Soweto's spinning queen

If you are able to make atyre pop, then you are pretty special.

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 tatt ooed 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 prett y special,” says Jivhuho, mother of an admiring teenage son. “When you hear a pop, you are going to hear the crowd go wild.”

This adrenaline-pumping sport was born in Soweto in the ’80s, when South Africa was still under the 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.