Marianne Thamm: Get your hands dirty (and roll your own tampons)

MARIANNE THAMM had three major influences as a child: her Portuguese mother, her German father and South Africa, the country she immigrated to with her parents from England at the age of two.

In an interview with Ruda Landman, she says everything she is, what she has become and learned, is because of her parents, but especially because of South Africa. “My entire internal architecture was constructed here," she says. “No other place resonates with me like here."

She is right, she could easily have been a character in one of Athol Fugard's truly South African stories in his early plays, such as Hello and Goodbye or People Are Living There. She switches back and forth between an unaffected English and Afrikaans.

Marianne does not have much regard for South Africans who can speak only one language. One must be able to be nomadic, move across borders. She sees monolingualism as stifling, almost like some cultures binding their women's feet to keep them small.

Words pour out of her mouth at high speed, her hands and arms wobble, her eyes sparkle. She is self-confident and comes across as tough, but one day I saw her crying after a visit to her mother, Barbara, who had been paralysed by a stroke.

I also experienced her defenceless side when she talked about her father, Georg, before he died. Their relationship was sometimes impaired, but she didn't give up. They were completely reconciled by the time he died.

Her gentle soul also shines through when she talks about her partner, Glynis, a clinical psychologist, and their two children, Layla and Kenya. Both have studied in creative fields: one jazz at the University of Cape Town, the other at the Waterfront Theatre School.

It doesn't surprise me, I used to see the whole family at theatres. After all, Marianne was on the editorial arts staff of the Cape Times. She was considered one of the most informed reviewers of her time.

Okay, I'm getting lost among all the stories, let me get back on track. I sit and wait for Marianne at the Hussar Grill in Mouille Point. Yes, here again, but it's close to where she was moments before.

She has just met the political cartoonist Zapiro (Jonathan Shapiro) and Branko Brkic, editor of the Daily Maverick, for their weekly coffee date. Marianne has worked for the Daily Maverick for a decade and writes anything from opinion pieces to theatre and lifestyle, profiles to investigative journalism.

She orders black mushrooms the size of hubcaps and I order the Dutch bitterballen. No alcohol for her, she doesn't drink.

***

About her EFF exposé after she went through party leaders' rubbish when they stayed in Camps Bay, she says it was old-school journalism 101. “I didn't stalk the EFF as people claimed."

After the piece was published, she faced sharp criticism and was labelled a racist on social media. “What is investigative journalism?" she asked. “It's like metaphorically sifting through electronic garbage and trying to work out how everything fits together and what's going on."

In her first job as a crime reporter at the Cape Times she had to go to murder scenes. Mutilated bodies of babies, old people, gay men, victims of family killings.

“We had to be there, go see, write down notes, be on the scene. There was no way you were going to get the information over the phone. I was trained to go to the sites of the murders," she says.

When someone called to say politicians were staying in an expensive guest house in Camps Bay and partying wildly, she knew she had to go. This upmarket neighbourhood stands in stark contrast to the EFF's ideology.

And people who claim that just because you are pro-poor, you don't have to live like a poor person, are suffering from cognitive dissonance. The accommodation was expensive. When they checked out, the bill for eight nights was about R60,000.

As an experienced journalist who has covered many beats, Marianne was not afraid to get her hands dirty. She went straight there and rummaged through the garbage.

Bottles emptied of French Champagne worth thousands of rand, business class plane tickets and clothing labels from the retailer H&M, which the EFF had boycotted in the past because it was supposedly racist, were among the items in the bins.

“I thought they were hypocrites," she says. “I am a self-proclaimed anarchist, and therefore I had no problem digging into the EFF leadership's trash to prove the hypocrisy of their public statements about economic transformation."

***

Where did it all begin? After school in Pretoria, she decided to study journalism at the old Pretoria Technikon. Even as a child she was an avid newspaper reader. She, her brother Albert and her father often argued over who was going to read which newspaper.

One day she read Aunt Evita's (Pieter-Dirk Uys's) column in a Sunday newspaper. It was a tipping point. She realised that with the right words and fresh, challenging ideas, you can discover new horizons, even if humour is involved. This, among other things, made her decide she wanted to work for a newspaper. Other influences on her young life were Bob Marley and Leonard Cohen.

After her studies she joined the Cape Times, then edited by the renowned Tony Heard. After covering the crime, courts and municipal beats, she joined the arts section. “It fell under the women's magazine, can you believe it?"

In those days, she had to watch a performance, rush back to the office and write the review before lunchtime. It was supposed to appear the next day. If you wanted to interview someone, the actor had to come in and sit right next to you.

“While he's talking you type like mad, time was always an issue. When the interview is over, you press the button and voilà, there you go," she says. Tomorrow it's in the newspaper.

“The Eighties were an exciting time to write about the theatre, I had a front-row seat, a ringside seat as it were, during an era of top political plays and many other experimental and leading-edge plays," she says.

It was the era of riots, PW Botha, states of emergency, Grace Jones, Boy George, nightclubs that were open until the sun came up and the Life & Times of Michael K. Later she decided to go overseas. She lived in Canada for a while, visited New York, but missed South Africa too much.

She returned and went to live with a close friend in Mtunzini in KwaZulu-Natal. They gardened, planted vegetables, chopped wood and read, read, read.

Back in the Cape, she worked for You magazine for a year and wrote, among other things, about a man who set himself on fire because his mistress had left him. She visited him in hospital but he was unable to speak, his lips burnt. She left him a R10 note in his Bible.

***

Then she decided to go abroad again and ended up in Antwerp, where she met the Belgian celebrity writer Tom Lanoye. They became old gabbas.

With another mate, the artist Philip Badenhorst, she worked with her hands again and helped him restore a restaurant. “My hands are not unsuited for anything," she says. “I feel I don't have to depend on journalism forever. At home I work in the garden myself."

Indeed, she has a lovely, secluded garden with two guava trees where she lies outside when the sun is shining and reads newspapers or books. Her library in the house is enormous.

If she ponders a column before writing it, she puts her headphones on and thinks on the stoep or in the garden about how she is going to tackle it. Dogs run around and over the years they have had many, with names such as Snowy, Sugar, Suzy and Ollie.

They are not simply animals. Like the four hens, they are part of the family. These chickens lay eggs every morning.

With the children in the house, there is constant life with friends coming in and out, laughing, talking loudly and sleeping over. Recently, she posted a clip on Facebook of how she wakes up her late-sleeping daughter with the vacuum cleaner rattling under her bed.

“I move furniture around all the time. On weekends I do all the housework, polish everything, dust, and stay physically busy. I don't have to go to the gym, housework keeps me fit," she says.

Many days she gets up at 4am to work because she enjoys it. She can work at any time of the day or night. “Don't be a slave to time," she says.

***

When Marianne returned from Antwerp to Cape Town, there were major political upheavals in South Africa. The doyenne of magazines, Jane Raphaely, in her Femina title wanted to publish more articles on hard news events and politics.

It was the early 1990s and excitement was in the air. The land was full of promise.

She invited Marianne for an interview. “You know I'm stubborn and I roll my own tampons," she told Jane. The editor laughed. She got the job as a features writer.

Although I had known Marianne since the early 1980s, this was the first time we had worked together for the same company,  then Associated Magazines. At the time, Jane published numerous titles.

It was the time of big money in the business, advertising was rolling in, all stories were possible. There was enough time to do in-depth investigative journalism.

When you interviewed someone, you spent a whole day with them. A lot of research went into each article.

Journalists were flown around chasing stories. Every night Jane took home a pack of magazines such as The New Yorker, Time and Vanity Fair and the next morning there was a photocopy of an article on your desk – a proposal or idea for a new feature.

The best photographers were hired, stylists, page layout artists and sub-editors. We thrived in this milieu for years, but after some time we got ants in the pants and went full-time freelance.

There were more than enough publications to enable us to write on a wide variety of topics. Because we worked on our own, we talked on the phone every day, when people still called each other. Look at the scene today: millennials get offended when you call.

***

It was at this time that Marianne decided to tackle her first non-fiction book. She had no idea if it was going to work but she took the plunge into the abyss.

Alison Botha was kidnapped by Frans du Toit and Theuns Kruger, raped and left for dead in the woods in Port Elizabeth. They cut Alison's throat and nearly beheaded her. The men stabbed her so many times that the number of wounds could not be counted, and her internal organs were falling out of her torso.

She was able to run to a road by holding her intestines and was assisted by a motorist. After an intense recovery process and many operations, Marianne started talking to her about a book.

I Have Life: Alison's Journey was born, and it was an overnight success; both were completely blown away by it.

Thousands of copies have been sold and the book has been translated into German as Trotzdem weiterleben: Eine junge Frau bewältigt die schlimmste Erfahrung ihres Lebens (Still Living: A young woman copes with the worst experience of her life). More books followed and Marianne also wrote about Callie and Monique Strydom who were held hostage for four months in the Philippines. (See Vrye Weekblad's interview with Monique here).

Her autobiography, Hitler, Verwoerd, Mandela and Me, was translated into Dutch as De ondraaglijke blankheid van het bestaan: Een bewogen leven in het land van Mandela (The unbearable whiteness of existence: An eventful life in Mandela's country). Books about the singer PJ Powers and the crime fighter Paul O'Sullivan followed, and in between she wrote freelance articles that clicked. Her columns in Fairlady have been published as a collection.

***

Still there was time for other activities. She started to do stand-up comedy at restaurants and theatres. It was something new and a nice challenge.

One evening we decided to attend Afrikaans singer Bles Bridges' memorial service in Parow. We first had hamburgers at the Spur, which had tables covered with candles. They played his song Ruiter van die windjie (Rider of the Wind).

One of his red suits was auctioned and if I remember correctly, his wife, Leonie, told me his last words to her after his bakkie had rolled were: “Ag no, mamma."

On another occasion we were invited to a party at the artist Beezy Bailey's mansion on the slopes of Table Mountain. David Bowie and his wife Iman would be there.

Great excitement prevailed and we dressed ourselves in our best clothes for the occasion. When we got there late that night, Bowie and Iman had already returned to their hotel. Total abstainers and vegetarians who had gone to bed early.

One night we almost died on the old De Waal Drive (Philip Kgosana Drive) when we were on our way to Observatory for a Mother City Queer Project party.

We were going round a corner when suddenly lights shone in our faces as another car headed straight for us. 

We would have been in such a horrible collision if Marianne had not swerved to the left with seconds to spare. There was silence in the car when we realised what had transpired.

Then there was the young man she introduced us to as someone who could sing so well. He was very shy, though, and if invited for dinner he would start singing where he was sitting but his conversation was a trickle.

We were all amazed by his voice and Marianne arranged for him to perform and sing at an alternative type of late-night theatre. It was the Coffee Lounge in Cape Town city centre.

He was excellent, a completely different person on stage. His career took off. His name was Marc Lottering.

***

In between there were other projects, but when Brkic asked her to become assistant editor of his new website, she accepted.

It suits her because she can work from home and tackle a wide variety of articles. Some of her revelations were so shocking that she began to be followed by unknown people. Her home was broken into and her computer was stolen.

She has already told her children: “If I ask you to get out of the car, you get out. No time for lunch boxes on the floor, no questions, just get out."

Her latest project, Round of Applause, is in the genre of performance journalism. It is presented in Afrikaans or English, depending on where she performs.

The idea arose after a few talks with the public and the realisation that some people do not know much about the constitution or about the finer details of politics.

“Many people do not know how the nuclear deal was stopped or what the community at Xolobeni achieved by taking the Australian mining company to court. They also knew little about the amounts involved in state capture," she explains.

It is indeed an informative show where she steps on stage and makes you feel like you are at home with her. She informally analyses the news quite calmly. The show grows organically as daily events unfold.

“I can combine everything I've learned and form a narrative." It's also funny; Marianne's experience as a stand-up comedian and her sense of humour come to the fore between the more serious topics.

She tells Charles Leonard in an interview with the Mail & Guardian: “The similarities are that both theatre and journalism are about stories. They both depend on an engaged, paying audience. They both try to offer insight, sometimes exclusively."

Finally, arguing with Marianne is like trying to grab the tentacles of an octopus: they are everywhere. Topics change by the minute. Either she makes you laugh or your mouth falls open.

Behind her strong personality is someone who cares deeply for people and animals, and who hates injustice. Her sense of humour keeps her on track.

Like when I ask her the cliché question: what is her key to success? “Marijuana and being gay."

The she threw her head back and laughed – at herself and the world.

• Marianne Thamm's performances of Round of Applause will be at: Cape St Francis, September 8; St Francis Brewery, Sedgefield, September 9; Studio 42, Die Koelkamers, Paternoster, September 20; Aardklop in Potchefstroom, September 23-27: Woordfees in Stellenbosch, October 2-4; Montecasino, Johannesburg, November 14-24. She also presents it in Afrikaans as: Vuisvoos, maar nog regop: Suid-Afrika 2024.

♦ VWB ♦

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