Arende’s Sloet Steenkamp. Castrol motor oil’s Boet. Captain Smit in Tsotsi.
Actor, playwright and musician Ian Roberts’ name is synonymous with television, advertising and film. Yet away from the camera, the tall, grizzled, blue-eyed man clad in a wide-brimmed hat, navy-blue flannel shirt and sleeveless khaki windbreaker is a raconteur with wanderlust who has lived a life of adventure and adversity.
Born in Fort Beaufort in 1952, Roberts — who is fluent in English, Afrikaans and Xhosa — grew up on a citrus farm in the foothills of the Katberg mountains. His closest friends when he was young were a ragtag group of predominantly Xhosa-speaking coloured boys. “The humour of these guys was something I’ll never forget,” Roberts says in his distinctly Eastern Cape accent. “We used to laugh at things, which maybe other people didn’t find so funny.”
They called themselves “The Hunter-Gatherers”, and Roberts remembers the sense of freedom they instilled in him, as well as their imaginations and musical talent. The present frontman of Die Radio Kalahari Orkes says in awe of his friend Pieter Trompetter, “He could hit a guitar with rhythms you can’t conceive of. I’ve been trying to copy him to this day, and I still can’t get near.”
In his recently published memoir, Nomad Heart: Adventures on and off the Set, Roberts dedicates a chapter to his status as an honorary Afrikaner: “The Boers have just always had more meaning for me because they’re so much more out there. I always like the offbeat.”
Describing himself as apolitical, Roberts recalls the apartheid curfew law. “After 8pm, there were no Africans allowed in our town.” Yet in his diverse group of friends he didn’t think about it. “Jirre ... All these things just happened to us pikkies [youngsters],” he says.
All the same, in Nomad Heart Roberts recounts the story of how he and a friend risked their lives to see piano maestro Abdullah Ibrahim, then known as Dollar Brand, perform in a township. “They can’t even print it, it’s so radical. No, honestly,” Roberts says wide-eyed and earnestly. “What we did was, we painted ourselves black and wore overalls with balaclavas and dark glasses. We could not be found out. We would have been killed. That’s what 1973/1974 was like in a township. We took a big chance. Now I can’t even write that. You can write that as an interesting aspect of the fact that we can’t actually be honest about the story,” he says firmly.
“But, bro, it was tight,” he says as he shakes his head. “And therefore, when he came out and played in that hall, it was a monumental experience because the whiteys were OK. But before that, there were about five youths in front of us — strong okes, you see,” he says, mimicking a bodybuilder’s stance. “And they said, ‘We’ll kill you’, you know? We had to put up with that first. But when Dollar Brand came out, we realised it was OK and we could wipe off our makeup.
Roberts extols the work of German filmmaker Werner Herzog and echoes this pioneer of New German Cinema’s adage that “political correctness is the biggest danger to true creativity that exists”.
With regard to the creative process, and in answer to the Proust Questionnaire question “What’s your idea of the lowest depth of misery?”, Roberts immediately responds, “Having a shitty director. I hate it when there’s intense anger. That would be miserable to me, because I’m signed, I’m on a contract, [and] I can’t get out of it. So all your freedom is gone as an actor, and now you’ve got to try to persuade this moron he’s wrong.”
He doesn’t elaborate on said kak directors, but speaks reverently of some of them, such as Manie van Rensburg, who was “an extraordinary man”. Roberts says, “He was a pirate, and his ship was called Movie, and he would sail any freaking sea for that movie ship. He was fearless as a pirate-movie maker”. He also speaks with admiration of Dirk de Villiers, whom he says was “a runaway train on an ever-curving track”. He adds, “Dirk didn’t like directors because they fucked up all his scripts. He said storytellers were the best directors, and he was a big storyteller.”
Roberts’ early days of theatre work saw him collaborating several times with Richard Grant (before Grant included the “E” in his name) at the now-defunct The Space Theatre in Cape Town. “The Space was a revolutionary field. There was a fire going on, you know. I never, funnily enough, felt claustrophobic in The Space, though it had a lot of cockroaches,” he chuckles.
“I feel probably more threatened on stage than I do working on a film because of the immediacy of a possible mistake,” he says when I ask whether he feels more at home in a theatre or behind the camera. “With film, you can do another take. David Mamet’s American Buffalo took my fear of audiences away,” he says, recalling a performance at the Baxter Theatre, where he was forced to improvise. “I call theatre-acting the engine room of acting, because that’s where you’re either going to make it or not. And I’d recommend that all actors who want to make it in film go and get stuffed-up on stage.”
The thespian’s decades in the entertainment business saw him moving between genres, including his being cast as the Camel Man in the Camel ads of yore (which role he ultimately declined). Yet this brand of cigarettes had a starring role in the birth of his first child, Cara. He ex-wife, actress Michelle Botes, was offered an epidural as Cara was crowning and declined the medication, demanding instead, “Gee vir my ’n fokken Camel! [Give me a fucking Camel!]” Roberts leans back, mimes inhaling a cigarette, exhales, and then laughs — for, et voilá, there was Cara!
The laughter subsides as the conversation turns to his second child, Daniel, who was diagnosed with cancer while he was a student at Rhodes. “It was just shocking, man ... ” Roberts shakes his head in disbelief. “He hid it away, and he used painkillers to try to deny it, but then, when we eventually found out, I went straight into my workbooks and got heavy herbal concoctions together and gave them to him.”
Roberts’ naturopathic attempt to cure his son didn’t work, and Daniel had to undergo months of chemotherapy. “My respect for this little boy went up so much ... ” Roberts trails off and gestures to his eyes where tears have gathered. “I didn’t recognise him,” he says of the first time he saw Daniel after his treatment. “He walked towards me in the street in Parkhurst. This guy was saying to me, ‘Hello, Dad’, and I just thought, ‘Who’s this?’ He had no hair, and he was heavy.”
Roberts recounts a getaway the two of them made shortly thereafter, describing it as “the worst thing” when, while hiking up a hill, Daniel had to stop. “He said, ‘Dad, I can’t walk any more.’” Roberts’ joy is palpable as he describes how well the now 31-year-old Daniel is doing, his son’s thick head of hair receiving an honourable mention.
The madala became a dad again in 2019 — at 67 — when five-year-old twins Ian-Keith and Lynn-Sophie were born to Roberts and his life partner, Francoinette le Roux. He remembers the birth of his youngest children as a traumatic experience: “They were born by caesarean section, and it was horrifying.”
Yet an anecdote of a urinary kind causes Roberts to crack up as he describes how both children, once they exited the womb, weed on both him and Francoinette. “I was sopnat!” he laughs.
Owing to her low birthweight, Lynn-Sophie had to remain in hospital for an extended period. “She had to get special needles and things. It was terrible. I couldn’t sleep, and I said to their paediatrician, ‘Dr Taljaard, stop. That’s enough needles.’”
But Taljaard turned to Roberts and said, “You’re an actor, you’re a singer, and you perform on stage. I’m a children’s doctor. You do your thing, and I‘ll do mine. Do you understand me?”
Roberts got the message.
As for the experience of being an, ahem, mature dad? “It’s shocking,” he laughs. “My children are a complete education to me. And if they’ve taught me one thing, it’s to catch a fat wake-up.”
From catching a wake-up to catching a train ...
Lyrics in Die Radio Kalahari Orkes song Kaptein, Kaptein read “Kaptein, Kaptein / Waarheen ry die trein? [Captain, Captain / Where is the train travelling to?]”
So where is Ian Roberts’ train heading? “My train, if the budget allows, will be to make movies,” he says as he purposefully nods and takes the last sip of his cappuccino.
Encore, platform motion picture.
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