Khaya Dlanga
Khaya Dlanga is a South African writer, public speaker, and social media commentator He is the author of several books, such as Life Is Like That Sometimes, which "reflect on love, loss, identity, and the complexities of human relationships" as well as mental health.
Quotes
[edit]- I don't act my age, I act my personality.
- White women have a black belt in the fake smile.
- And so we push them away because a twisted logic tells us that we need to protect them from us. And so we push them away because a twisted logic tells us that we need to protect them from us.
- I always hear this phrase, ‘humble beginnings,’ and it confuses me a lot because I have never heard it said of anyone that they come from arrogant beginnings. I think we all begin where we begin. That is the only life you know and you have nothing else to compare it to. I also don’t want to romanticize anything about iilali because there is a tendency to want to romanticize poverty. The only people who romanticize it are people who have never experienced it. Even those people who want to romanticize poverty don’t want to be poor which means that they know that there is truly nothing romantic about it. Other than that, I miss my grandparents mostly, I miss
hanging out with the boys my age and wondering aimlessly.
- Absolutely. I think that we need to pay tribute to all the people in our lives who have been behind us every step of the way. It is not always possible but I was fortunate enough to have an opportunity to pay tribute to my own mother in a way most people can’t. I believe that my mother is a representation of many invisible mothers in South Africa. Her story is not unique. She is one of many.
- It was easy for me. I think it was easy because it’s something I am over now. It’s part of who I am which helped me be the person that I am today. I also don’t believe that I am the only person who may have had those issues early on in life. As I mention in my book, I didn’t feel sorry for myself in anyway, but I felt that I would be judged for coming from a home that was not as well off as that of other kids who went to the great school I went to. I think I subconsciously became a loner as a defense mechanism. I didn’t want my “poverty” to be “discovered” and used as a weapon. Therefore I made no friends and made no girlfriends. Funny enough, my sister had a friend from the same school I went to who came from a very well off family in the township. She would be dropped off every now and then and I remember not going outside when I saw that she was being dropped off because I didn’t want to be seen. Maybe I was proud and being a bastard now that I think about it. It was foolish and childish of me.
- I would love to write fiction. I have no idea if I will every have the opportunity. Like one famous writer once said, “I hate writing but I love having written.” This is how I feel about writing.
- I can only speak for myself. I think that the only way I was able to survive was to look at surviving the present. I was never looking at how I would one day be working for some great ad agency. There was nothing more important than the present. It was also important not to feel sorry for myself. I think that I would have been so used to feeling sorry for myself that I would have used that as refuge and perhaps started building up bitterness against people who had nothing to do with my situation, resulting in wasted negative energy. I viewed what I was going through as training ground for something else. I also told myself that I am not owed anything by anyone.
- Happiness is a fundamental human driver, so it just makes a lot of sense. And especially when people are going through really hard times they want to look beyond their horrible existence at this point in time. Brands that do that will win, and I think that’s why Coca-Cola for many years has just been really driving the idea of happiness even though they don’t really speak; it’s not always ha-ha humour, you know, there’s an emotion that it evokes and because happiness is one of the most-important human needs for us to survive. And I also think that happiness also helps with optimism. I think it also talks to the mindset myth that maybe South Africans have that resilience and the fact that things will get better — that, if they’re worse, they can only get better from there. When I look at some creative people, who are from South Africa, have done very recently some pretty amazing things, like Nelson Makamo, who is a South African artist.
- The most-important thing we want to deliver is to get out of people’s way. Give you great, affordable data and that is it. That’s what we want to do. Because a lot of people are complaining about data — it’s expensive, #datamustfall. We want to be able to answer that question so that people can have access to the internet and do the things that they really love doing. Something that I loved — and I always reference it — [is] that apparently when you get to Facebook, there’s a booklet that you get given and you read: one of the lines or the mantras is, “People don’t use Facebook because they love Facebook. They use Facebook because they love their friends.” For us, I never want to live under the illusion that people love Rain. People love what they can do, because of it. They love the fact that they can access the internet and watch videos, I don’t have to worry about how much money I’m spending because it’s so affordable. And it works.
