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Emzini Wezinsizwa is my favourite sitcom ever. No sarcastic valley girl voice either. I’m being as deadly serious as I can be at this point. I’m drawn to absurdly wonderful things that make the skid marks in life seem less odorous. I ride with the fearless, who aren’t too concerned about pretentious standards of ‘sexy’. It’s raw and that’s what makes it real. I appreciate that the first instinct is to call it ironic/smartass/desperate. In hatermode I do the same. It’s natural, like wishing someone dead.  Real talk: How could I honestly and earnestly enjoy/respect (or in nasal private school voice, be able to stomach) the shabbily shot, badly acted, elementary piece of third world television?

It is an important, insightful exploration and celebration of the lives of a sizeable chunk (majority?) of South African society. The black, urban working class. The show is called Emzini Wezinsizwa (in English: House of Boys/Young Men), and named for the place where most of the action takes place; Johannesburg single sex hostels that were built by the Apartheid government . They were built to house the city’s dregs, working both within and outside of the mining industry, but considered essential for running the city (factory workers, builders, cleaners and city workers). The housing projects were set up in a calculatedly divisive manner; separating people by tribal group, marital status and gender. Designed to inhibit any notion of permanent life. For example, you might find one for fat belly, married, zulu men, who’s wives and kids live thousands of kilometers away in some rural, poverty stricken, desolate but breathtaking rolling hill; or one for single Malawian or Mozambican guys who left their countries for Jozi’s bright lights and hooker rashes.

That I wear the unnecessarily severe favourite sitcom claim with pride, and take every given opportunity wherever I am in the world to tell people about the show; is just mere excitement at having seen something awesome and wishing to share. I have tried to buy every available series DVD on the market, with moderate success (which has entailed spending between R30 in shady backalleys with the ever philanthropic Carlton Centre bootleggers and R200 with the even shadier beast, the SABC). My nom de plum, Spoek Mathambo is a sly reference to something Chirwali once said about ghosts in a hilariously absurd (if not slightly morbid) episode about a conman with an HIV Aids cure.

Growing up in Soweto in the late 80s and early 90s, I thought hostel dwellers to be violent, vile and… Zulu. I put this on the pervasive macho culture, coupled with the absence of women and family life. During this period, hostel dwellers assumed key roles in a new type of political violence, that had all of us township dwellers in fear. The media simplified this wave of brutal violence as a clash between Zulu (hostel dwellers) and Xhosa speakers (township people). Shorthand for the underlying conflict between two major political parties, the ANC and the (Zulu nationalist) IFP, which had waged a campaign in hostels to extend its support base in Johannesburg. The level of violence and acts of terrorism could be termed as a sort of civil war. Later, evidence surfaced showing the Apartheid government’s involvement in providing arms as well as blatantly inciting some of the attacks – in an apparent attempt to destabilise the approaching democratisation of South Africa.

Hostels became barracks; breading grounds for an army of men. They were strongholds from which attacks could be planned and coordinated, and fortresses to which residents could retreat. Throughout the period; hundreds of men, women and children were killed in what was known as the Hostel Wars.

And so hostels seemed to me, a never ending spring of brutality. Fuelled by mbamba, bred on machismo and spurred on by cramped living conditions. On more than one occasion, I remember my father feverishly locking the car doors as we were surrounded by throngs of impis with red strips of cloth around their arms or heads; wielding all means of rusty axes. I recall too, the army road blocks that would make me hours late for school. My family and the fear in us was so extreme that, as my mother never tires to recount, she sent me to primary school before time, in worry that she might be killed any day and so I should at least have the first few moments of schooling covered before her head was split open by a knobkerrie or panga, or the pellet from a homemade shotgun.

The TV show, Emzini Wezinsizwa takes this painful and morbid hostel history and flips it around by showing the other side of hostel life. It definitely changed my idea of what hostels were. It douses the drab brick-face concentration camp buildings with heaps of comedy and high jinxes. It shows these houses of men as birth places for camaraderie and intercultural respect. The premise of the show is that the inhabitants of Room 8 are a mixed bag of men from many different tribes and places, and much of the comedy comes of all of their cultural and linguistic peculiarities. From know-it-all Xhosa, Chawe; to the Zulu tradionalists Magubane (an inyanga medicine man) and Khabazela; to gambling, womanising, Sotho jester Mofokeng; and bumbling Malawian Chirwali. The supporting cast includes other hostel dwellers, visiting rural family, a snitchin’ drunk called S’beko, an austere and strict security guard (nduna), township folk, and domestic worker girlfriends who live in the backrooms in white suburbs.

I don’t remember exactly when the show starting being so important to me, but I remember a time BEW (before Emzini Wezinsizwa). I was completely indifferent and the sound of my dad laughing to the show would have me reeling and gagging in embarrassment. I would try my damndest to eat my dinner fast and get the hell out of hearing range. It was the least cool thing on TV. Five middle aged rural-type dudes living in a dingy hostel, constantly bouncing between Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho and Chirwali’s dodgy language creole. At that time, if you asked me about South African comedy you would get a blank stare, which would be followed by a dazed and detached rattling off of relics of the ‘80s: Velaphi, ‘Sgud Is’nayc or god forbid my mouth would dry out and my pink lips spew that rainbow nation nugget, Suburban Bliss. These names would come to me, but not before being overcome by shame. You see I was a laanie 12 year old who saw Americana as the pinnacle of modern culture and Seinfeld as it’s comedic apex.

It was only later, when I turned 13 that I ”came back” home. Through an identity crisis resultant of seeing the vast majority of my (mostly white) grade 9 class tippex swastikas on their Space Cases (…long story), I refound myself. And to balance the dead pan militance of my newly found ‘proud black fist’ (with its droll starter pack of nappy hair, Maya Angelou and god awful poetry), I needed the absurd hilarity (and subtle ‘every man’ poignancy) of Emzini Wezinsizwa.

As a card carrying member of the Cheese Boy Club, it’d be disingenuous for me to claim that my love for Emzini Wezinsizwa stems from being able to relate with the places or people described in the show. I cannot say that I know what hostel life feels like, but I am glad that the show has broken down my prejudice. It humanised their existence beyond being horny, bloodthirsty dregs. Emzini Wezinsizwa showed them to be my hilarious distant (favourite) uncles, full of rich stories from a place I have never been.