Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - September 11, 2005

"'He looked for a miracle solution - one that would change his situation overnight. But no such solution exists'"

IT IS safe to say that Fana Khaba was fantastically promiscuous. He himself was entirely open, not to say boastful, about his exuberant sex life. When I had lunch with him six months before he died, he told me he had frequently had three women queuing up outside his bedroom door to have sex with him.

There was an unashamed, if slightly unhinged, tone to his other boast to me: "I drive around Soweto and look at all these women with their HIV-positive children and think: they're all mine. Mine and God's."

His official partners seemed to have accepted that they were not the only women in his life. Nonosi Mphela, for instance, said that while she was going out with him: "He had a lot of girls everywhere. He was mad about girls." Sleeping with the same women was part of his bonding mechanism with his close friends. Said Satch, a friend: "There is one woman who was chowed by Khabzela. Now she is being chowed by Kumza."

When Khaba became a celebrity, the temptations - and the pressures on him to perform - snowballed. Satch claimed there were sometimes five girls a night. "These kids would say, like: 'I don't want to be loved by Khabzela. I just want him to f*** me.' And when that thing happened, it's like a trend ... So, like all the places he went to, they used to talk about that. And the others, they would want to have a taste of that too."

The erotic appeal of the celebrity is not peculiar to South Africa. All over the world groupies line up to have sex with rock stars, footballers, chat-show hosts - whoever fills the celebrity slot in that particular culture.

The problem is that the local variation has worse consequences than accidental pregnancies or sexually transmitted diseases that can be cured with a shot of penicillin. Khaba accumulated both during his sexual marathons. He had at least five children by five different women - none of them by his fianc e, Sibongile Radebe - and he suffered regularly from sexually transmitted infections.

At some point, he also acquired HIV - and passed it on. He passed it on to Radebe and to at least one of the mothers of his children. Mpho Mhlongo told me about her. "One child and one mother are sick," he said. "The child is two years and she looks very frail. You can tell she's sick."

Then there is the woman whose furious missive on the YFM website struck a jarring note amongthe outpouring of love and grief: "I waz one of his girlfriends! Damn on me 4 cheating on my boyfriend; now I am also dying."

But I thought Khabzela's notion of masculinity might also have been a fault line. Who were his role models? His father, Petros Khaba, was a troubled soul, to say the least. His brief, turbulent presence in Khaba's life must have left a deep impression - but so would his much longer absence.

Greg Maloka, the general manager at YFM, said: "He was very angry with his father. He missed him and he wanted to prove to him that he could make something of his life. He always had a need for a father."

The substitute male role models provided by his mother would have been the elders in the Jehovah's Witness church. They would have represented the extreme end of the moral spectrum: chaste, non-drinking, imbued with religious certainty. At the Jehovah's Witness meeting I attended in Chiawelo, one of the erect, dark-suited elders read out the following chapter from Corinthians 5:11: "Do you not know that unrighteous persons will not inherit God's kingdom? Neither fornicators nor idolators, nor adulterers, nor greedy persons, nor drunkards will inherit God's Kingdom. Every other sin that a man may commit is outside his body but he that practises fornication is sinning against his own body."

In the end, Khaba's behaviour was profoundly self-destructive. Was he, at some level, inviting retribution? And, at the end, did shame and fear of divine disapproval exacerbate his anguish - and contribute to his erratic behaviour?

A warning in Watchtower (the Jehovah's Witness publication) might have played on his mind when he was dying and demented: "There are numerous Bible examples showing the world's view of greatness leads to ruin. Haman's craving for glory led to his humiliation and death. What about haughty Nebuchadnezzar, who was stricken with madness at the height of his power?"

Khaba had done his share of sinning. Not heavy-duty sinning like burglary, hijacking or murder. But when it came to a materialistic lifestyle and predatory sexuality, he was up there with the best of them. On air, he regularly boasted of his conquests. He referred to his penis as his "anaconda" and made regular reference to its activities, as in "my anaconda ate last night".

[Musician] Kenny Ndaba spoke scathingly of this culture. "They call them playboys. They show off with this girl and next week it's another one. It is to boost your ego. And the girls go with them because they have a flashy car. The girl wants to be seen in that car, to show her friends: 'Look, I'm driving in a BMW.' She doesn't try to find out if that guy has other girlfriends as long as she can brag to other girls.

"It is very competitive and it has got worse since 1994 because a lot of people can afford it. That's the reason we have such a big number of people with HIV."

As Ndaba pointed out, the cost of this lifestyle is high - and not only in terms of one's health. Sexual favours are often exchanged only in return for some material reward. A major drain on Khaba's income, according to his fianc e, was the money he spent on his girlfriends. "They expect you to be loaded. They want money, they want clothes," she said.

Fana's former teacher, a Mr Ndlovu believed there was a deeper, personal reason for Khabzela's promiscuity. He thought it was rooted in the sexual humiliation he endured as a teenager. "When we were growing up, he thought he was ugly. He felt rejected .." Ndlovu remembers a much younger Khaba who attended church services with his friends: "They would always tease the girls. But you could see they didn't know anything about girls. You would hear them saying: 'Hey, mina ngingakuthatha iviki lonke. (Hey, I can take you to my place for a whole week).' But when they left it would be without girls. They weren't taken seriously. I remember they would say: 'Ngashaya 18 rounds (I can take you for 18 rounds of lovemaking). And the girls would just reply: 'You are young boys. You don't know what you are talking about. You have not experienced it yet.'

Said Ndlovu: "When he got famous, he took it as payback time - payback to all those who teased him for the way he looked; for being a 'Watchtower'. On radio, he used to say: 'You may think I'm ugly but look at the girls I'm going round with. Look at the car I'm driving.'"

I sometimes wonder what Khabzela would have been like if he had lived to 40 or 50, the age when, if we're lucky, we slough off conditioning by parents and society and decide for ourselves who we truly are and truly want to be.

Khaba first began to feel ill early in 2003.

"It was in about February or March," recalled Radebe. "He started complaining that he was tired most of the time. There was a day when he came home and said: 'Sweetie, my legs are wonky.' And I didn't understand. I said, 'Ag, it's your Hansa.' Because he loved his Hansa. He drank it every day. We never thought HIV. We never thought HIV." Khaba himself thought he had been bewitched.

At YFM, it was becoming increasingly clear that he was in trouble. In March 2003, The Star newspaper carried a horrific story about a 15-year-old domestic worker who was allegedly forced by her employer to have sex with a dog. Khabzela immediately assumed that the employers were Afrikaans. He said on air: "Afrikaners, asseblief, kaffirs is nog mens, jy weet. Moenie dink want ek is swart en then ek is a vark. Ek is ook mens. (Afrikaners, please, kaffirs are also people, you know. Don't think that because I am black I am a pig. I am also a person.)"

As it turned out, the alleged perpetrators were not Afrikaans at all. They were Taiwanese. An Afrikaans man named Mr T Labuschagne heard the broadcast and filed a complaint of hate speech with the Broadcasting Complaints Commission of South Africa on the basis that Khabzela's words had caused him and other Afrikaners extreme distress.

Khabzela and Dirk Hartford [YFM CEO] immediately apologised to Labuschagne but YFM was found guilty of hate speech. On appeal, the verdict was reduced to one of unfair and untrue comment but Hartford and general manager Maloka were appalled by the association of hate speech with the station and Khabzela was warned that if it happened again, he would be taken off air.

Hartford said that, in retrospect, Khabzela's powers of reasoning had already been affected by the virus. Although Hartford and others at YFM suspected Aids, Khaba's reluctance to face up to it made it difficult to engage him directly.

Said Hartford: "If Fana had (continued to) refuse to come out publicly about his status, we would have had to accept it. But the minute he did, we had to deal with it. We gave him a day to tell his family. He called a family meeting. They gave him their blessing. He came back and recorded a message about his condition and we played it that day, over and over again." That was April 16 2003.

The response from the YFM listeners was instant and overwhelming. Thousands of emotional fans jammed phone lines and chat boards with messages of love and support. The following are just a small sample: "Hola Khabzela baba. We are all saddened by what has happened. You are a big asset to our nation. Wish all the high-profile peoples in our country can disclose their status like you." "having hiv doesn't make u less of a great person u are but disclosing it makes u even greater person!" "by revealing your status you have already beaten this virus. We are with you all the way brother."

Devastating as Khabzela's news was, there were few others in South Africa in as good a position from which to fight the virus. His family was right behind him, so were his fans. And so was YFM. Even though he was an independent contractor at the station and was not on a medical aid scheme, the station assured him it would continue to pay his salary and medical expenses and keep his slot open until he was well enough to come back to work.

It was at this point that Khabzela made a decision that transformed his life from one that was a huge and valiant success against the odds to one that was a tragedy. "In retrospect, we were na ve," said Hartford. "We thought he'd take his ARVs and be back at work in a few weeks. And then he'd become a fantastic icon for living positively with HIV."

The best course of action for Khaba - and the one Hartford assumed he would follow - would have been to remain quietly at home, eating healthily, resting, not drinking alcohol and avoiding stress. He would have had to swallow antiretroviral pills and endure the side effects which, for the first fortnight at least, are often unpleasant.

He did take ARVs - for a while. "It was in his mind that ARVs would kill him," said fianc e Radebe. "He took them for a week and then he started taking sangoma's medicine. I guess at some point he just got desperate and took whatever people said would cure him." Radebe herself was in shock. Not only did she have to deal with the news of her own positive status but also the revelation of the extent of her fianc 's womanising. "The fact that there were children involved was like cutting through my heart with a sharp knife," she said.

"The saddest part was that the people he had children with were people I knew. People who were close to me, who were looking at me every day and smiling at me. And I even knew the kids. At one point, I went to Woolworths to buy things for a child, not knowing it was Fana's child. We both took the things to the woman's place, with me not knowing that it was his child.

"The other one stayed at Winchester (a townhouse complex). At some point when she was pregnant, my instinct told me it was Fana's child. He denied it. He denied! This girl knew he had a wife. She saw me every day with Fana but she went on doing whatever she wanted to do with him. Because, you see, I never went with Fana to these parties. I would always stay at home. So these girls would go with him and that's where they did their stuff. And then he would come back home.

"There were tears every day. Little things were coming up every day. Fana has done this. Fana has done that. Fana has another baby. And I was expected to deal with them every day. Fana would leave the house to go see those children. We were trying to sort our relationship out here but he would go and see them and their mothers. And I was expected to sit in the house and swallow it."

Friends Masi Makhalemele and Angie Diale said one of Khabzela's fatal flaws was his inability just to sit still, to come to terms with the enormity of what had happened to him and realise that, for the first time in his life, he had to relinquish control.

"Fana was constantly on the phone. All these people were coming in and out. Taxi drivers, DJs, boozers. They'd walk into the house and he would try to be a hero."

Boss Maloka said: "Everybody wanted a piece of him. Even on his deathbed, everybody wanted something out of him, which really broke me. And all he really wanted was to get well and get back to his job and to look after his family.

"Because there were times when he got ill when his mind wasn't right; when he couldn't make decisions for himself and you had the family and all sorts of other people intervening and I think all of those things just made him worse. All these forces fighting each other so that they can take the glory in the end. I think those things were the biggest factor in his death."

Hartford said he regretted that he had not been firmer and more interventionist with Khabzela and the people around him. "I thought that because we were not experts on HIV/Aids, we did not have the right to intervene strongly and we stepped back whenever another so-called expert stepped forward. But for whatever reason - and Fana had a lot to do with this - many of these interventions ended up going nowhere and when he finally succumbed to the virus all that was left was a host of recriminations all around. Expert against so-called expert, traditional against scientific solutions, nutrition against ARVs ...

"Every one of the actors in the current debate crossed Fana's and our path and all of them struck me as genuine people striving to find an answer. But I cannot understand why we as South Africans can't build a consensus on the best way to deal with it. Good nutrition is essential for building an immune system that can resist HIV and other viruses. In this respect I am fully behind our President and the minister of Health. But when one's CD4 count falls below 200, antiretrovirals are the only and last resort.

"Of course, key to this is the ability of the infected person to radically change their lifestyle. Sadly, Fana was not able to do this. He looked for a miracle solution - one that would change his situation overnight. But no such solution exists."

Judge Edwin Cameron writes in his wonderful memoir, Witness to Aids, of his own initial reluctance to start antiretroviral therapy. Despite the fact that he believed in their efficacy and he badly needed them, he put off taking the drugs for far longer than was sensible. "Why was I so reluctant to start treatment ..?" he muses. "One reason was the side effects I knew that I could expect. The drugs are immensely powerful. They have to be. Powerful enough to reach into the abstruse corners of the body's genetic mechanisms, where HIV replicates, to put a stop to its machinations. So powerful that in doing so, they unavoidably affect other body functions - upsetting the digestive system, causing painful nerve abreactions (tingling, numbness) and redistribution of body fat. Rare toxic reactions, some even fatal - when patients or their damaged livers just cannot tolerate the force of the drugs - gave me additional pause.

"But I also feared something starker: that the drugs wouldn't work for me. Dr Johnson told me that his colleagues in rich countries were reporting success rates of about 70%. Wonderful."

Denial, Judge Cameron said, was a common response to Aids. He too experienced it. "Though cognitively accepting that I was infected with H IV, I continued - even as the evidence mounted that I was falling sick - to hope against hope that I would never fall ill with Aids. Despite the unmistakable signals that warned that my immune defences were failing, and that my viral load was rising, I hoped against relief and probability that somehow I would escape."

*Khabzela, published by Jacana Media, will be launched in Johannesburg tomorrow.

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