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THE CHEESE BOYS
My friend Bongani was a short, bald, super-buff guy. He wasn’t always that way. His whole
life he’d been skinny, and then a bodybuilding magazine found its way into his hands and
changed his life. Bongani was one of those people who brought out the best in everybody. He
was that friend who believed in you and saw the potential in you that nobody else did, which
was why so many of the township kids gravitated toward him, and why I gravitated toward
him as well. Bongani was always popular, but his reputation really took off when he beat up
one of the more infamous bullies in the school. That cemented his status as sort of the leader
and protector of the township kids.
Bongani lived in Alex, but I never visited him there while we were still in school; he’d
always come to my house in Highlands North. I’d been to Alex a few times, for brief visits,
but I’d never spent any real time there. I’d never been there at night, let’s put it that way.
Going to Alex during the day is different from going there at night. The place was nicknamed
Gomorrah for a reason.
One day after school, not long before we matriculated, Bongani walked up to me on the
quad.
“Hey, let’s go to the hood,” he said.
“The hood?”
At first I had no idea what he was talking about. I knew the word “hood” from rap songs,
and I knew the different townships where black people lived, but I had never used the one to
describe the other.
The walls of apartheid were coming down just as American hip-hop was blowing up, and
hip-hop made it cool to be from the hood. Before, living in a township was something to be
ashamed of; it was the bottom of the bottom. Then we had movies like Boyz n the Hood and
Menace II Society, and they made the hood look cool. The characters in those movies, in the
songs, they owned it. Kids in the townships started doing the same, wearing their identity as a
badge of honor: You were no longer from the township—you were from the hood. Being from
Alex gave you way more street cred than living in Highlands North. So when Bongani said,
“Let’s go to the hood,” I was curious about what he meant. I wanted to find out more.
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