Fred Khumalo's Bitches' Brew

Bitches’ Brew by Fred Khumalo, is an entertaining, gritty gangster novel about Zakes, a jazz trumpeter, pimp and his lover, Lettie, a woman from Lesotho. It’s sort of a hustler-love novel filled with allusions to South African and African-American jazz, particularly Miles Davis. The novel encompasses numerous aspects of South African history, urbanization, and social relations, informing the reader of the 1949 race riot between Zulus and Indians in Durban, for instance. It was also quite hilarious at times for its tone and ending, with Lettie still unsure if it’s the size or feel of a man’s penis which makes sex pleasurable. Moreover, the rise of these gangsters under apartheid and the racial mixing present in the novel, though fictional, definitely reflect the looseness of racial divisions even under the height of apartheid rule. Jazz music, a symbol of freedom, is undoubtedly part of this process of destabilizing racial barriers, a role it similarly played in the US.