Larry Joe: from prison to passion A story of a young man’s journey to his dream…
- Interview by Bronwyn Engelbrecht
at the Tshwane University of Technology Business School induction day March 2012
B
orn in Kimberley, grew up in Cape Town and Warrenton, and finally moving to Douglas in the Northern Cape in 1993, Larry Joe has come a long way since his humble beginnings. While living in Douglas, he became involved in gangsterism and drugs at the age of 15. In 2001, he broke into a house and stole a lot of goods, and after discovering that the police were after him, he boarded the train in Kimberley and ran away to Cape Town. For the first three months there, he lived on the streets, begging and parking cars during the day.
One morning he saw three men playing music in front of the restaurants. They had a bucket where people could throw money into
when walking by and listening to them. When Larry was a child, his father showed him three chords on a guitar and he realised that he could easily do this and make money. “I had about R130 in the bank from the three months living on the streets and parking cars, and begging, so I went to Cash Crusaders and I bought myself a second-hand guitar for R125, and I started playing. The first day I made R800 as a street musician and I thought ‘this is good money, I can survive with this amount of money’ so I just kept playing,” Joe explains.
A pivotal point in his life came on the 11th of May 2007 when Joe had a dream. “I dreamed that I was performing in New York in Madison
48 Management Today | April 2012
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