I come from a long line of storytellers and bards who forge epics woven from words spun together like koeksisters on any Sunday afternoon, in any chicken curry-imbued home on the Cape Flats. I come from pre-Netflix family gatherings, where after lunch, huddled between an array of milk tarts, ashtrays and beer bellies - I received first-hand the storyteller’s institution like no other. I come from a well-traveled sailor who fell for a small town tennis champ in the thick of a divided country - an offspring of two colourful giants who, in a black-and-white world, were never given the world as their oyster. Their platform was a kitchen table, their microphone a teapot and their protagonists - friends, relatives and the highlight reel of lives fully, if not richly lived. 

How mom and dad, aunty So-and-so and uncle Whatchamacallit could rote-recite their anecdotes from years gone by, talk all night and drive home, barely exhausted at daybreak was beyond the scope of my little brain. But these gatherings - these meetings of the tribespeople, had become my mainstay. Even through the clickety-clack of tiny fingers on a Sega Mega Drive, fascinated by a 16-bit blue hedgehog collecting rings on my Ouma’s static-adorned TV, I could hear them in the next room - the elders like a Greek chorus ululating a hilarious cacophony of parables and old wives tales. Here they would recite narratives about which classmate married whom and where they live now, as if in one voice they conspired to write the manuscript to some bad novella.

And by way of osmosis, I absorbed a generation’s worth of tall tales, struggle stories and small town genealogies. So, as my obsession grew, wrapping it’s fingers around my DNA like a lover’s embrace - the storyteller’s gift fell to me on a not-so-easily-defined life and career trajectory.

So for as long as I can remember, this preoccupation with characters and backstory, with subtext and plot conjures in me seeds of ideas, many of which manifest into songs, stage shows, music albums, podcasts, poems, articles and blog posts. Story is what has carried me, the last bastion of innocence in a world that prematurely births realistic thinking from childhood fantasies.

“...he views the world through a different set of lenses. This, coupled with his borderline obsession with lyricism and word play, makes him a formidable storyteller...Between his pragmatic mind and creative spirit, Josh forms part of the rarest types of people, the intellectual creative." - Jarrod Morkel, Director | The Cognative Design Solution.

multi instrumentalist,composer, producer 

kurt.diedericks@gmail.com

Instagram.com/kurtmodi

Followers of Joshua &quot;Fruit Vendor&quot; Prinsloo

Followers of Joshua "Fruit Vendor" Prinsloo