Maverick: Extraordinary Women from South Africa's Past [Paperback]

Rendered stylishly in her unaffected tone...Beukes waft(s) life
into a motley crew of wildcats.

Maverick is bright and nervy. It conveys the charisma and
determination of its subjects.

Eclectic and inspiring.

This is a title about raconteurs and renegades, writers, poets, provocateurs and pop stars, artists and activists and a cross-dressing doctor. From Africa's first black movie star and Drum covergirl, Dolly Rathebe to Glenda Kemp, the snake-dancing stripper who shook up the verkrampte social mores of the 70s, these are the riveting true tales of women who broke with convention and damn the consequences. Spanning over 350 years of history, Maverick explores the compelling lives of some of South Africa's most famous - and notorious - women, including Brenda Fassie, Daisy de Melker, Sara Bartmann, Ingrid Jonker, Helen Joseph, Nongqawuse and Bessie Head. But it also delves into lesser known stories of the likes of reluctant Boer commando Sarah Raal, the ill-fated khoekhoe interpreter Krotoa-Eva, Black Sophie, the brothel queen of Bree Street and Elizabeth Klarer who gave birth to an alien love child in 1958.

Maverick was nominated for the Sunday Times 2006 Alan Paton
Non-Fiction Award.

Lauren Beukes used to be a freelance journalist, which gave her
the best possible excuse to meet interesting people and indulge in absurd
activities.

On assignment for the likes of The Sunday Times, The Hollywood Reporter,
Nature Medicine, Colors, Marie Claire, and Dazed & Confused, among other
magazines she regularly contributed to, she's picked up really useful life
skills like pole dancing and brewing traditional sorghum beer.

For the sake of a story, she's jumped out of planes and into shark-infested
waters and got to hang out with AIDS activists and township vigilantes,
Botswanan high court judges, electricity thieves in denial, homeless sex
workers, racist nudists, reluctant base jumpers and teen vampires among
other interesting folk.

She's since forsaken journalism to work as the head scriptwriter on URBO:
The Adventures of Pax Afrika, an epic animated show for kids now going into
a second season. South Africa's Mail & Guardian called URBO "engaging and
delightfully subversive", heady words of praise she claims she's going to
have tattooed on her chest - or, alternately, a t-shirt.

Maverick is her first book, but she also writes fiction and has had short
stories published in various anthologies including African Road: New
Writing from Southern Africa, 180 Degrees and Urban 03.

She recently completed her first novel and graduated with her MA in
Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town, where she occasionally
has a walk-in part as guest lecturer.

She lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa with her husband and
assorted furkids.

The Snake Charmer - Glenda Kemp

In 1973, at the height of South Africa's verkrampte (uptight) sexual
repression, the little village of Volksrust, on the edge of KwaZulu-Natal,
was afizz with the news that the notorious Glenda Kemp would be performing.
She had already inflamed the moral outrage - and desire - of white South
Africa with her gyrating limber hips and the python she coiled around them,
but no-one could have been prepared for this show. When the lissom and
mischievous showgirl got wind of the uproar, the emergency prayer meetings
and the cops lying in wait to arrest her if she showed even a hint of dusky
nipple, she rose to the challenge by getting down on her knees and praying
to God for inspiration.

That evening, despite the pastor's seething warnings to his congregation to
stay away from that `dark hole of evil', the Olde Barn nightclub was packed
with a thrall of people, including church elders, prominent townsfolk,
wives primped and preened for the occasion, two magistrates and several
cops.

The lights dimmed, a hush fell on the room and to the rhythmic tattoo of
African drums, the woman they had all been waiting for shimmied into the
spotlight - as they'd never seen her before. Gasps rippled through the
assembled crowd.

Glenda's shows had a reputation for being quirkily creative. Unlike the
lithe young things twisting themselves around a pole in strip clubs today,
Glenda didn't just take her clothes off. She had audiences coming back week
after week not because they wanted to see her naked (she only stripped
completely in the independent countries of Lesotho and Swaziland) but to
see what daring and imaginative thing she would to do next.

Among other themes, she'd re-envisioned fairy tales for her shows, but in
her version of Beauty and the Beast she was carried off by a gorilla, while
in her bastardised Nutcracker, she took on the role of a mannequin come to
life, oiling her limbs, surrounded by her immobile fibreglass sisters.
There was her legendary strobe dance, where she'd strike a pose between
flashes of light, her Little Devil puppet who caused one policeman blushing
embarrassment when he was forced to testify that he'd found her topless and
`busy with it' during a performance and, of course, her most famous
co-star, Oupa, the snake. But this took it too far as she skirted
dangerously close to a contravention of the Immorality Act, laying bare
poor repressed white South Africa's darkest taboo.

When Glenda stepped onto stage that night, she was wearing the bare minimum
required to avoid arrest - a cuff of springbok fur folded around her ankle,
a matching g-string and homemade nipple caps, but she was also slathered
head-to-toe in black body paint and wearing a tightly coiled Afro wig. When
the audience caught their collective breath, one man, beside himself, burst
out, `God, dis 'n meid!' (God, it's a maid!)

`They wanted to be shocked, so I gave them what they wanted,' Glenda says
with one of her signature dulcet giggles, sitting in the threadbare lounge
of her modest Durban home overlooking the ocean. Now 57, with a practical
pixie-cut that long ago replaced the flowing locks she flung around with
such abandon, it's still possible to see in her features the incandescent
young woman who electrified a nation Her alter-ego, the demure teacher, is
now all that remains.

It's taken the schoolteacher-turned-stripper-
turned-schoolteacher (and now devout Christian) some 30 years to shake off
the last vestiges of her scandalous reputation, which even after she gave
up the gig, snagged around her ankles like one of her casually dropped
g-strings. It still occasionally trips her up.