“My dad was like, ‘If you’re not going to go to school, you’re not a child of mine’.” Themba continued to hustle for more and more gigs, and also got a part-time job as A&R of legendary South African label Soul Candi Records. “Then I got kicked out of home,” he laughs. At the same time, he managed to hold down his first DJ residency and pay his own tuition fees, but dropped out in the second year. Still under pressure from his parents, he kept studying and went on to do financial accounting at Varsity College. “I loved the different reactions to the different types of songs, and realised then that whatever DJing was, that is what I wanted to do.” Armed with a CD player, vinyl and tape decks, and the Gemini 66 mixer he’d just got for Christmas, he played his first set. Everyone came to me to ask about what songs I had, and I had everything from my father’s Motown and jazz to the local kwaito to the acid techno all the white kids were listening to.”īecause of his reputation, he was asked to DJ at a small local party aged just 14. “And I wasn’t a sporty kid either, but the music was my cool factor. “I wasn’t a huge academic,” Themba remembers, with a warm smile. Fortunately, music provided a common link in the playground. His life in the townships was at odds with his white school peers who came up in the more affluent suburbs. The thing is, he didn’t fit in at school. in industrial psychology and believed academic achievement was the only way out, so he was incredibly strict with Themba when it came to school. He had proud parents who’d managed to work their way out of poverty. Themba grew up in the townships on the eastern side of Johannesburg. “I would be lying if I said I couldn’t sense the tension and racism towards me. It was only when I was older that I understood the history of South Africa understood how different my upbringing was,” he says. “I love the discovery of it, reading about who worked on a song - producers, studios and engineers, just building my level of intel.”īecause of the “dynamics of apartheid at that time in 1991”, Themba was the only Black student in his school. As well as enjoying the music, he would devour the sleeve notes as a further means of escape. “Cassettes, CDs, vinyl, whatever medium, whatever music, I collected it,” he enthuses from a restaurant in Johannesburg, before popping another forkful of delicious-looking beef rib into his mouth.

Any music: rock, hip-hop, European house, jazz, soul, it didn’t matter. Music has been the renowned South African DJ and producer’s getaway since he was 11, when he started avidly collecting it.

“Because of our history, we sing and we dance,” says Themba.

Wuala pop