The best networking event idea I’ve ever seen isn’t networking at all. Here’s how a four-word brief — “write it around Braai Day” — became a top-secret government summit, a room full of suspects, and the newest tradition rolling out to the Lekker Network’s “tenth province.”
There is a moment, early in every one of these evenings, when I stop being nervous and start being smug. Last night at Clara Anna Fontein in Durbanville, it arrived the second the guests walked in.
Because they didn’t walk in as themselves. They arrived as ministers and deputies and comrades, summoned by an official invitation from the Minister of Arts and Culture himself, Shimmy Shabalala, to a highly classified summit on a matter of grave national importance: should we rename Heritage Day to Braai Day?
Reader, they committed. Head-to-toe leopard print. A purple wig that deserved its own security detail. A green suit with a South African flag knotted at the throat. A kente fan, deployed with the confidence of a woman who has never once lost an argument. A tweed jacket and orange bow tie. A convincing military uniform and salute held just a beat too long. Nobody phoned this in. Nobody ever does — and that’s rather the point.
The brief was four words long
This game began, as the best ones do, over a virtual coffee. One of the Lekker Network’s co-founders and I got to talking, and he commissioned me to write a bespoke murder mystery dinner for the network. The entire brief was this: make it about Braai Day.
That was it. The rest was mine to invent — which is exactly how I like it.
Now, here’s a small trade secret. A room full of South Africans standing around a braai is not a murder mystery. It’s a Tuesday. A good mystery needs a reason for a strange collection of people to be in the same room — and then it needs a twist to shove them all off balance. So I asked myself a very simple question: who, actually, is in charge of Heritage Day? The Minister of Arts and Culture. And just like that, I had my host, my summit, and my murder victim.
What I did with that plot, I’m afraid, I cannot tell you — not with chapters still to play this. I can tell you that Minister Shabalala’s opening address begins with a perfectly reasonable proposal about a public holiday and escalates, with breathtaking speed, into something so gloriously out of hand that the room actually gasped. And the murder, when it comes? Almost the least interesting thing that happens all night. That’s by design. The murder is just the problem to solve. The joy is in everything around it.
No script. Just suspects.
Here’s the part people never quite believe until they’ve done it: this evening is roughly ninety percent improvised. No lines to memorise. No scripts to read. Everyone gets a character, a few prompts, and full permission to run.
And every single time, the same magic happens. The person you’d least expect picks up an accent and steals the entire night.
My favourite moment last night — and I’ll keep it vague enough to spoil nothing — involved one guest (freshly widowed), overcome with theatrical grief, flinging herself toward a garden window to wail the victim’s name into the Durbanville night. The window, unhelpfully, was only open a crack. So there she was, folded sideways, cheek to the frame, howling “Shiiiiimmmyyyy” through a twenty-centimetre gap. Moments later she was crushing (Panado) something on the table and doing (imaginary) lines with the commitment of a woman with nothing left to lose.
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You cannot write that. I’ve tried. You cannot write a script funnier than a room full of people the moment you hand them a character and get out of the way. That’s not a slogan. It’s the whole business.
The best networking happens when nobody’s networking
Here’s the quiet genius of handing strangers — or colleagues, or a whole network of people who’ve only ever met online — a character instead of a name badge. Nobody asks what you do. Nobody swaps a business card. You skip the weather and the small talk entirely, because you’re far too busy being a scandal-ridden deputy minister to make polite conversation.
It’s the most disarming networking event idea I know, precisely because it looks nothing like networking. By the end of the night, people who arrived as strangers are finishing each other’s sentences and cheerfully plotting each other’s downfall — friends before they even know each other’s real names. For a network like Lekker, built entirely on connection, that’s the whole point.
From Durbanville to the tenth province
By the end of the evening, before we’d even cleared the table, we were already talking about what comes next. Because this wasn’t a one-off. The Heritage Day Summit is now the Lekker Network’s own bespoke murder mystery — and it’s rolling out to local chapters across South Africa and to what they lovingly call the tenth province: every South African scattered around the world who still belongs to the network. One evening in a clubhouse in Durbanville, about to be played in living rooms and venues on several continents.
That’s what a bespoke game is. Not a box off a shelf. A world built for a specific set of people, for a specific reason, that becomes something they own and pass around and make their own.
Nobody left that room the same person who walked in. Which is the only thing I’m ever really trying to do.
Want a night your people will still be talking about next year?
I write bespoke murder mystery dinners around your actual people — your team, your family, your network, your ridiculous inside jokes. You give me the occasion; I give you a world, a summit, a scandal, and a room full of suspects who forget their phones exist for an entire evening.
Tell me about your people, and let’s build the night no one saw coming.
Commission your bespoke murder mystery →
Designed in Cape Town. Hosted everywhere.
— Lisa Aspeling, The Murder Mystery Guide
📷 Images by Dinkie Media.