WHAT MAKES A child be or want to be invisible to his peers? Could it be because he knows he is so different from the rambunctious bullies on the playing field that he has no ammo to fight back with? Could it be that he has such big dreams about who he wants to become and he knows his humble neighbourhood will destroy those dreams with their ragged laughter if they catch wind of them? Could it be that he’s growing up in the shadow of things that make him invisible? Anwar McKay’s moving autobiography The Boy from Bramble Way touches on all of these complex issues with a candour that will take your breath away.

Without pretences to be ‘literature’ with a capital L, the book is structured chronologically. The writing is filled with cliched expressions. But as you get to meet this quiet boy with big beautiful eyes and a sensibility that is able to embrace his whole world and then some, you fall in love, not with the words, but with the story itself.

McKay’s mother Tyra is a central figure: and how life built her up and then broke her down, again and again, is a thread that runs through the work, not as a pity party, but as a tribute to the adult McKay grew into – a product of the coloured township of Bonteheuwel on the Cape Flats, a member of a community sullied by indigence and gossip, the youngest of three boys, one subject to crippling anxiety – the cards didn’t see fame, fortune and happiness for the baby Anwar.

It’s a story of an indomitable spirit with articulate dreams, and one that obviously must have a happy denouement, because he’s still here to tell the tale. Anwar, that is. The husband of internationally renowned comedian Marc Lottering, Mc Kay found his own feet as a producer later in life. His book bears testament to what life can be if you believe enough in yourself. But it’s also a tale of coming out queer in a religious Muslim world coloured by Calvinist values, apartheid relics and bias. It’s about being determined to be the first university graduate in your family, whatever it takes. And it is about learning to call the world – the beautiful ‘rich’ parts of the world — home, because you can. Because you’ve earned it.

And without bursting into melodramatic Disney-evocative song or quoting a myriad of stories along this line, McKay takes intimate ownership of his own story. The use of Afrikaans dialect as spoken by his mom in quotes spices the work in a way that will warm the cockles of your heart as it lends an endearing genuineness to the dialogue. Read his mum’s words, pronounced as they are spelled and you can hear her voice. And you get to love her as a matriarch.

There are a couple of missed opportunities in this lovely publication – the saddest being the blank page at the end of the glossy, photograph bearing pages in the text. The photographs chosen for this publication in two separate sections are delicious: you want to eat them up as you see the main characters personified, but opposite page 207, the page is blank. In the proofreading stakes, the book is dotted with omissions here and there, but the read is a happy solid one, and the presence of the book puts McKay’s story firmly and admirably out there.

The Invisible Boy from Bramble Way by Anwar McKay is published by Southern Right Publishers (2025).