Doctor Khumalo: The S-Curl, the glamour, the funk

Read More

In the new documentary 16V, Doctor Khumalo remembers the day he was relieved of his boots and pads by a delegation of Mofolo tsotsis and their dogs. The mugging happened in about 1983, when Doc was sixteen, during one of his hour-long walks from his home in Dube to training in Rockville, via Mofolo and White City.

Being a scrawny, outnumbered and rational Sowetan, young Mdokisi knew better than to resist the expropriation of his kit. But once there was a safe distance between him and the tsotsis, he allowed himself to engage in a bit of backchat. “I shouted at them: ‘Heyi wena! One day, you’ll come to watch me play at Orlando Stadium – and you will pay!’ And then I ran.” 

This was pure “16V”. The insouciance, the impudence, the intelligent lack of appetite for physical combat. This was the cheeseboy spirit he brought to the football pitch for Kaizer Chiefs – and on the pop culture stage of young, newly democratic South Africa. He showed a generation a way to be street without being rough; a way to triumph by sheer force of ease. 

The subtext of this posture was entitlement – a word that has recently become a dirty one. But it still properly describes a beautiful mental shift that happened for Doctor and his cohorts; a psychological internalisation of the liberation moment. It was the absorption by his generation of black South Africans that they owned freedom, innately, due to their fundamental human right to it. Finish and klaar. They didn’t need to earn or deserve freedom on the strength of their actions; they simply had to take it.

As a junior school kid, Doc felt an early flicker of a dreamy future of middle-class abundance when he starred in an Eet-Sum-Mor TV commercial in the early years of SABC TV. The casting agent had scouted him in his Dube classroom. And by the time he was getting mugged in Mofolo, the luminous sheen of freedom was alive and well in his jheri curl. 

But Doctor was not a born-free, and the first episode of the series, directed by Yanga Chief, deftly traces the formative shock of the 1976 Soweto uprising on his generation, and the long, tectonic grind of violence that followed it. “Life had robbed us,” says Khumalo, remembering the sporadic ghetto soundscape of gunshots and the screams of bereaved mothers: not the soundtrack of a happy childhood. 

In some ways, Doctor was one of the luckier ones. He had a stern but loving ex-Kaizer Chiefs star dad, Eliakim “Pro” Khumalo – who put an end to his son’s disastrous early foray into boxing after he came home with a black eye. He had a similarly stern mother (who would later shoo away hordes of wannabe-WAGs who besieged the family home in Dube). “We lacked for nothing,” he says. And he had a mischievous ally in his older sister, who would unlock the front door when he came home after 9pm curfew. 

So when fame came for him in 1987, the documentary suggests, Khumalo was more or less emotionally ready for it, unlike so many diski prodigies before him and after him who fell foul of addiction and personal chaos. In a way, the emotional readiness was reflected in his football – in its balance of purpose and decoration, between individual licence and the collective project.