Book review: When Love Kills

When Love Kills – The tragic tale of AKA and Anele

Melinda Ferguson

Melinda Ferguson Books

Review: Chantel Erfort

My first encounter with AKA was at a Heineken event around the time Fela in Versace was getting lots of airplay. While I was tuned in to the Cape Town hip hop scene, I knew little about the Joburg scene that AKA was part of despite him having been born in Cape Town.

So when “surprise act” AKA took to the stage and the crowd went wild, my first thought was “who is this guy?”. And that’s largely what my attitude was when I picked up When Love Kills.

Subtitled The tragic tale of AKA and Anele, Ferguson attempts to draw the reader into the life of South African hip hop sensation Kiernan Forbes, aka … AKA who was well known as a womaniser and is portrayed as a serial cheater with a huge ego and insatiable hunger for success. He even gave himself the double-superlative nickname Supa Mega.

While the focus, as the title lets on, is on his relationship with the young Anele Tembe whose life came to a tragic end when she plummeted from a 10th storey balcony of the Pepper Club hotel in Cape Town in April 2021, Ferguson also goes into detail about his relationships with well-known celebrities Bonang Mathebe and Zinhle Mohosana (DJ Zinhle), with whom AKA has a daughter.

The book, however, has met with fierce criticism from the Forbes family, in particular, and “The Megacy” as Supa Mega referred to his fanbase.

My main criticism is that it is full of conjecture — so much so that I thought the book might rather have been called “When it may be possible that it was perhaps love that killed”. Page after page is peppered with references to what people “perhaps might have thought” or “it’s possible that XYZ happened” and “it’s easy to imagine that…”.

This of course is the result of the writer not having had direct access to several key players (among them the Forbes family), and her trying to analyse the story rather simply telling it and allowing the reader to come to his or her own conclusions.

Early on in the book she draws overwritten parallels between the stories of AKA and Anele, and Romeo and Juliet, with some chapters comparing the two in terms of where and how they were raised and which schools they attended. A lot of information in the book is drawn from social media posts and public spats, which Ferguson at one point refers to as childish. Interestingly, when I thought of how to describe this book, the word juvenile came to mind. While I understand that a lot of AKA’s showmanship played out on social media, I found the extreme focus on it quite tedious.

I recently started experimenting with sharing one-word movie reviews online, and if I were to give this book a single-word review, it would simply be “nope”.