Bongani lived in Alexandra. Where Soweto is a sprawling, government-planned ghetto, Alexandra is a tiny, dense pocket of a shantytown, left over from the pre-apartheid days. Rows and rows of cinder-block and corrugated-iron shacks, practically stacked on top of one another. Its nickname is Gomorrah because it has the wildest parties and the worst crimes.
Street parties are the best thing about Alexandra. You get a tent, put it up in the middle of the road, take over the street, and you’ve got a party. There’s no formal invitations or guest list. You just tell a few people, word of mouth travels, and a crowd appears. There are no permits, nothing like that. If you own a tent, you have the right to throw a party in your street. Cars creep up to the intersection and the driver will see the party blocking their way and shrug and make a U-turn. Nobody gets upset. The only rule is that if you throw a party in front of somebody’s house, they get to come and share your alcohol. The parties don’t end until someone gets shot or a bottle gets broken on someone’s face. That’s how it has to end; otherwise, it wasn’t a party.
Back then, most DJs could spin for only a few hours; they were limited by the number of vinyls they could buy. Since parties went all night, you might need five or six DJs to keep the dancing going. But I had a massive hard drive stuffed with MP3s, which is why Bongani was excited when he saw me mixing—he saw a way to corner the market.
“How much music do you have?” he asked.
“Winamp says I can play for a week.”
“We’ll make a fortune.”
Our first gig was a New Year’s Eve party the summer we graduated from Sandringham. Bongani and I took my tower, my giant monitor, and all the cables and the keyboard and the mouse. We loaded everything up in a minibus and brought it over to Alex. We took over the street in front of his house, ran the electricity out of his place, set up the computer, set up speakers, and borrowed a tent, and people came. It was explosive. By midnight the whole street was packed from one end to the other. Ours was the biggest New Year’s Eve party in Alexandra that year, and to have the biggest party in Alexandra is no joke. All night, from far and wide, people kept coming. The word spread: “There’s a light-skinned guy who plays music on a computer. You’ve never seen anything like it.” I DJ’d by myself until dawn. By then me and my friends were so drunk and exhausted that we passed out on the lawn outside Bongani’s house. The party was so big it made our reputation in the hood, instantly. Pretty soon we were getting booked all over.
Which was a good thing.
When Bongani and I graduated from high school, we couldn’t get jobs. There were no jobs for us to get. The only ways I had to make money were pirating CDs and DJ’ing parties, and now that I’d left Sandringham, the minibus drivers and corner kids in Alexandra were the single biggest market for my CDs. It was also where I was playing the most gigs, so to keep earning I naturally gravitated that way. Most of the white kids I knew were taking a gap year. “I’m going to take a gap year and go to Europe.” That’s what the white kids were saying. So I said, “I, too, am going to take a gap year. I am going to take a year and go to the township and hang out on the corner.” And that’s what I did.
There was a low brick wall running down the middle of the road in front of Bongani’s house in Alex, and every day Bongani and I and our crew would go sit on the wall. I’d bring my CDs. We’d play music and practice dance moves. We hustled CDs all day and DJ’d parties at night. We started getting booked for gigs in other townships, other hoods.
Thanks to my computer and modem I was getting exclusive tracks few people had access to, but that created a problem for me. Sometimes I’d play the new music at parties and people would stand around going, “What is this? How do you dance to it?” For example, if a DJ plays a song like “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae)”—yes,