This week’s cliché is certainly problematic. (To appreciate this, all you have to do is read Dispatch #1.) But most people here, all but the most rabid, racist extremes, people of all hues, do want the rainbow nation to work.
Three nights ago over dinner, in the conservative Free State, a Boer farmer and I were comparing the problems of our two countries. I said I thought ours were bad, but theirs were worse. He did not think so. The U.S., he opined, is an old, rich democracy, yet we keep making the same stupid mistakes. “South Africa is young. We want it to work. We will make it work.” This from a man whose father had casually used the n— word with me, and when he saw how shocked and unhappy that made me, added a dollop of the usual pabulum. (More on the Boer farm family next week.)
As it happens, I’m lodging in the near vicinity of a microcosm of the R.N. A five-minute walk from my guest house brings me into a time warp: Greenwich Village, early 60’s (when, as it happens, I lived on East 4th & Avenue B). I refer to Seventh Street, the main drag in Melville, Johannesburg, which my guidebook characterizes as having a “laid-back and artsy feel.” (Rough Guide redux, p..526). Bookstores, cafes, gay bars, jazz bars, funky restaurants, gee-gaw shops, street peddlers selling animals made of wire. A scruffy neighborhood, easy to be comfortable in, and with more racial mixing than you can probably see most places in New York: blacks, whites, Asians, mixtures.
I was introduced to a Melville-type at “Wish,” an internet café, while I was interviewing another guy, who turned out to have been the guy’s college classmate. He (the Melville type) was decked out in full sixties regalia: dashiki (uncommon here, most have gone western), beard, little glasses, long dreads, hands clasped in peace at the intro, and palpable street creds. (”See you in Soweto next time, my brothers.”) When he went back over to his computer, my interviewee said the guy, who looked to be in his thirties or early forties, came from a rich family, but was working as a d.j. “He’s really just spending time. His sister is, too.” My guy is an entrepreneur/philanthropist who runs double marathons. That other guy was sooo “Sixties.”
An extreme Seventh-Street oddity was a pizza place, where I ate twice. It was about, like, the music, like, man. Dig? I mean, talk about a time warp: this place had two time warps, the 60’s and the 50’s: “Save the Last Dance for Me,” “Hit the Road, Jack,” “Blue Moon” (L. Armstrong), heavy on L. Prima/K. Smith and B. Darren; conspicuously absent, L. Richard, C. Berry, and anything that might be called “rock.” (Real pop music aficianados can correct me here, please.)
Do they, the Melvilleans, know about Greenwich Village? They must. Don’t they mind being a simulacrum?
Another night, another meal. This time, I saw four Indian women eating at a Vietnamese-Thai restaurant. I’m by no means confident I understood what was going on, but this is what I think. Three looked churchy and, possibly, gay. The fourth, who came in late, was fifteen years younger and much slimmer than the others. The outfits of the older three were blowsy (skirts, shirts, dresses); hers, more up-to-date (tight jeans and a cute shirt not covering her mid-section). Although they were solicitous of her getting enough dainty morsels, she was not the daughter of any of them. They were talking about relationships, like a therapy group. .(Je snoop, donc je suis.) Then, her cell phone rang, she apologized, and went outside. When I left the restaurant half an hour later, she was still on the sidewalk, still talking on her telefonino, a full member of the global chattering classes.
At my low-to-middle-end guest house, a cozy, also funky place, we are quite a potpourri, with rainbow overtones. In my two weeks, the guests have comprised lots of people from northern Europe, for some reason –perhaps the Dutch connection-one from Australia, no other Americans, and two South Africans, a black woman and a guy of mixed race. Both indigenes are beautiful people, here several weeks for an intensive course in hotel management. They come from (coincidence) Free State.
The guests mix, in various styles and with various degrees of ease (the English are the stiffs) with the two women who run the place, who do the work. Both of these women are from the same ethnic group, Sotho, one (the boss, big and wonderful) from Botswana, and the other (younger, smaller, with sharp barometric swings) from this side of the Botswana border. Look for more on these two women in a future dispatch.
Yebo. (Hello.) “Yebo Millionaires” is a game show here.
Back up the road to Melville. Sidewalk cafes, too. What, exactly, is going on (going down) in Melville? There are Iron Age smelters nearby, but I can’t find who the place was named for: Herman, I hope.
In Melville, you see the new rich, the new non-poor, acceptance, niceness, lots of hair, lots of beer and wine. One restaurant has closed since I arrived. Before it closed, the owner explained that too much of the serious money has been moving to the northern suburbs. In the past decade, or so, much of downtown Jo’burg has relocated to one particular, ritzy burb called Sandton. (Does that remind you of anything? The really, the truly, literate will know that Jane Austen’s last, unfinished novel about real-estate development on England’s south coast is called Sanditon.)
Seventh Street seems callow, but nice. More may be going on than meets the eye. Here comes a Hippo-Sized Hypothesis:. This is the new South Africa. These people in the cafes and bars are recovering from apartheid, like the Lost Generation in Europe, who were trying to get past WW1. Do you believe that hypothesis? It’s probably nonsense.
By way of contrast with Melville hippies, consider the clerk at the chain store in a nearby mall where I bought my cell phone (mobile). She told nosey me that she commutes in slow-lane vans called “taxis” to and from, again, Soweto, the nation’s -maybe the world’s–signature township. She was wearing the mobile phone company blazer, sprayed hair, and heavy make-up.
After she sold me the phone, she remarked matter-of-factly, “I have no money for lunch.”
“What do you think my wife would think [i.e., if I bought you lunch]?”
“I was just joking,” she retreated.
After I finished shopping, I brought her back some fruit and a roll from Pick & Pay, the supermarket in the mall, handing it to her with a wink, then fleeing, while she tended to a middle-aged white couple, who gave me a subdued stink-eye. She nodded her thanks.
Is the phone woman the old South Africa? the old and the new? Certainly the wonderful place I found to play squash at, in a leafy, nearby suburb, is the O.S.A. I’ve been there four times now. Almost all the players are white; the staff, mostly black. There are a few Indian players, no blacks.
Or what about this? (Old and new?) To keep the reader of Dispatch #1 from dying of empathic mortification, your correspondent, Candidus Americanus, omitted his first, post-flight, pre-getting lost, disaster. Here it comes now, two weeks later. Embarrassment, where is thy sting?
A few miles (kilos) from the airport, driving on the left, you understand, in speeding, heavy traffic, I hit some debris as I tried to navigate a construction zone. (Jo’burg roads are a construction zone.) Both left tires immediately blew. I pulled off the highway into the area where the crew and their equipment were situated. Since I had not yet bought a mobile, I asked one of the orange jump-suited employees if I could pay to use his, to call the car-rental people.
(Shortly after majority rule, which came in1994, South Africa paid off a huge chunk of debt, and government has used the augmented revenues for huge infrastructure projects like roads. Laudable, even though this has made hardly any inroads into the huge unemployment problem. I won’t even offer an unemployment stat -all are horrific, all are problematic. Anyway, there seem to be thousands of young men in blue or orange jump suits with yellow glow vests working on the roads.)
More kindness of strangers (See Dispatch #1.) Two young guys (orange suits) came over to cluck at my flat tires. One did have a phone, but it was empty. They offered to guide me to a phone. I locked the car, and we clambered up a grassy bank into an enclave I can’t pretend to have comprehended. There was a big police station on the road, in front of which a big, scary squad was doing serious paramilitary drill, presumably in preparation for crowd control at the World Cup, in June. There were also a post office, a hotel, and scattered shopping and office complexes. The neighborhood, or enclave, seemed half-built, perhaps a recession victim.
We tried the P.O first. A gaunt woman of about forty, white, speaking British-y English, tried the car-rental number for twenty minutes; the line was never free. (Later, the car renters explained that Fridays are mad busy.) Then, we trudged down the tarred road for fifteen minutes toward the hotel. It was about nine-thirty or ten by now, getting hot, me in my long pants from the plane and carrying a heavy backpack with my computer, etc.(clothes locked in the car).
As we walked along, I asked my two helpers how they got to work every day, out on the highway in the middle of what must have been, for them, nowhere. They said they take a train from the township, which must mean something on the order of sixteen-hour days. They, in turn, inquired as to whether I smoked ganja (negative), and asked if it was true that, if you approached someone on the streets of New York for directions, they would charge you a fee to answer. (Might this have been a hint that I should not omit tipping them?)
At the hotel compound’s entrance, I had to sign in at a gate while my two new friends watched. Then, one flashed his mobile at the woman security guard, suggesting he do her the honor of entering her number. Nothing doing. Inside the small lobby, we all needed a cold drink, but they did not take U.S. money. A water fountain? You buy water in places like this. In fact, there was a nice little bar at the back of the lobby, just past which a bunch of idle, bling-heavy pleasure lovers, were drinking and yakking it up, poolside. No one was actually in the pool. I considered plunging in, fully clothed, but controlled the impulse. When I asked the barman for three glasses of water, he somatized, experiencing temporary deafness.
While the young, white, flamboyantly gay desk clerk kept trying the car rental place, we sat down and waited uneasily, the two guys in orange suits and the sweaty stranger, equally sore thumbs. The conversation having long since lapsed, my two Samaritans began to look increasingly nervous, so I suggested they get back to work before the boss went ballistic. Without a mote of conviction, I said I’d sort things out, then see them back at the site. They promptly left, after which I asked the clerk, and he had the barman give me a (free) glass of ice water. Why hadn’t I thought of asking the clerk for three glasses of water? I had, but it had seemed much.
The upshot was that the clerk, also unable to get through to the car rental place, got me a cab, expensive, back to the airport. The car rental clerks had me fill out a report and gave me a new car, directing me to return with the keys to the construction site, where their towing guy, to whom they relayed my shaky directions, would meet me. I changed some money, started back, and, to my mild surprise, readily found the place. The “towing guys,” who were waiting, turned out to be a cheerful young tattooed white couple. I gave my two helpers a nice, but not ridiculous tip. We did that elaborate handshake with fists, snapped fingers, slaps, etc I can never get it right, probably because I was never in the Boy Scouts. (Baden-Powell was inspired to start the B.S. by his British army experience in -yes– South Africa. Off I went -to get lost in the city.
recommended books:
Zakes Mda, Ways of Dying (a novel about ways of surviving)
Nathan Alderman says:
Thank you for the book recommendation. Looking forward to dispatch #3.