AKA and Anele - Reading Between the lines

When Anele Tembe fell to the ground from Pepper Club in 2021, on the 11th of April, I was celebrating my 35th birthday. It was the last birthday I would celebrate being married, a birthday that was filled with pain and disappointment because I had just come to the full realization that I, myself was in an abusive marriage which took 13 years by this time to see. The story broke, then the videos came out, and a couple of days later, I found myself streets away in the city of Cape Town for work. It felt unreal to watch the media take the story apart, social media ablaze with accusations and evidence that pointed directly to an abusive relationship that had been brewing for a year before Anele breathed her final breath.

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In the weeks that followed, I anxiously awaited comments from the parties within the walls of this story. Anele’s funeral came and went, in the middle of Covid restrictions with a very desolate and Isolated AKA sitting in front of her body like a zombie, seemingly lost in the events of that night in his head. Rumors, speculation, and statements were being made by everyone who is everyone, but I waited, to hear from the man himself.

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The faithful day finally arrived when AKA sat with Thembekile to discuss what had happened. I watched the interview with a fine-tooth comb while trying to decipher the meaning of his actions, words, and expressions. What I deduced was that he had been trained. Certainly, my years of media training would allow me to see the nuances in his unanswered questions,? the emotions that he tried to keep strapped to the chair he sat in, and the key message he was told to use as an anchor which he repeated often to try and ground himself,? as to not become too emotional.

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The training didn’t work, and in fact, it slam-dunked the belief that he may have been the reason Anele Tembe laid bare on the street in one of the most beautiful cities in South Africa that April. For someone so keen on being himself in public spaces, with messy spats on social media, revealing details about his life that most wouldn’t, and not backing down from a verbal smackdown online, this was the most subdued version of AKA anyone in the public got to experience. He was mourning of course, but at the same time, there were certainly other events at play. He had to manage his image very carefully because any step in the wrong direction could mean prosecution for a possible crime, and as he surely would have put it, a crime of “passion”.

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At the time, I was still a fresh student in the study of Narcissistic personalities and abuse itself, but there were telltale signs from the information we were privy to that were telling. Naively, I took to social media to make a live video on the events that seemed to have taken place in what I had seen. Not knowing much of both AKA and Anele’s history, I went with my still uneducated gut, or rather my passion for understanding these personalities since I was trying to understand the one I was about to face in the biggest showdown of my life to date.

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The videos showed a traumatized Anele, sitting on the floor crying for her mother, saying “You don’t know what he is doing to me”, considering that was all we had to go on, videos, images, and AKA’s interview, the speculation was all but accurate, even until a few weeks ago.

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And then, Melinda Ferguson’s book, “When Love Kills”, the story of Anele and AKA, three years after Anele fell, and a year after AKA was executed in Durban, was released. With a deeper knowledge of abuse, and with an expectation that all roads will lead to obvious indicators of an abusive personality in AKA, I was excited to confirm my thoughts on what may have happened.

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BUT THAT DID NOT HAPPEN

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In fact, the book revealed something I truly wasn’t expecting through a now better-educated lens, and it made me feel sick to my stomach.

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The book is easy to read and captivating, I specifically don’t read books about people’s lives or stories, especially not ones that are biographical in nature. If anything, books that are written more like textbooks are something I am attracted to,? but this book for some reason captivated me and took me less than 24 hours to get through,? cover to cover. Melinda was very careful to not add her own personal bias to a degree, although there are slight highlights of her personal view of what happened that do come through. For the most part, she worked very hard to stay as factual as possible. There are parts that were leading to be honest, but for an academic reader, this wouldn’t have swayed your opinion in either direction. My concern was for the emotionally motivated reader, someone who has either experienced abuse or been in close enough proximity to be traumatized by it. This book will give credence to their perception of the conversation about AKA being an abusive individual. Yet, for someone who has both experienced, observed and studied these personalities, I in fact saw a version of the story that has never been discussed. Critical thinking is vital in cases like this, and for all intents and purposes, is a requirement of adequately making sense of a story that is difficult to make any real sense of at all.

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The book covers a truckload of AKA’s life. I mean, at least 70% of it is about him. It may as well have been a biography of the AKA we loved and hated all at the same time. There is so little of Anele that even comes through that it set alarm bells off in my head from the beginning. In all fairness to Melinda, there wasn’t much to go on when it came to Anele. She was essentially a shadow, a nobody who met a star and ended up mangled on the street. Much of what we know about Anele is based on her father’s musings. A particular detail that unsettled me from the get-go. My 20-year-old best friend has a much richer life than Anele seemed to have, which is an anomaly I am still trying to understand. At that age, with the brilliance she is professed to have, why have there been no stories from her life from the people who had nothing to gain? Surely this young woman had friends, people who got to know her beyond her father, people she confided in? The version of Anele that her father gave felt all too much curated, the beautiful, talented pastry chef in the making, who excelled at school, was close to her father and never had a real relationship before AKA,? it just seems a little too polished for my liking. This is against the backdrop of a messy AKA, who was so brandish about his relationships, cheating, partying, possible drug use, and extreme arrogance. It seems that nobody has asked why their lives are described in such complete contrast.

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The major issue with the media is, that sensationalism sells, the truth is but at the helm of the drama. South Africans are so keen to look for drama that we will jump on any bandwagon without any consideration for the cracks in these stories that could reveal truths that need to be highlighted.

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With all that being said, there is a narrative, that reading Melinda’s book has brought to my attention. One that may be speculative, since everything is at this point, but from an educated standpoint, it makes a lot of sense when we are discussing abuse and Anele’s untimely demise.

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From my observation of these personalities, narcissistic people come from traumatic backgrounds, for the most part, they all experience some sort of extreme trauma or tragedy and neglect as children. Anele experienced the loss of her mother at the age of twelve, and as a single father for a while, there is no doubt in my mind that Moses Tembe was unable to fully give her all the emotional support that she needed after the loss of someone so significant in the young girls’ life. Anele’s siblings describing their youngest sibling as spoiled, points to an imbalance that was being filled by things rather than relationships. Anele is described as being a very stubborn, steadfast young woman. According to her father and AKA, nobody was going to force her to do anything against her will. This is the argument being used for why she could not have possibly committed suicide, and for this reason, I too believe that these suicide attempts actually were not attempts at all, but had a much more sinister intention.

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Take the journey down this thought path with me for a moment.

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A young woman who has been all but born into a life of privilege loses the most important figure in her life at a very young age. Her Zulu father who does not have the ability to be maternal in any way finds ways to comfort his young daughter with gifts, vacations, and nice things and hopes that when he remarries, his next wife will be able to fill the void that his deceased wife had left behind. By the time he remarries, however, this young lady has already become set in her way of entitlement and believes that she deserves over and above what this life has offered her till this time. The neglect that she experienced has created an abandonment wound that is insatiable, which means, she needs to find someone important she can rule over without them or anyone knowing any better. The easiest way to feel important, seen, and wanted is to have the attention of someone who can in no form be seen as a victim. Someone larger than life, who has all the money in the world, and someone she can be a wife to who will confuse her controlling nature with loving him too hard. He needs to be emotionally immature enough that his emotional attachment to her will keep him wanting more, more of the high highs and low lows that come with what the relationship offers him, like a drug.

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Melinda, in her interview with Mac G, talks quite a bit about an addiction to love and drugs that may have been the alternate cause of this tragic story, but in my personal point of view, it seems and feels much more sinister.

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Let’s clear something up first, I don’t believe that Anele committed suicide, or was mentally ill for that matter. All of this I based on the details Melinda so painstakingly dug up in the book. This same investigative journalism also gave us so much more information about AKA all in one place, that his history, behavior, and personality gave so much weight to the man behind the music. AKA was a character who thrived on attention, at first, second, and even third glance, he has all the ticks of a grandiose narcissist. Loud, overly proud, and materialistic, needing to date and cheat on high-profile women. His lavish lifestyle and show-off nature, including his immature online commentary and reactions could easily sign him off as an emotionally abusive, arrogant asshole. Yet, his relationships, when there were no overlaps, seemed to be good to a degree. His relationships with his family also did not seem to have too many fallouts.? The relationship with his daughter was nurturing, intimate and innocent. Abusive people have above all things, relational problems, and although AKA made horrible choices, he didn’t seem to have the classical relational failures present in abusive personality types.

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AKA may have been very particular about his craft, but control didn’t seem to be something he was particularly aligned to, based on Melinda’s words. In fact, there were events that pointed to Anele being the one who needed things under control to appease her. The fact that they started their relationship when COVID took over the world is a massive red flag, in hindsight. If she was entitled and controlling, the two of them isolated in lockdown would have been the perfect breeding ground for a toxic attachment. Anele’s continual frustration and fear of AKA cheating on her,? his relationship with his daughters mother,? Zinhle, and Anele not being able establish a relationship with AKA’s mother point back to the relational issues I described earlier. Firstly, she was entering an already established co-parenting family unit,? this would have meant that moving in with AKA would require her to be accepting of the family dynamic and work hard to maintain the status quo. It however seems as though that was something she wasn’t interested in doing.

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When Anele stood on top of the Hilton Hotel in Durban,? it was assumed that she was suicidal but there was no clarity to the events on that day for me until the book. It seems as though this was an attempt to gain AKA’s attention after he had gone out without her the night before and was unwilling to communicate with her after returning back to the hotel. The question that keeps coming up for me is why would she go to those lengths to get him to talk to her? With everything that was happening, how did anyone think that them getting engaged a short while later was even a good idea? Then came the post with the engagement ring, insinuating ownership of some sort, as though Anele had won some sort of competition by bagging a ring from the rapper. Could there have been a tinge of coercion involved in this engagement gesture?

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In 2007, before I took that damning walk down the aisle, in a counseling session with the pastor who was to marry us,? the words he said to me jumped out while I went through the pages of this book. “you cannot be physical when you argue, anything could happen, what if she falls and get seriously injured”,? words I, and I am sure neither AKA or Anele heeded as they prepared to be tied together in marriage. When you have no idea why your relationship Is toxic and at the same time why you are so attached to someone who is clearly harming you, statements like that feel and seem unlikely until someone ends up dead.

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The destroyed rooms,? the hysteria in videos,? the broken doors, it’s not all cut and dry. Humans have a tendency to want to simply things so we can make some sort of sense out of events that don’t make any sense without scrutiny. We want to find the simplest solution that requires the least work. If we take a moment to do a deeper inspection of these events, it’s been said that Anele was recording events and sending them to family and friends before AKA started doing the same. Her reasoning behind recording him was so that she could show the world who he really was. Comments on his manhood were also made which in all likelihood would have infuriated any emotionally immature man. Does that justify any physical abuse, never,? but since nobody really knows what happened in those rooms, all we can go on is what we read and see. In my critical evaluation, if Anele was a narcissistic person, then any reasonable communication,? trying to understand why she was so insecure and why she so desperately needed AKA’s undying attention would have sparked arguments,? arguments that go as far as trashing rooms,? screaming that then flip into crying fits on the floor in seconds. Narcissistic people cannot manage emotional tension almost at all and have no way of regulating themselves when something upsets them,? which in turn means that the most irrational decisions are made in the moment,? the likeness of a two-year-old throwing a tantrum. If we look at those rooms through that lens and compare that to AKA’s relationship history, all the chips just don’t align.

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Past behavior is a predictor of future behavior, especially in personality types that are hardwired to change. If only there was more information from Anele’s side, the people who knew her, there may be more insights that could have predicted these events.

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All has been said and done for now, we await the inquest, and as Melinda said,? there may be some shocking information that comes to light. At the end of the day, it's not going to bring AKA or Anele back, but I hope that when we read these stories, that we choose to look through the words with a little less emotional motivation and a little more analysis. It’s important to recognize that abuse is one of the forefront issues in South Africa right now, and if we are not learning how to identify these relationships, we aren’t moving the conversation forward and are not helping those caught in its claws, an opportunity of surviving.