// johannesburg. 2014

Based on research conducted for my honours thesis, I wrote a fictional ethnography as I made the move from my hometown to Cape Town (at age 23/24). These are incomplete vignettes based on my wanderings and wonderings in Johannesburg, South Africa. A mixture of memories and imaginings; academic explorations and personal experiences of growing up in Johannesburg. Maybe I will revisit these stories and complete them some day...

one.

Smoke like mist rises from the grills, filling the air with a wood-fire haze. Orange clay-painted faces stand in the shade of make-shift stalls, pausing their exchange of electric clicks and high-toned bouts of chatter to take food orders from visitors. Behind them, stacked against the wall, cages stuffed with chickens snatching beak-fulls of feathers and pecking at each other’s feet. Above them, perched in a mocking fashion, cock-eyed pigeons parade their freedom on the roofs of the stalls. Shadow people slice through the charcoal air and the pigeons scatter; they fear they could be next!
I choke on the sweet smoke as I open my car door and step into a pothole filled with murky grey, rainbowed water. The cold clings to my sock and oozes bubbles out of my shoe as I walk out of the shadow of the highway above and into the burning summer sun. A painted face runs to me and asks if I want to order lunch.
‘Angiyidli inyama’, I don’t eat meat, I lie politely. It is rude to decline, but acceptable for me to be vegetarian because I am white.
Rows of dented white taxis parked beneath the highway between blackened pillars, like piano keys, blast music from crackling speakers while a faint Celine Dion competes with the rhythmic melodies of mbaqanga and RnB. I walk through a red brick archway plastered with concert posters and adverts for those wanting to bring back lost lovers, past a rusted sign that reads “Welcome to KwaMai Mai”, and into the market.

‘Intombi into mlungu’ A weathered man lounging on a three-legged plastic chair spits the words at me, licking the shrapnel of his words from his blistered lips. He thinks a virgin will cure his AIDS.  Children toss around a ball of crumpled newspaper while mothers wash clothes in iron tubs and fathers play a variation of cards and checkers on overturned buckets and apple boxes. I am here to see Umpiyezwe, war of our nation, but I do not know where to find him amongst this maze of cars and ordered chaos. He grew up in a time of struggle; now we live in schizophrenic bliss. I call him Impi, warrior, because that is what he is. He calls me Thembi, hope. We had met before, outside a nearby hostel where people dance on Sundays. He invited me to come and see his shop in the market.
‘Where is your husband?’ Says another man walking beside me. He reaches for my hand.
‘Voetsek’, Impi walks towards us, emerging from a white-framed arch, and pulls me aside. He leans his shoulder in front of me and raises his jaw at the pestering man. The man turns and kicks the newspaper ball into a pool of stagnant drain water. The children dare not cry. A boy in a faded Springbok rugby jersey picks up a dented Coke bottle and throws it through the diamond gaps in the star-shaped gate. They play a new game instead.
‘Come this way’, Impi takes me by the wrist and leads me to the right, away from the beer depot around which the men gather. He wants to show me the coffins.
‘The first time I bring a white boy here he brings with him a knife for protection!’ He smiles with his eyes. ‘Protection for what? I do not know.’ He chuckles and his face softens. He has old eyes.

‘Mai Mai is better than Jeppe’, he says, ‘at Jeppe all you can buy is beer. Here you can buy a coffin and spears, shoes and amabeshu’; cowhides worn around the waist.
The coffins and cheap wooden chests are all spray-painted a gold and copper ombre. A teenager with a blue and black ombre guitar sits on a splintered log and plucks at the strings to tune them. They whine as he pulls and twists them into place. An older man jabs a cigarette at him if he turns the flecked silver keys too far. They must be tuned right for him to play maskandi like his father.
I trace with my fingers the crude lines chipped into the wood of an expensive chest. A picture of the Virgin Mary behind a cloudy piece of glass embedded into the front of the chest smiles at the wooden elephant scene beside her.
“You like this one? This one is for a married woman”, Impi explains, “She keeps a blanket and things in here”.
I side-step incomplete coffins with fake gold trimmings, over mouldy planks of wood and across a red floor decorated with criss-crossed outlines of spray-painted coffins. A brick pillar sprinkled with saw-dust displays a worn, tilted, bottle-green sign that reads: “Hou U fabriek skoon. Keep your factory clean”. Three men walk past and toss an empty Nik Naks packet and pinched cigarette bud onto the pile of plastic and dirt beneath the sign.

We enter a shop layered with beaded accessories against the walls from ceiling to floor. Impi insists that I try some on before settling on a hat, necklace and belt. The beads are bright, light and plastic. He calls a teenager over to take a photo of me with my phone. The young man avoids eye contact and then melts back into the sun through the doorframe.  A woman sits in the corner threading beads. She asks Impi how he knows me.
‘Singumndeni’, we are family, he nudges me and smiles again with his eyes. Impi says that my father is his brother because my father let him take me to Jeppe hostel one Sunday afternoon last year. This had proven to Impi that my father trusted him to protect his daughter in what he viewed as a dangerous place. I was surprised that my father had allowed me to go, but perhaps living in a city where crime and danger are a constant threat we have become accustomed to their ominous presence.

People walk past and look at us through the shattered windows. I look at myself in a jagged piece of mirror resting on a couch squashed into the matchbox room. I see a man’s reflection behind me standing in the doorframe. He asks to enter and explains that he takes photos and prints them for R15 each. I do not have any money on me so I decline. He walks away, but comes back and asks if he could take a photo for himself. He takes out a small red Nikon camera, the blue flash lights up the dark room for a moment and washes out the details of my pale face.

We walk past an old woman seated on a grass mat weaving a basket. She sits in the shade cast by dripping laundry hanging from the shops’ gutters. Sweat trickles from her forehead into the deep furrows above her brow and into the fine creases around her eyes. Her skin, like leather, maps her life with scabs and scars, scratches and sorrows. At the end of the row of brick shops is a red wall with three windows and a satellite dish. Leaning against the wall of peeling paint and stale urine are large wooden disks with animal skins nailed to them, drying in the sun. There is a pipe that runs from the gutter to the ground. A man has tied a hippo tail to the pipe and is lathering it up in grease to soften it. This will later be made into a whip, explains Impi. No matter what, it will not break. Next to him are glass Sprite and Fanta bottles dressed in what looks like blonde wigs. I think these are tied around the arms, but I do not want to ask in case he makes me try them on.

Impi’s shop is blue; sky blue. It is bigger than the other shops. Shields like leaves cover a wall while amabeshu cowhides cover another. Handwritten labels are stuck onto every item. The time it must have taken to make every item by hand…
‘Bheka la’, look here. Impi points at the neat rows of sandals lined up against the wall on a shelf. The shoes are red with three straps boasting intricate zigzag patterns of black and white lines and triangles, each one carved out by hand with a box-cutter.
‘This is izingcab’lela’, he picks one up and hands it to me. I turn it around to look at its car-tyre sole. ‘There’s a people called amagxagxa, they wear a suit and these shoes. They drift between the two worlds of new and old’. Impi takes the shoe from me and bends the toe back to the heel. ‘It will not break. It is strong. This comes from KwaZulu Natal, but in those days we just had leather from our cattle. When we come to Jo’burg we have tyres. Tyres make strong shoes’.
‘How do you make these?’ I ask.
He holds up his hands and inspects the scars that web across his fingers. ‘I will show you, but someone has pinched my knife’.

A man enters the shop carrying a plastic bag. He takes his checkered hat off and holds it against his chest. He greets Impi and calls me madam. His eyes, like Impi’s, are soft and blue-rimmed.
‘My young brother asks for some leather if you have any spare, please.’
Behind a wooden work bench Impi picks up a neatly stacked pile of fragments of different coloured leathers from China Mall and the Oriental Plaza. He slides them into the plastic bag that the man holds open for him. ‘Thembi’, Impi gives the bag to me, ‘take this to shop 62, please. I must talk to this man.’

I walk down the second row of brick shops. The numbers are painted on doors and walls. Some have no numbers, just names. The names are for chemists, healers and sangomas. A girl tugs at her mother’s hand as they walk past, ‘mama, mama, umlungu!’ A white person. Her mother smiles and waves at me to sugar-coat the awkward moment.  Stickers stuck to some doors read “Shembe is the Way” with a faded face next to the bold words. I have the same one. A few months ago I attended a Shembe gathering just outside of Soweto. I had to cover my hair, shoulders and knees. A woman had wrapped my curls in a white cloth and secured the knot by my neck. As I walked barefoot through the straw-strewn streets of the temporary Shembe market, people hugged me and shook my hand, holding on for a little bit longer. One woman took a photo of me with her old Motorola flip-phone, saying she wanted to show her boss that white people can come to these events. I had to pay five Rand for the possibility of meeting the healer that everyone had travelled across the country to see. I did not get to see him; he was too busy making a man in a wheelchair walk again.

I see a sea of red, blue and yellow; rows of shoes lined up outside shop 62. From the burglar bars hangs a ragged, windswept South African flag. I knock on the splintered wooden door. Shards of old red paint stick to my knuckles. I wonder if the gospel music blaring from inside drowned the wooden clicks. I knock again. The music is silenced and someone jerks open the door.
‘Sorry, sorry, I was working and couldn’t get to the door’, he says. He seems young to be owning a shop here; maybe my age or a bit older. A pungent smell of boiling herbs leaks out of the room. It reminds me of those small bean bags you put in the microwave to soothe muscle pain, only this one must have burnt.  
‘Come in, come in’, his voice is smooth and warm.
He leaves the door open. I am thankful for that. I see that he is boiling a liquorice type of goo that oozes greenish brown bubbles in a small tin pot over a Bunsen burner. Mountains of shoes like sand dunes crowd the small room. He sits on a footstool against the wall furthest from the door and I sit by the window on a wooden work bench glazed in fabric glue. The light falls softly on his face. He has a healed deep gash on his cheek; no sign of stitches having been there. He looks familiar.
He picks up a long piece of punctured grey leather and a strip of brown suede. He threads the brown strip through the holes to make a Morse code pattern.
He looks up and grins ever so slightly, ‘mehlo madala’, he says in earthy tones.
I look down and blush in return. I smile because mehlo madala directly translates to old eyes, but I also smile because it means long time no see. I do know him.

two.

The moon shimmers like a gold nugget in a river of stars. The leafy suburbs have been plunged into darkness by Eskom’s load-shedding, leaving the night sky unusually bright. Candle-light dinners light up windows and cast bronze shadows on disgruntled faces. I park my car in the street next to an alleyway; the only spot available near the school. It is the Grade 7’s play tonight, their last show at the school. A neighbour has asked that I bring their youngest daughter to a restaurant in Rosebank where they are celebrating a birthday.

I sign in by torch-light and smile at the security guard’s shaded face. A generator grumbles on as proud parents cheer at the end of their children’s well-rehearsed performance. The girl and I walk back to the car, she bubbles with excitement and the after-effects of Cream Soda, pausing momentarily to admire the moon. For a moment the ominous alley-way fades, along with the potential dangers it conceals. We get in the car and drive off. She sits in the seat diagonally behind me and listens quietly to her iPod while I map the route to the restaurant in my mind.

Not far from the sheltered middle class suburb we had departed from, we reach a big intersection near the University of the Witwatersrand; Wits. The robot switches from amber to red. I slow down, but do not stop, as I scan either end of the road bathed in red light for any oncoming traffic. Right, left, right again. A window smashes. I look left, expecting to see a car accident. Nothing. The girl starts screaming. I whip my head around and see her lying on the back seat, trying to get away from the door. Two big hands have punched through the window and are gripping onto hers; her small, fine fingers swallowed up by these calloused palms and jagged nails. The car stalls. My mind races, but my actions are delayed. Fight, flight or freeze? I do all three. With one hand I reach back and scratch at the foreign fingers, while with the other I turn the key in the ignition. The girl keeps screaming. The hands hold on to hers, trying to surgically remove the iPod through the incision in the window. They succeed, leaving a gaping hole of shattered glass dangling from the frame and fragments scattered over the shell-shocked girl.  

‘Are you ok?’ I ask, frozen.
‘Can we go?’ She whispers.
The car is on, I turn the key further and it grinds. A car stops behind us. The robot turns green.

three.

Johannesburg is the city of gold. It was founded on a quest for wealth and hidden fortune. In a raging storm of blood and sweat, precious stones and glittered dust, rose a metropolis. Today the streets are filled with gold-diggers of a different kind. Sandstone buildings with detailed stone-work and laced cast-iron railings now house the death, decay and destruction of their former glory. The clock tower on the old Rissik Street post office has been gagged in a giant plastic bag after having its insides gutted by an accidental fire. Its lifeless frame weeps chunks of charcoal floorboards and melted paint. Like a magician that disappears behind a cloak of wonder and disbelief, the city of Johannesburg disintegrates and revives in front of our eyes; a living, breathing entity that does not want to die.

I drive through Newtown, past highway pillars tattooed in graffiti; on one a painting of Nelson Mandela, fist in the air, with the words “freedom to create” beneath. I take a wrong turn and get lost in this world of pictured defiance. I see a middle-aged man working on a car on the pavement outside an auto-repair shop. I pull over and flash my hazard lights as I open the passenger window and wave him over. He walks over with a heavy heart, annoyed that I have interrupted his work, and he asks in Afrikaans what I want.
‘How do I get to Mai Mai Market from here?’
He does not respond. I ask the question again in Afrikaans.
‘I heard you’, he grunts. ‘What do you want to make there?’
‘I want to take pictures’.
His eyes blaze, ‘if you go there you lose your camera, you lose your car, you lose your life’.
‘Ok I will go to Arts on Main instead’, I lie. Arts on Main is on the same road as the entrance to Mai Mai.
He glares at me, not sure if he should believe me. ‘Go down this road, jump the robot and take a right. You will see a sign there for Arts on Main’. He walks away.

I park under the highway outside Mai Mai. I check my phone to see what time it is and to avoid making eye contact with the women selling food in the braai area. There is a knock on the window. It is Impi. I unlock the doors and he gets in just as a woman rushes over and ask if we want meat. Impi declines. She poses the question to me.
‘Cha, ngiyabonga. Ngisuthi’, no thank you, I am full.
‘Usuthi?’ You are full? She asks, raising an eyebrow.
It was not a complete lie; I had eaten an hour ago.

Impi closes the door and indicates that we should turn right and then left. More graffiti. More pothole-dodging. We drive up the road, deeper into the industrial part of town.

[note: the story continues to Jeppe hostel where Zulu dancing takes place on Sundays. That is where the shoemaker knows Thembi from. She had been there before and had seen a white man dance.]

four.

[note: an old homeless man from Malawi asks for money to buy cigarettes. Shares his life story]

five.

[note: walking through Soweto, hearing stories of political pasts, and sampling food on Vilakazi street]

six.

[note: Northcliff Hill at sunset - looking out over a purple sea of Jacaranda trees when someone falls to their death]

seven.

[note: visit George Gogh Men's hostel - bullet holes at the entrance, public prayers nextdoor, tin homes burnt down outside]

eight.

[note: walking back home from the Emmarentia Dam when a child screams and an armed robbery takes place across the road]

nine.

Standing on the roof of the 12 Decades Art Hotel with Arts on Main below, the labyrinth of roads has been revived; life has been breathed into the streets again. In this phantasmagorical safe haven of artisanal coffee and beer, repurposed junk, and intimate anonymity, city dwellers escape the stress of employment, the threat of unemployment, the anticipation of the unknown, and the cynicism of the known.

There walks a girl, wandering the streets aimlessly. She had left home to be with an older man she thought she loved, only to be trapped and deceived. She was young and reckless; a saint and a sinner. A childless mother walks behind her, cradling the pain of an unborn infant. She had lost her baby in pregnancy. She sips her artisanal coffee and flashes a dead smile at her friends who prattle on about shoes. Crossing the road, a father picks up his son and sits him on his shoulders. People from Johannesburg used to be called vaalies because of its location in the former Transvaal. Now they are referred to as sopkoppies because they carry their children on their shoulders and say “‘sop koppie”, mind your head, when walking through a doorway. 

Behind me a middle-aged man helps his father up the steps onto the roof. His father is dying of a broken heart after the death of his wife. They were married for almost sixty years. He wants his father to see the city while he still can and reminisce while he still remembers.
‘Not far from here’, he tells his son, out of breath, ‘is where I grew up’.
‘In Braamfontein’, says the son, having heard the story many times before.
‘We used to play on those mine dumps’, he sweeps his hand in the direction of imaginary yellow hills of unearthed soil and gold dust’, his ice blue eyes look through the concrete skyline.
‘Those are toxic’, says his son, his vision barricaded by buildings and reality.
His eighty-year-old father continues, ‘I was five, maybe six. My friend - ’
‘Paton’.
‘Yes, Paton and I would drag this iron tub to the dam. When we got to the water’s edge we stripped and tossed our school clothes one side so that they would not get wet in the water’.
‘What about your tie?’ The son reminds him of the key element of his story.
‘Oh yes, the captain had to keep his tie on so that everyone knew he was the captain of the ship. The captain would sit in the ship and the sailor would push it out to sea. The problem was’, he chuckles and his eyes fall sadly on his son’s aging face, ‘there was a hole at the bottom of the tub and so it filled with water. My mother would shout at me when I got home with a wet tie. I told her it was from the water fountain at school.’ His eyes well up with tears and his smile turns false.

I reach in my pocket and hand him a tissue, having pretended to not be listening.
‘Thank you, dear’, his nose trumpets into the tissue.
His son puts a hand on his aged father’s shoulder. I wonder how many times those shoulders had carried him and how he now gives his father a shoulder to lean on.
‘Tell me the story of how you and mom met’, he says.
‘Ag, you don’t want to hear that one again’.
‘I’d like to hear it’, I say out of character.
The old man smiles blissfully. ‘Both my parents died of a heart attack on the same day, four years apart. My dad died when I started high school and my mother died during my matric exams’.
‘I’m sorry. That must have been really tough’, I give the rehearsed response, but mean the sentiment behind it.
‘It was’, says his son, ‘my dad became an alcoholic when he finished school’.
‘That was because all I was left with after my parents died was my dog and when I was sent to live with my aunt she got rid of him; my only companion’.

The sun was starting to set and his eyes shone silver in the copper sun light. ‘I ended up in hospital. The nurse on duty saw my name on the list and thought I was her ex-boyfriend – we had the same name. She came rushing in expecting to find him there. He had threatened to commit suicide if she left him, so you can imagine how furious and concerned she must have been’.
‘Imagine how pleasantly surprised she must have been to see this charming blue-eyed boy awaiting her arrival!’ Teases his son.
‘Yes, she was very shocked! She stormed into the room and when she saw me she unclenched her fists. It was love at first sight for her. When she turned around and walked away I saw those beautiful, long legs and it was love at first sight for me!’

I soak up his heart-warming story with the heartless city as our backdrop. To think that such love can blossom from such debilitating place: utshani obulele buvuswa omlilo. The dry, dead grass is made new again by fire. So too do we become awake and alive again in the face of devastation.

ten.

[note: attending a music performance at Tanz cafe in the suburbs before it closed down, and then leaving the city for Cape Town]