kagablog

When I moved up to Joburg in 1990 to make my fortune as a musician I was pretty much unaware of how dangerous it could be, and my combination of ignorance and arrogance placed me in violent situations quite often. For example, just showing the finger to a motorist resulted in a gun being shoved into my face by an irate off-duty cop. I had to learn what was acceptable Joburg behaviour, where was safe, and when. Along the way I picked up a fair amount of bruises.

One new year’s eve, the band I was playing in at the time played a gig at the Black Sun in Yeoville. After the gig I passed out in the car outside. Band members woke me up in the early hours of morning to pack up our music equipment. I stumbled upstairs to fetch my drumkit, totally unaware of what was happening around me.

We found out later that somebody was busy selling coke on the premises, which had infuriated the local mafia. They placed some heavies at the door and then proceeded to trash everyone inside.
As I came down the stairwell with some drums in my hand, one of the mafia dudes took a drum out of my hands and hit me on the head with it. I fell down the stairs, and he threw the drum after me, and then ran down the stairs and leapt onto my face. I had a clear imprint of the sole of his shoe on my cheek afterwards.
A couple of them then proceeded to kick the shit out of me as I lay there, until my girlfriend, god bless her tiny cotton socks, managed to argue her way past the dudes at the door and pull me to safety.
One the band members had his eardrum damaged by the mafia in the attack, and he decided to sue them for damages. It then turned out the guy he was pressing charges against had about a zillion assault charges against him, so they offered us all bribes if we would keep our mouths shut. Not wanting to invoke the ire of the mafia, we agreed and collected the cash from them, ironically, in the very halls of justice themselves.
We were never certain if the attack that followed a few weeks later was organized by the mafia or not. I was busy sleeping at the time (yes, I used to pass out quite a lot) when a group of people walked past our house and broke off the arial of our car. My mates, who were sitting on the balcony, took exception to this and one of them ran out with a broken baseball bat to challenge them.
They decided to feed the baseball bat to him … and entered our house in a fury. I awoke to screams and the sound of shattering glass, pretty terrifying, as I had no idea of what was going on. I ran to the band room and locked it, before they could get in there and destroy our music equipment. They found a broomstick in the kitchen and broke it over the head of the guy who had run out with the baseball bat, until it was in tiny pieces. He needed about 60 stitches. Apparently one of the crowd was a woman, who had flung bricks around our house! Nice people, the Joneses ..
Not long after this, I had an argument with my girlfriend at a club and decided to walk home, something I often did at the time. The club was on Bree Street and I thought I would head for Yeoville to visit a girl there. In my considerably pissed state, I thought it wise to take a shortcut through a narrow alley at three in the morning.
I noticed, off to my right, a dude running towards me in a threatening manner, so I turned towards him, and put up my fists. But he was only meant to distract me, and three or four teenage guys leapt on me from behind. They dragged me into a dark corner, held my arms, and one began hitting me in the face, while another stabbed me in the back repeatedly with a knife. Fortunately I was wearing a leather jacket and the stabs were shallow, probably intended to make me shut up, because I just kept shouting and struggling.
At one point they got me down on the ground and started putting in the boot, and that was when I realized that I might not make it out of this situation alive. Somehow I got to my feet and then I decided to drag the lot of them towards the street I had come off, which had street lights.
Some sort of superhuman strength came over me, because I managed to pull them all with me. One of them tried to get my watch, and another tried to pull off my jacket, but I managed to retain both … and ran towards a couple who were leaving the club and getting into their car. My attackers fled. All I had on me was R40, but there was no way in hell I was going to let those bastards take it! They got nothing from me in the end.
Instead of going back into the club, I carried on walking. Some cops pulled up next to me and asked why I was drenched in blood. I told them what had happened and they drove off. When I got to the flat of my female friend, she wasn’t there, or wouldn’t answer, so I trudged off and broke into a mate’s house. The scar this left, from the window frame, is the only one I still bear, though my face looked like a raw burger patty for weeks …
Since then, I have learned to avoid, or recognize on time, potentially dangerous or violent situations. I did get smacked by a bunch of Lebs because a woman was giving me a blowjob. She had insisted on giving it to me on the bonnet of a car, just a few feet away from her boyfriend, who had passed out in his car.
The Lebs had arrived at the pub with their shirts off and were looking for trouble. When they saw me being pleasured on the car they took exception and came over to see what what was going on. When the woman talked back to them, they hit both of us. Then they began chatting and, for some strange reason, apologized for having hit us. Pretty weird …