Tyres screech across an empty parking lot in Soweto as 40-year-old Nalo Jivhuho sends her black BMW skidding and spinning in a cloud of white smoke and fumes.
As soon as she slips into the hotseat, the human resources developer becomes “Dankie Darlie”, impassioned enthusiast of South Africa’s increasingly popular daredevil motorsport of spinning.
In a tank top and braids, Jivhuho uses her tattooed left arm to spin the steering wheel as she forces the car into high-speed skids and stunts like the circular manoeuvre called a doughnut.
“If you are able to make a tyre pop, then you are pretty special,” says Jivhuho, mother of an admiring teenaged son. “When you hear a pop, you are going to hear the crowd go wild.”
This adrenaline-pumping sport was born in Johannesburg’s sprawling Soweto township in the 1980s, when South Africa was still under the race-based apartheid system.
“It used to be seen as a gangster sport associated with people going into the white areas to steal these shaped cars, come to Soweto and spin them,” says Jivhuho.
The underground image changed when spinning was recognised as an official sport 10 years ago; today it has fans and performers across southern Africa and big brand sponsors.
At its most extreme levels, the passenger or even driver will climb out of the spinning car, hanging from the window or roof in stunts that thrill the crowds.
A few hours before Jivhuho’s training session, her four cars are checked over at her home by an all-male group of mechanics. “She can kill you for these cars,” jokes one of them, Nqobile Tshabalala.