I didn’t want to get into mischief.
I was always pretty comfortable in my own space. I would kick a soccer ball or ride my bicycle on my own. That was my entertainment. I kicked the ball around all by myself. There was a wall and I learnt how to tap without dropping the ball and I had to pass to myself. I cycled a lot. I ran around in the space that I had. Once in a while, there would be one or two kids around and we would hold a little tournament.
As a boy, my dream was to be a policeman or a firefighter after my dad bought me toy cars with battery-operated sirens. The blue lights were a powerful sign of authority and I wanted to be that authority.
During the week I went to the local farm school called Woza Woza. Every Friday the boys would bring good-quality cow dung from home and the girls would bring two-litre bottles of water. We would do the ukusinda. It was a cleaning process to polish the floor.
The cow dung could not be dry because if it was, then it was only good for making fire. If the cow dung was still slightly moist, then that’s what you would bring. The girls used water to moisten the dung.
It was as if we were plastering a wall, but on the floor, with a sweep of the hand. And then we would allow it to dry and the floor would be sorted. By the time all of us came back on a Monday morning, it had settled in nicely and we were rocking a beautiful floor in the classroom.
Life was simple and very rural. But my dad had genius ideas to liven things up.
He would put on a horse-racing event. A ‘Durban July on the farms’. In general, he was big on betting and on the horses, but this was a competition called Oswenka. All the city gents from Joburg, the migrant labourers who had come back home to the farms, would be in their suits. There was a competition to see who had the best suit. So Oswenka would come to display what they were wearing in front of the judges, and show the inside of their jackets. If someone had a waistcoat, he was the man. They had style and were wise from living in the hostels in Jozi. They showed off their shoes and socks. That was farm entertainment.
Despite us not having the attractions of city or township life, if there was a birthday to be had, it was celebrated. Dad made sure that when he came back from Vryheid he had bought cakes from Checkers. We would get candles and put them on the cakes. We blew out the candles and ate sweets and drank cool drink.
Milestones were recognised and celebrated. That made my family what it was. My parents were loving and our home was happy and we celebrated that. I was always there with a camera to