My first encounter with AKA was at a Heineken event around the time Fela in Versace was getting lots of airplay. While I was tuned in to the Cape Town hip hop scene, I knew little about the Joburg scene that AKA was part of despite him having been born in Cape Town.
So when “surprise act” AKA took to the stage and the crowd went wild, my first thought was “who is this guy?”. And that’s largely what my attitude was when I picked up When Love Kills.
Subtitled The tragic tale of AKA and Anele, Ferguson attempts to draw the reader into the life of South African hip hop sensation Kiernan Forbes, aka … AKA who was well known as a womaniser and is portrayed as a serial cheater with a huge ego and insatiable hunger for success. He even gave himself the double-superlative nickname Supa Mega.
While the focus, as the title lets on, is on his relationship with the young Anele Tembe whose life came to a tragic end when she plummeted from a 10th storey balcony of the Pepper Club hotel in Cape Town in April 2021, Ferguson also goes into detail about his relationships with well-known celebrities Bonang Mathebe and Zinhle Mohosana (DJ Zinhle), with whom AKA has a daughter.
The book, however, has met with fierce criticism from the Forbes family, in particular, and “The Megacy” as Supa Mega referred to his fanbase.
My main criticism is that it is full of conjecture — so much so that I thought the book might rather have been called “When it may be possible that it was perhaps love that killed”. Page after page is peppered with references to what people “perhaps might have thought” or “it’s possible that XYZ happened” and “it’s easy to imagine that…”.
This of course is the result of the writer not having had direct access to several key players (among them the Forbes family), and her trying to analyse the story rather simply telling it and allowing the reader to come to his or her own conclusions.
Early on in the book she draws overwritten parallels between the stories of AKA and Anele, and Romeo and Juliet, with some chapters comparing the two in terms of where and how they were raised and which schools they attended. A lot of information in the book is drawn from social media posts and public spats, which Ferguson at one point refers to as childish. Interestingly, when I thought of how to describe this book, the word juvenile came to mind. While I understand that a lot of AKA’s showmanship played out on social media, I found the extreme focus on it quite tedious.
I recently started experimenting with sharing one-word movie reviews online, and if I were to give this book a single-word review, it would simply be “nope”
She wrong the book
Longlisted for The Sunday Times/CNA Literary Awards 2021.
In this astonishing corruption memoir, former Bosasa Chief Operating Officer and whistleblower, Angelo Agrizzi rips open a legacy of secrecy, exposing two decades of untold greed, politicking, corruption, racism, bribery and deep state capture. Inside the Belly of the Beast is a mind-blowing exploration of the fraudulent workings of a company, founded on deep deception, under the cult-like leadership of the Master himself, Gavin Watson. Having been intimately involved with Bosasa since its inception, having worked and travelled side-by-side with Watson, and having witnessed his unique style of bribery and corruption during this period – something that most certainly assisted in bringing South Africa to her knees during Zuma’s rule – Agrizzi is one of few people with a first-hand account of what really happened behind the closed doors of Bosasa.In January, 2019, Agrizzi made his first appearance to testify at the Zondo Commission. His ongoing testimony continues to be heard.
About the author (2020)
Phillipa Mitchell was born to British parents in South Africa in December 1972.Besides being an author, she is an accomplished writer, ghostwriter, editor, independent publishing consultant, and entrepreneur and has worked in the bookselling and publishing industry for over two decades. Her passion as a writer and ghostwriter is working on non-fiction material including autobiographies, business and inspirational books.She has raised two fine young men who are her pride and joy, and, thanks to their good genes, are both exceptionally talented in the creative arts.She is a child of Africa and is passionate about its people, its culture and its magic. Angelo Agrizzi is a self-taught businessman who has been described as a visionary – for seeing the world in a grain of sand and then acting on it.
He was the Chief Operating Officer of the Bosasa Group of thirty-eight companies from 1999 to 2016, which he turned from a R112-million per annum fledgling security company with eight staff members into a R1.46-billion per annum operation with over 6 500 employees over his nineteen-year tenure. Despite the large-scale corruption in which the company was involved, Angelo prided himself on delivery when it came to the operational management of the business.