The Pavement Bookworm
The man who was crazy enough to think he can change himself
By Ithateng Mokgoro, TEDxJohannesburg Curator
There are strong relations it seems, between the gods that govern drug addiction, those that oversee mental illness, and the ones who give us the gift of creativity. It’s as if one can’t exist without the others. They are joined at the hip, completely inseparable. The first two, it seems, are the price you must pay for the latter, the gift of creativity. The misfits of society, the round pegs in the square holes, have to pay more than all of us. Perhaps even for all of us.
Why is it that while some people cruise through life going from one good fortune to the next, others seem to be stuck in a nightmarish groundhog day of hardship and misery?
Are some people born to suffer?
I hope not.
Philani Dladla is a beautiful man, and a truly original idea if there ever was one. I first came across his story on the Internet a year and a half before his book was published. My first instinct was to dismiss it as just another crazy story. “Fodder for the tabloids,” I thought. But the posts kept coming into my timeline and the more I looked into the story the more real it appeared. Here was a clearly homeless person, down and out in the streets of Johannesburg, giving seemingly solid reviews of books that covered some fairly difficult material — anything from Plato and Socrates, to Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life and Dan Browne’s The Da Vinci Code. I was a little intrigued.
He’s crazy enough to think he can change himself. While he’s at it, maybe, just maybe, he could also change the world .
But it wasn’t until my wife Kelo Kubu suggested that we invite Philani to speak at the TEDxJohannesburg event that we were organising at the time, that I became more than a little intrigued. As curator of the event, it is my job to devour every single word that has been written about a potential speaker, and to watch every single video that they appear in online. All in the name of research of course. Tough job but someone has to do it.
And so began the process of stalking Philani. The first thing I learned was that I was not the only person excited about him. Tons of blogs had been written about him, in South Africa and abroad. Newspaper articles in local and global titles started popping up. Television interviews and references to radio interviews appeared everywhere. This was no ordinary homeless person. This was a rock star homeless person, and everyone, it seemed, wanted a piece of him.
I eventually managed to track him down through Tebogo Malope, the filmmaker who was the first person to bring Philani’s story to the surface through a video that he had uploaded on YouTube. Once Philani accepted our invitation to speak, we dived right into his talk. As curator of TEDxJohannesburg, I have the privilege of living the event over and over long before it actually happens. I read the speakers scripts, I go through their slide decks, we change things, we go back and forth and so on and so on. Philani had written his presentation on sheets of paper, scanned them in, and emailed them through to me. I’ll never forget the experience I had when I held those sheets in my hands and read his presentation for the first time. Let’s just say that I was a complete mess. He told a heartbreaking story that somehow managed to tear me apart and lift me up all at once.
The talk itself did not disappoint. He delivered it like a pro and got a well-deserved standing ovation at the end.
There’s a part of me that can’t help feeling that there’s something perverse about the world’s fascination with Philani. What happens when all of this works out? What happens when the Pavement Bookworm starts charging good money, as he should, for his speaking appearances? What happens when his books (there’s more than one book in him) become bestsellers, and what’s left after the publishers have taken their proverbial lion’s share is enough to buy him a nice house in the suburbs? What happens when his biopic (options, anyone?) becomes a box office blockbuster? Will he still be interesting? Or is he only interesting when he’s an anomaly — a homeless person who loves to read?
My hope is that we allow Philani to flourish and grow and go on to do other things. I hope that we can allow ourselves to see beyond the current hot ticket story. There’s a gifted man in there and he’s not a one-trick pony. We need to be gracious enough to afford him the chance to come out and do his thing, whatever it is.
He’s crazy enough to think he can change himself. That process is still a work in progress, but he’s doing a pretty good job so far. While he’s at it, maybe, just maybe, he could also change the world.
If we let him.
