Now that the dust has settled on Melinda Ferguson’s latest book, “When Love Kills - The tragic tale of AKA and Anele”, let’s unpack it.
I interviewed Ferguson, a journalist turned author celebrated for penning memoirs and non-fiction - “Smacked”, “Hooked: Secrets and Highs of a Sober Addict”, “The Kelly Khumalo Story”, “Oscar: An Accident Waiting to Happen” and “Bamboozled: In Search Of Joy In A World Gone Mad” - several weeks after the book hit the shelves.
She was on a mountain retreat at the time.
After a quick banter about tea, while she unwinded with a cup of coffee, she spilt the tea about her controversial book.
She explained: “I think after Anele Tembe died in April 2021, I didn’t say, ‘Oh I am going to write a book on this’. Absolutely not. But the image of this very young girl meeting such an undignified death on an early Sunday morning in Cape Town, and I know those streets of Cape Town.
“I used to go to clubs. I used to be one of those people who were out and about in the early morning when I was a 20- year-old in Cape Town. So that image kind of stayed with me for a very long time.
“When the videos were released a few weeks after Anele died, the horrible relationship that seemed to be going on behind the Instagram loved-up photos affected me a lot as a woman but also as a person; not just thinking about it is a case of traditional gender-based violence, it was very complicated. I saw two people that were hurt.”
She continued: “And then when AKA was assassinated, it became a huge story and the whole thing was brewing. I only really said I have to do this book towards the end of last year. But I had been doing a lot of reading, a lot of reading, over the last two-and-a-half years.”
As the title suggests, the book unpacks the Shakespearean-like tragedy that played out between one of SA’s most prolific rappers, Kiernan “AKA” Forbes, and his fiancée Anele Tembe, who plummeted to her death from the 10th floor of the Pepperclub Hotel on April 11, 2021.
The circumstances around how Nellie (as she was called) passed raised eyebrows. But the noise paled compared to the execution of AKA, along with his best friend, Tebello “Tibz” Motsoane, outside of Wish restaurant in Florida Road, Durban, on February 10, 2023.
Like South Africa, Ferguson followed social media, where the scandals, conspiracy theories and updates lived.
She added: “I’ve been reading and reading, almost like wanting to know more. And I guess when I started doing the book, it wasn’t a case of me almost wanting to discover something, I didn’t know what it was going to turn out to be like.
“This book was a book that constantly revealed itself to me. I would think of one thing and the next thing I would be with someone else. Then I would be with Chris (Brown) and Rihanna, then it would be Oscar Pistorius and then I was back on Twitter (now X).
“So I spent a lot of time on social media. Social media, for me, is a very big character in this book. In many ways, social media drives this book.”
While Ferguson interviewed Moses Tembe for the book, Lynn and Tony Forbes condemned it publicly.
In getting a sense of who AKA was, the author spoke with some individuals from his inner circle while relying heavily on his social media posts and his tell-all interview with Thembekile Mrototo.
She said: “Kiernan was prolific on Twitter. I feel like he crowned himself the King of Twitter, definitely in South Africa.
“And he had millions of followers just waiting for a tweet. There was a lot of power he wielded in social media. And so a lot of things that I learned about Kiernan was from his own mouth, through tweets.
“I have been speaking to people ever since Anele died. When Kiernan died, I did have contact with people from that world.
“I once worked at ‘True Love’ magazine for 11 years. That’s a long time being at a black women’s magazine. I had a lot of connections even though I left the magazine about 10 years ago. I was still friendly with people, was talking with people.”
In part 1 titled, “AKA and Anele”, and part 2, “The Life and Times of Kiernan Forbes”, Ferguson unpacks, firstly, their schooling backgrounds, career paths and, with AKA, his rise to fame, talent and notorious braggadocious nature.
In the third part, “AKA and Anele continued, Moses’s feedback is included, which gives insight into his daughter, touching also questions about her mental health.
Ferguson shared: “When I found Moses Tembe, I felt like that was a great opportunity because I really wanted to speak to someone in Anele’s family. I felt like with Kiernan, there’s a lot of media out there - Lynn Forbes’s interviews, she’s spoken a lot in public, there’s a lot of stuff written, there is also the Thembekile interview, which is a lot of information out of Kiernan’s own mouth.
“I had a lot already on AKA but I didn’t have much on Anele. It was hard to get anything, aside from a few articles and a TikTok video with Anele and AKA.
“Anele was never as famous as AKA, she wasn’t a celebrity in her own right. She was AKA’s girlfriend. She was, for me, in the end, a kind of commodity and that speaks volumes. That’s a woman who doesn’t have a voice.
“I felt there was a huge response to the death of AKA, more than there was to Anele. I tried to find a way to make Anele exist - Moses helped me with that. Seeing photographs of them together tells me a lot. It tells me a lot about a father who loves his child. It also tells me what she was like as a student.
“In the end, she wasn’t the same type of weight of character as AKA. That’s the truth.”
As for the stories surfacing around Anele’s mental health, she acknowledged: “I did tackle that. I tackled the Hilton Hotel incident. I think it’s become very easy to say Anele was mad. Anele was crazy and she was mentally unstable.
“I think that the easy narrative went out. But I think there is a lot more behind it.”
On the Forbes family slamming the book, she said: “I understand the Forbes have every right to make such a statement. I found it strange that it was released before they read it.”
Adding more context, with the couple going into lockdown just after making their relationship public, Ferguson pointed out: “The relationship starts existing just before we go into public lockdown and she dies in April in the second year of lockdown, at a time when we still had quite a few restrictions.
“So in my mind, there was this relationship playing out between two people who might have started getting cabin fever. This girl was only 21 when she met AKA, I think he was 32. That’s a big age difference.
“I think for a young girl like her, even though she was well-travelled, came from a privileged family, had been exposed to things in her life … she was just starting her journey. She was still a child.
“And then you can imagine what happens during lockdown; this kind of toxic relationship developing between the two, full of jealousy, full of anger, full of violence, it seems, that I talk about in the book.”
Ferguson added that she feels that Kiernan had mental health problems, too, stemming from his parent’s separation while he was still in school.
In the book, aside from the Mrototo interview, she includes AKA’s links to the club underworld, his fallout with a business partner, his beef with Cassper Nyovest, his relationship with his DJ Zinhle, with whom he shares a daughter, Kairo, his romance with Bonang Matheba (noting her deafening silence when he was killed) and him turning around his life by pouring his energy into his fourth studio album, “Mass Country”, and moving on with fellow rapper Nadia Nakai less than a year after Nellie’s passing.
There’s also mention of other toxic celeb relationships à la Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, Oscar Pistorius and Reeva Steenkamp, Chris Brown and Rihanna …
At the end of the day, Ferguson wanted this book to be viewed as a wake-up call.
She added: “I believe that love in its twisted form killed both of these people and so, for me, it is a cautionary tale for everybody but especially young people who are seduced by this crazy world of social media, the hip hop kind of toxic masculinity culture that exist all over the world, but in South Africa it is flipping huge.
“And for people to wake up; what we think love is and what love is might not be the same thing.
“I’m not trying to solve the case of who killed AKA, neither am I trying to solve the case of who killed Anele. Although, if you read the book, I’m giving the evidence that I’ve been given that questions whether Anele jumped. Whether she killed herself. That narrative was accepted very quickly. It hadn’t been a year when he announced romance with Nadia.”
After being urged several times to read the book before writing up the interview, I finally did.
As such, I can say the following with complete honesty.
The book, written in a few months but underpinned by a wealth of social media knowledge, is nothing more than an archived version of events, which is well-documented in countless articles, social media posts and interviews.
It offers nothing new to the narrative, per se. But there is a clear bias towards Anele, and AKA, given his clout in the industry, is vilified in the way he is described.
The entire book is underpinned by conjecture. While I’m not condoning gender-based violence or the fallible nature of human beings, speculation isn’t fact. That’s the truth.
Also, speaking ill of the dead is not okay. But, in this case, it does sell books as it rides the coat-tails of AKA’s fame. Now that’s tragic!