You may have read GG’s books about the kasi economy; now follow his journey to the dynamic world of KasiNomics and learn about the tribal forces that shaped him. Born White Zulu Bred is the story of a white child and his brother raised in poverty in a Zulu community in rural South Africa during the apartheid era. His extraordinary parents, Creina and Neil Alcock, gave up lives of comfort and privilege to live and work among the destitute people of Msinga, whose material and social well-being became their mission.

A revolution is taking place in the great marketplaces of the informal sector and it contains an unquantified scale and power as an economic engine and a way of life for the majority of our low income populations. The KasiNomic Revolution may still be a murmur in the streets, a grassroots economic groundswell, but it is the future of African economic activity.

Kasinomics attempts to cast a light on the invisible matrix at the heart of South Africa’s informal economies and the people who live in them. Living and doing business in African marketplaces requires an ethos uniquely suited to the informal, to the invisible, to the intangible. Kasinomics will take you down those rural pathways, weave between claustrophobic mazes of shacks, browse a muti market, visit a spirit returning ceremony and save money with gogo in a stokvel, among many more people and places.

My bike bucks and rattles on the stony ground as we pass the places of my youth, memories flashing through my mind as I ride past the once familiar landmarks. The ride has been a hard and exciting one for this skinny white kid. I’m definitely not a Zulu, not until I open my mouth, that is, or when I think; like Khonya, I think in Zulu, and when I can’t find the English words I say it in Zulu, the language of my upbringing, a poetic, humour-filled language of warriors.