The Mzungu Diaries

This piece of autobiographical fiction is my attempt to look white settler mentality in the eye.

South Africa 1979

We came from the cracks in between worlds. Bawling and hollering, we rose from the smell of Lexington cigarettes and diesel, from Dettol baths and Sunlight soap, from ink and petrol. Secrets told in white bungalows swaddled us. Sweet bougainvillea shielded us from the burning sun. Broad verandas shaded us from the truth of things. We grew up barefoot and carefree. We always checked our shoes for scorpions.

Female infant. Seven pounds, six ounces. Mother’s race: white. Father’s race: white. National District Hospital, Bloemfontein, 25 June 1979.

Healthy baby girl. Mother and child well -Gesonde baba meisie. Moeder en kind gesond.

A thirst for gold begat us. A taste for spice birthed us. An ache for power called us forth. We came from hunger for diamonds. We rose from the smoke of a century-long-cigarette, smoked after conquest. We are the sediment in a tincture of bondage. We live in the clouds— dwelling in citadels made from black bodies. We sit on the stoep eating oranges in the sun.

Our legs are burned by skipping ropes and ozone holes. See how we march, single file, girls and boys, a Godly congregation, a plethora of contradictions marching forwards into sandstone schoolrooms.

Write after me- Thou shalt not kill. Jy mag nie moord pleeg nie.

Ignorant by design, of past and present crimes, we exchange bubble gum and handwritten notes with school friends. We believe we are the future. The idea of a rainbow nation appeals to us, in theory.

We’ve never seen the Thames, or the Loire, or the Seine, or the Rhône, or the Rhein or the Tiber. Instead, we floated down the Nile, down the Tana, down the Zambeizi, down the Limpopo, down the Tugela, down the Orange River, down the Mohokare- buoyed and bobbing on sanguine rivulets, down racing rapids and thundering waterfalls. We tumbled over Mosi-Oa-Tunya to wash up uninvited. Borne to these shores on torrents of blood, we tumbled into chasms, ran down tributaries, permeating red soil, monopolising dust. We built cities from black bodies, we dug mines with black bodies. We didn’t question our methods.

Child, female, age 24 months. Progressing as expected. Linguistic and motor skills as expected.

Arriving in paper boats made from good passports, we present British High Commission letterheads, Alliance Francaise certificates, Dutch family trees, and embossed permits. We are thoroughly certified and qualified by our own standards. We have contracts written in indelible ink on our souls. We carry the marks of empires– blood that we can’t wash from our fingers, no matter how hard we scrub. Wishes and good intentions can’t remove the stains.

Where do we come from? We unfolded from the efficiency of German engineering and violence, from French cuisine and whippings, from Italian shoes and shackles, from Portuguese trade and beatings, from Dutch architecture and vanity, from Belgian chocolates and entitlement, from Spanish curiosity and threats, from English roses and torture. Our blood is a cocktail of unreasonable demands.

England, Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Holland and France are distant memories. We’re wrapped in the dust of South Africa, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and so many more. We came from the yawning gap. We are the adopted children of a plundered mother— the ignorant seed of an abusive father. We are the offspring of acrimonious divorce. See how we dance, ring-a-ring-roses, a pocket full of posies, a-tissue, a-tissue we all fall down.

We remember our forefathers and foremothers with statues. They came, they saw, they conquered. We came, we saw, we plundered. We are not so different— a fact we will, of course, deny when pressed. Our teachers take us on school trips to monuments that celebrate battles and betrayals. “This is where our people were chosen by God” we are told again, and again until it sounds true.

Child, female, age 8. Good reading comprehension, occasionally inattentive in class.

Our parents and grandparents hailed from “somewhere civilised”, or so we are told. When we question them about rivers of blood and cities made from black bodies, they say “We should move on from the past”. “Always keep moving forwards”. So we keep moving forwards like our mothers and fathers do— building something. They build factories and workshops, producing skin lightening creams and fine jewellery. They go to work in offices where diamond profits are discussed. They move forwards past outstretched hands. No need to dwell on the past. We like to have our cake and eat it, no matter what the ingredients are.

We rarely leave. Although we have no memory of arriving. We arrive waving from car windows like The Queen of England. Waving, smiling, throwing sweets and coins from the windows. We arrive asking for Coca-Cola, Fanta, Stoney. Small children run alongside our fathers’ dusty petrol guzzling bakkies. Smile for the camera! We arrive greedily filling our months with sweets. We arrive pale as boiled poultry, red as boiled lobster. Some of us are browned by the sun, some of us are browned by Mediterranean ancestry, some of us are browned to the correct degree but no more, and some of us are browned by circumstances that are not discussed in public. Some of us have a dark princess somewhere in the ancestry of our imaginations.

We travel from faraway town to faraway town, gliding on a heat-haze-highway. Cities of white diamonds shimmer into the distance, at the end roads as long as time, built on foundations of black bodies. Black men are devoured by deep mines, filling deep pockets. Black women are devoured in their absence, gold and diamond widows, filling the gaps, working hard, babies on their backs. We rarely admit our part in the scheme of things.

We plunder this land to collect stories, to collect memories, to collect meaning. Climbing to the top of mountains, we pause for a moment to take in a view we do not understand. We climb back down again empty handed.

Sitting in the shade of a thorn tree, we wait while our fathers walk to the nearest town for help. The car won’t start, which is expected. “Get back in the car if you hear a hyena.” Help is generously supplied by a farmer with a blonde beard and Dutch features wearing tiny khaki shorts. He wouldn’t have stopped if we’d been the wrong colour. But we smile, oh how we smile, even though we know. We let him pinch our cheeks, even though we know. We say nothing when he lifts us, a little too slowly, a little too firmly, onto the back of his truck, a hand lingering a little too long on our thighs. How we smile! We love to be rescued.

Flip flops by the swimming pool. Lying prone on the hot tiles, watching the poolwater evaporate in seconds. We learn to swim in azure water meticulously cleaned by a black man with a big smile and a blue overalls. We like the way he teases us, chases us around the garden, the way he carries us on his broad shoulders, so that we can reach the plumpest mulberries. Singing “here we go round the mulberry bush on a cold and frosty morning”. We inhale the sweet, clean, soapy smell of him and say “I love you, I will marry you one day”. He laughs because we are only 6 and he is 19 — a man, with his own cigarettes, gum boots and a shiny black bicycle. He rides away one day never to return. In our diaries we write “Joseph went away today”.

Respectable employment for strong men aged 18-35. 9 months, renewable at mine discretion. Men wishing to apply should present themselves to the district office, between 06:30 and 08:00, Monday to Friday. Bring pass book. Do not bring dependents.

Not knowing where we belong weighs heavy. Women pass us daily carrying firewood and a century of burdens we cannot see. We come from “everywhere and nowhere” we say when asked. Crouching barefoot on meticulously polished red floors, listening to the shuk-shuk-shuk of a hand-broom while we play with plastic ponies. We come from taking peppery snuff out of a nanny’s hand. She twinkles her eyes at us, makes a thumbs-up, and sprinkles the delicious black granules into the sinewy, hollow at the base of her thumb. Sniffing, snuffling, giggling and sneezing, we beg “Again, again!” until she playfully threatens to beat us with a broom if we don’t go out to play. She has ironing to finish for us. We don’t know where her children are. Clutching our hands to our bellies laughing, we run helter-skelter out into the sun, sneezing.

Tearing off shoes the second we’re out of school, we hop over the biting termites. We learn to skip. Red ochre earth between our toes, black dust on white feet, olive feet, tan feet. Our dirty feet announce themselves with every jump. Our feet are soiled by conquest, but our shins gleam. We polish our legs with petroleum jelly from the Kwena Products Factory. We sneak into the factory to steal a scoop of Vaseline. Village girls get beaten if they’re caught, but we don’t. Is that the difference between us?

In the clattering, bustling market where women deftly drop balls of dough into boiling oil, spinning the mixture in their hands, we wait in line, inhaling the heady cocktail of scents: paraffin and sugar, sweat and flour. We watch as oozing dough-balls fall, “ploup” sizzling into oil, forming perfect golden orbs. Waiting expectantly, hopping from one dusty foot to another, kicking the biting ants from our ankles. A woman with a baby on one bare breast expertly scoops up the sizzling dough-balls with a long dented spoon. In exchange for a fistful of coins, she hands us a plastic carrier bag full of hot doughy delights. We bite into them, burning our tongues in exquisite pain and pleasure, dripping oil down our fronts. We drip oil onto the newspaper sheets at our feet. Our dirt-caked feet tread on foreign newspapers showing Eifel towers and faraway cities, places we have never seen with our own eyes.

We’ve never seen Buckingham Palace or London Zoo. We’ve never seen Flamenco dancers or bull rings. We’ve never seen the Statue of Liberty. Whose liberty? These wonders live in books, magazines and newspapers. They are as mythical as unicorns. Magazines can be bought by the kilogram in the market. On glossy pages we see snow-white girls sitting on pink satin beds wearing printed pyjamas, or pretty dresses. We look at them longingly, these snow white girls from another world. We look like them but we do not feel like them.

English cottages, German timbered houses, Italian castles did not make us. We came circuitously, through the back door, crawling through the gaps, winding through the cracks like water. We came through the orchard of wizened apricot trees, through the maid’s quarters. “Where is she anyway?” our mothers ask. “That lazy girl! She’s never there when you need her!” We know she’s on top of the water tower, kissing our brothers, who said they would push her down if she didn’t. We know that her baby brother, the sick looking one, is actually her son. We know that nobody is supposed to talk about that. And come to think of it, have you noticed that he looks like us sometimes when he smiles. On the rare occasion that he smiles. Have you noticed?

Infant, age approximately 24 months, date of birth, unknown. Father, unknown. HIV positive.

Clip-clopping across marble foyers in tight shoes, our feet are unaccustomed to the violence of patent leather and buckles. In the doctor’s waiting room a framed print of a gigantic blonde Jesus knocking on a skyscraper confronts us. We await vaccinations while Jesus knocks. Hot, bored, fidgety and ungrateful, we wait. We are pricked and prodded into privileged health. Sickly worming medicine assaults our senses. We swallow concoctions that taste like artificial strawberries and bananas, we wince. Our attitude is ungrateful, our parents tell us. “The children around here don’t have half your opportunities. You should be damn well grateful for these jabs!” We come from ingratitude. We cannot be vaccinated against the error of our ways.

Child female, age 13. No concerns noted. Vaccinations up to date.

Apple-red library floors— “Shush, why are you so loud?” Entering cool buildings with columns and staircases. We read Shakespear, we read Jane Austen. We know how to do a demi plié and recite a verse in French. We can carry a sack of maize meal on our heads too, but that is not what we are being educated for. It’s all about balance and poise. Our French ballet teacher walks down the line telling us that our bottoms are “enormous and insupportable”. Standing in bras-bas at the barre we feel the weight of shame.

Female, age 14, ballet grade 5. Standard Not Attained.

When our African aunties, who are really the senior staff members in our parents’ businesses, meet us in the street, they pinch our arms. They say, brimming with pleasure “Eh, you are getting so fat! Beautiful fat girls!” And we brim with pleasure too— outwardly. Beaming back at their radiant faces, we look down bashfully to show respect. We understand these compliments. We know the etiquette of looking away. We are well versed in looking away, in not seeing.

Back home we decline a second helping of steaming hot mealie porridge. We look in the mirror, we stand on the scale, we look in the mirror again, we stand on the scale once more. We deny ourselves the pleasure of dessert. Our bodies are pulled in two incompatible directions. We have never been thin enough or fat enough to satisfy the adults in our lives. Their hunger for bodies is too powerful for us.

Rx: Tenuate Dospan 75mg. One tablet daily. Avoid overeating. Stick to the diet. Vermy ooreet. Bly by die dieet.

Deposited on the back of Toyota pick-up trucks, we are huddled in blankets, bumping over dirt roads, our hair flying in the dust, whipping our faces, whizzing past fields of corn, whispering, whispering. Whispering like a coven of witches, we ask “Have you seen Fatima’s brother? Have you seen Thato’s brother? Have you seen Naledi’s brother? Have you seen his skin? Have you seen his teeth? Have you seen his eyes?” We shudder with presumptuous collective pleasure, imagining dark boys holding us tight.

Male, age 17, excellent academic record. Should consider higher mathematics.

Years later, in his parents’ bathroom, we’re face to face with his skin, and his teeth, and his eyes. And his hands, as pink and promising as petals, are running over us, testing and bending us like willow. Testing one, two, three, all-a-flutter with butterflies, and waterfalls that thunder inside us. He flashes a smile, that beautiful boy, with eyes as bright as stolen diamonds, eyes that are centuries deep, eyes that say everything and nothing all at once. He whispers, hot in our ear, like a burning breeze, “Does that feel nice?” and we are speechless. We press ourselves onto him. We are two trees growing together under pressure. For a brief moment we feel belonging. In the half light of his parents’ bathroom we wash our mouths out together.

A year later we drink coffee together in bed, working on our assignments. We have understood the assignment together. We follow that boy to Zanzibar. We follow him to Durban. We follow him to Cairo. We follow him to London. We follow him to the end of the earth, to the end of the line.

Male, age 18 yrs, Residence application declined. Reason: insufficient documentation.

We follow him over bridges made from black bodies, into cities made from black bodies, through university gates made from black bodies. We follow him to classes on economics and engineering, just to look at those diamond eyes, which we will daydream about in our arts and philosophy classes. We follow him, but we are not the only ones. We follow him until they take him away under suspicion. Of what? We do not know. We follow him until they take him away in disgrace. But whose disgrace? We cannot tell. We follow him until they take him away in handcuffs. But who has the key? We cannot find it. We follow him to the end of the earth. Who loves him more than we do? Surely nobody. We follow him until they take him away in a plastic bag.

Male 19 yrs, date of death 06/07/98, time of death 23:45. Cause of death unknown.

We weep rivers for that boy, we weep oceans. We cry seas of tears that carry us back to where we began. Back to where we ended up— uninvited. We extract the precious ore of dreadful epiphanies. We collect character building experiences like rare butterflies. We plunder our grief for teachable moments and write books about it. We share the hard lessons in exchange for a small subscription fee. Over a glass of wine and a joint we ask “But who is writing the laws?”

Once more we are called upon to arrive. We arrive in paper boats. We arrive with our papers in order. We arrive with good passports. We cross bridges made from black bodies. We trickle into every available space. We are borne to these shores on torrents of blood.

We arrive, we arrive, we arrive.

About the author:

Ali Mapletoft is an artist, creative director, filmmaker and writer. She is founder of Creative Oxygen, a consultancy that supports leaders to bring creativity back into healthcare and technology.

A Note:

I grew up in a political enclave in the mountain kingdom of Lesotho during the last decades of South African apartheid. This small, landlocked country sits entirely surrounded by South Africa, its lowest point higher than almost anywhere else on the continent, earning it the name “The Kingdom in the Sky.”

Lesotho is home to the Basotho, resourceful and resilient descendants of Moshoeshoe I, who defended their nation against both Zulu expansion and Boer aggression by negotiating a bitter-sweet alliance with Britain. The country became a British Protectorate in 1868, trading one set of terms for another.

Surrounded by political exiles and anti-apartheid activists who were unwelcome in South Africa, my childhood in Lesotho was multicultural and idyllic in many ways. But one year at school in apartheid South Africa at age seven made a deep impression on me. Typecast as a traitor because I came from a “black country” despite my white skin, my only two friends were an Eastern European Jewish girl and an elderly kitchen worker who, although she “passed” for white, looked mixed race. We never spoke about that — even as a seven year old I understood that it was not a safe conversation.

The first person plural "we" is historically used to express stories of the oppressed. In this piece it is used in a deliberate act of plunder and collective complicity. The faux-naive "we" is one more theft.

The word mzungu is understood across much of Southern, East and Central Africa to mean “white person”, or simply: foreigner. Originating from the Swahili word kuzunguka, it translates as “to go around in circles.”

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It began last summer— a tainted season of existential fuckery, when my gnawing sense of underachievement and spiritual malaise calcified into a failed attempt to be mindful. Specifically, to start the day with “a practice”. The mindfulness scene wasn’t for me— I started gardening. I fucking hate gardening.

There was no way I could have understood the malevolent forces I was exposing myself to, not least the sheer, merciless cunning of flowers.

Exploding like a firework from the top of three converging bamboo canes is a morning glory plant I grew from seed. Defying its assigned territory, a large ceramic pot, the plant thrusts out possessive vines, cannibalising the ornamental olive tree.

Most mornings, I drink my coffee in a triangle of sunlight beside the morning glory plant. Here, I pretend to admire the dawn offering of trumpet-like purple flowers. Sometimes I read books like “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle as a nod to my mindfulness pledge. At first, I try to make peace with the present through Eckhart Tolle, but it doesn’t work. I can’t wait to finish the book. All I can think about while reading “The Power of Now” is the future, when I will have finished it.

My true purpose each morning is to pinch off the shriveled morning glory flowers that withered and died in the night. I didn’t know about the plant’s twenty-four-hour flower turnaround when I planted it. For some reason, yesterday’s dead flowers always feel more urgent than today’s fresh trumpeting glories. If I don’t nip them in the bud, seeds will start to develop, slowing down the production of new flowers in the future.

I would hate to be stuck in a lift with Eckhart Tolle banging on about the power of now. It would make me even more impatient to be in the future than his book. I’d be polite, of course, but inside I’d be cursing Eckhart Tolle and the cunting now. In many ways, tending to yesterday’s flowers is my way of keeping the present at bay. Every time I nip a whithered flower, I notice how little I appreciated it yesterday. It’s a loop where I only ever see the morning glory through the lens of the past. The plant is a clock marking yesterday, and warning me of tomorrow. The present doesn’t seem to exist at all when I’m doing this.

“Oh, how pretty!” my friend interrupts in the middle of a chat about existential dread. The morning glory flowers nod and simper deceptively in the breeze. Our conversation will inevitably end in a flaccid call to arms where we’ll both agree to step into our truth and power, without intending to do anything of the sort. She gazes at the flowers over her americano, unaware of their malignant intent. If only she knew! If only she understood how this rancorous botanical tyrant controls me! I want to say, “Don’t let it hoodwink you with the whole pretty flowers facade”, but people won’t be told.

The plant will inevitably devour the cast-iron bench I sit on. It has an ardent desire for ownership— it aspires to total dominance, sending out special surveillance tendrils, seeking, investigating, groping for purchase, monitoring the perimeter. When it finds a twig, it lays claim, gathering intelligence as much as expanding territory.

I can tell this plant is exchanging messages with a higher power. One of the vines is particularly unnerving. Tightly coiled around a thin olive branch with the urgency of an old-fashioned telephone wire; impossible to uncoil, its grip is brim-full of malevolent purpose. The plant appears to be making an urgent telephone call: an SOS, a coded message, a fucking warning! Each morning, it sounds the alarm with more purple flowers. Their design is no coincidence— gaping like they might bite your fingers. Open, listening, waiting, transmitting, decoding, plotting. It’s safer to deal with yesterday’s dead flowers.

As the summer turns to autumn, bulbous seedpods lurk under heart-shaped leaves, diligently protected by spiders. By October, the seeds resemble pregnant bellies. I harvest them, I’m painfully aware that they represent the bittersweet duality of failure and success. My failure to nip every dead flower in the bud, and the plant’s preordained success in the game of survival. People imbue flowers with benevolent anthropomorphism— not me. I’ve been domesticated.

Even as the plant withers and appears to die, I know this is an illusion. Its consciousness lives on in the small ceramic bowl of seeds on my kitchen countertop. It hollers and complains about the damp until I nestle a few little silica gel sachets amongst the dark pits, blacker than black, as hard as pebbles, absorbing light and matter. Emboldened, the seeds begin to formulate a strategy.

It’s not until the following summer that I’m given new instructions by the plant’s descendant— dutifully grown from seed, watered, nurtured, and feared by me. Make no mistake, this is the same hostile entity, a continuum infused with every essential code and intent. A few weeks of nipping-in-the-bud pass before my commands arrive, but I can feel them brewing like a storm, approaching around the coiled network of green wires. I hear the plant crying in the night — “Oh, the things I would do if I had thumbs!” It births new flowers at dawn. A baby giving birth to babies. I’m struck by the brutal loneliness of it all.

One morning, the decree comes, decoded, translated, and transmitted up through the earth and out of a gaping purple mouthpiece. “Write!” It croaks like a threat.

I dare to lean in. It comes again, louder, more urgent. “Write!”

That night, I dream the entire house has been overtaken by the morning glory —green vines pour out of the plug-sockets in the hall, flowers gape, leafy choke-holds suffocate the furniture. My bed, the kettle, and the toilet have been consumed. The children are gone. All that remains is a green cave, gagged with overhanging leaves and whispering purple flowers.

I jolt awake in a cold sweat. I must write. It feels like a curse. I must write.

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Most days were blue skies and bare feet.

I grew up in a multicultural enclave in the mountain kingdom of Lesotho during the last years of South African apartheid. This tiny, landlocked island known as “The Kingdom in the Sky” sits in the clouds at over 4,593 feet, completely surrounded by South Africa. Lesotho is home to resourceful and creative people: the Basotho.

An awe-inspiring land of rich blue, snow-capped mountains, gigantic waterfalls, and impossibly big skies, it was also a political safe-haven during the oppressive apartheid regime in neighbouring South Africa. During my childhood, in the 1980s and 90s, this tiny country sat like an island in shark-infested waters, attracting political exiles, freedom fighters, banned authors, journalists, photographers, filmmakers, communists, and artists. My school friends were the children of shopkeepers, school teachers, and farmers. But they were also the children of ANC activists, revolutionaries, diplomats, spies, princes, and exiled political leaders.

This was a country where, on the one hand, we grew up barefoot and carefree, riding horses in the mountains, and on the other hand, we checked under the car for bombs every morning before setting off for school. We’d scan the garage for bombs in the same casual, habitual way that we checked inside our shoes for scorpions. This was a world where we slept with the windows open at night, and in the morning, we consoled our classmates over the assassination of their freedom fighter father. It was a world of elaborately painted mud huts and municipal sandstone buildings, of rousing political songs and soul-stirring choral chants, of warlike revolutionary paintings and quiet watercolour landscapes, of street art made from wire and proud ancient paintings hidden in caves. Our world was one of perpetual contradiction, of the certainty of uncertainty.

It was against this backdrop that I learned two things: Thing one. Everyone is creative. Thing two. Creativity is so powerful that some people would rather you didn’t use it too much.

A hot, still day.

The whitewashed walls of the circular workshop buildings gleam against a backdrop of rust and ochre scrubland. The old water tower, suspended on spindly metal legs, creaks like an empty stomach in the heat haze. The Maluti mountains glower in the distance— purple crags telling tales of dragons and lost Elfin kingdoms. Tolkien was born just a few miles from here. Not that you’d guess, looking at the parched land; young shepherds crouched in the shade of a sparse thorny tree, pitted, dusty road shimmering into the liquid distance.

The mountains have a severe look about them— theatrical. The Gods have ordained that the earth should meet the sky somewhere in the proscenium arch of blue and purple, but this shape-shifting horizon will leave you unsure. “Where does rock end and the atmosphere begin?” you ask— unanswered. When you tire of trying to squint into the distance, you notice that the fathomless sky boasts triumphant streaks— white cirrus whitewashed carelessly onto a high, blue vaulted ceiling.

Barefoot and content, I’m five or six, crouching, making clay animals on the dusty ground outside the pottery— a traditional skill I’m already working to perfect. The cool clay dies quickly in the heat of the sun. I carefully wet and scratch the legs of a ram to make them stick, before smoothing the joins away just like I’ve seen the artisan craftsmen do in the pottery.

I’m so engrossed in my work that I don’t notice the dapper young policeman leaning his bicycle up against the whitewashed wall of the workshop. I don’t see or hear him until he emits a low whistle in my direction. I eye his crisp uniform warily. Perhaps if I attach little pointed clay horns to my ram, the policeman we see that I’m busy and leave me alone. But he turns, pivoting on one foot, setting the other down, straight-legged like a soldier about to begin a military parade. He spits once on the ground, holds my uncertain gaze. We seem suspended there, the policeman and I, floating— as if one of us might suddenly fall into the sky by some accident of reverse gravity. And then he speaks, unequivocally, unmistakably to me.

“Little girl, what are you playing with? You should do some real work, or I’ll take you to prison!”

He laughs heartily at his own joke and cycles away whistling merrily. I’m suddenly ashamed and afraid. I hide under the gallery shop stairs for what seems like hours, just in case the policeman comes back to arrest me. For the first time, I’m carrying a potent and troubling idea: Some work is real work, and some work is not real. This lie grows multiple arms over the years, each wrapping itself around some delicate part of my inexperienced being, grotesquely metamorphosing into a terrifying Kraken of beliefs. A gurgling monster chants under its ragged breath, “Only the chosen few will ever succeed. Only the chosen few will create.”

Ways to Work With Me.

I work in three distinct ways, and they suit three very different people.

The Bold Work. 1:1 mentoring for established creatives who are ready to do their most uncompromising work yet. Book A Call

Creative Direction. For founders and practitioners who’ve outgrown their brand and need a creative photographic identity that meets them where they’re headed. See More.

Creative Oxygen™. For healthcare and tech organisations ready to treat creativity as the infrastructure it actually is. Learn More.

When I’m rich and accomplished, I’ll say things like “Money doesn’t matter, your energy does.”

When I finally have a sculpted gym body, I’ll flex my bicep as if by accident, and I’ll say “Every body is beautiful."

When I’m famous, I’ll drive around in my fast car with the top down, and I’ll say “I miss being unknown”.

When I finally have the perfect artist’s studio, I’ll paint the finishing touches on my masterpiece while wearing a chiffon robe. I’ll livestream it.

I’ll go to parties and sashay around telling people, “None of this is real. We’re all energy. Everything is an illusion”.

When my friends ask me how I did it, I’ll say, “The universe delivered as soon as I let go of the outcome.”

But until further notice, I’ll keep showing up.

I’ll wake up early to get my kids ready for school- even when I don’t want to.

I’ll write average poems, and hope that someone says “Yeah, me too”.

I’ll paint pictures that a few generous friends admire.

I’ll write film treatments that end up in the bin.

And then I’ll do it again.

And again.

And some more.

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