District 9

26^th Feb, 2011

I spent the day in Ivory and Ebony Park yesterday, presenting the first Enterprise Powerhouse information session. W was the first to arrive early, and we had a great conversation about him and his business. His father left early on in his childhood and didn’t send him to school, and that is his big boulder on his shoulder, that he didn’t get an education and so can’t do his dream job, boilermaker. Boilermaker? Dream job? OK, if you say so. The guy has fabulous energy and is an entrepreneur. I asked a few questions around what he had gained by not going to school, the inquiry needed to go deeper but we made our way there. The Theory of Equilibration is such a great tool to reposition one's thinking.

Ivory Park is lovely, from a certain perspective. Its got  a great vibe, its like being in a rural area. Slow, rounded time with people everywhere. Being with J, much greeting and many introductions, we spent a really lovely afternoon putting up posters for the information session and letting people know about the project.

The day was marred by a massive traffic jam, so that it took me 3 hours to get home. At one point I got my laptop out of the boot and checked my email, and came across discussion on Facebook about a Spoek music video, that is quite dark and primal. The discussion started around how the gaze in the video was disturbing, and then it emerged that it was made by the same folks who made District 9, or “the loathsome” District 9, as the writer named it. I read on, as I enjoyed the film and thought it well made. And this is what was written on the discussion:

I don't think there is any subversion here looking at the credits of who made the video the usual suspects

The Gaze is coming from same place that produced our representations in the loathsome District 9. Its from a particular location in white South African's gaze and psyche and received perception which goes unperceived by them,uninformed, uninterrogated, unreconstructed and underlying the unrelinquised, innate and deeply comforting supremacy that cushions their existence in sunny SA, even the ones with "political " backgrounds or suss. Am still astounded how I have always been met with blank stares and "who is that?" when referencing Hall or Gilroy when talking representation issues. Happily, I have long abandoned educating the Other's Other. And so I stay sane.

I was very shocked that I hadn’t made a deeper inquiry into District 9, that I am in fact one of those white folks who hasn’t reflected past my current perception, and allowed the voo-doo-isation of black people to exist, so swept up was I in the horrific xenophobic attacks and the condemnation of South Africans’ actions against foreigners resident in SA. When it has all been too frightening and this group is herded into a mass of “the Other”, and when our unspoken feelings of exclusion and vulnerability seep up from our unconscious mind, it is this kind of thinking, this voodoo-isation, that creates the separation, like a mist that creeps in, a veil that wafts between black and white. I see this, the interpersonal dead-wall.

I am very disturbed that I so easily enjoyed District 9, a sci fi thriller about a space ship full of aliens that is stuck over Joburg, and when freed by the army, are kept in a fenced off area where Nigerians control the monopoly of cat food to which the aliens are addicted. The film represents aliens (illegal African immigrants) as such, and stereotypical Nigerians as vicious, slobbering predators, South Africans as negligent, careless observers, with a violent public service.  

This debate is what makes South Africa an incredibly important place for me to be in. Nowhere else would my thought be thus stretched. I have not encountered this level of debate around race in Australia, perhaps because I don’t move in the right circles. I don't see any evidence of a public debate on race there. This is also the discourse that runs in private conversations, black conversations, and which I would love to see go public. But then, I wasn’t here when District 9 was released, so I don’t know what was publically debated.

I am grateful to have my peers lay it on the table this vividly, so that I am moved forward by their experience and into more critical reflection of my interactions in this world.

Such dangerous stuff to write about, if I made it public I do believe I’d be making myself available for some rabid criticism. What comes from myself is what I fear coming from others – that I didn’t have these critical thoughts myself, that I am terminally white (no argument there), that I am dense, not insightful enough. Perhaps its all true, as I have been living my experience elsewhere. And this is how I learn about race and dynamics, to be here, and to see through the various filters we experience each other through, that the fear has created.

I find on Facebook some fairly vicious, if intelligent, comments about white people. I guess that’s because so many of us live here only focussed on our own wellbeing, protecting ourselves against whatever perceived threat. There are still maids and gardeners and people who raise other peoples’ children. Fat cats, beggars on streets, people walking, trudging, missioning everywhere.

What I love about being in Ivory Park is the humanity, just being there in a place of Africa, how ordinary it all is. I like the rounded edges, the softness in the air, the friendliness of the people. And I wish for other white south Africans that they could experience this too. I know they did with the rugby in Soweto. I don't mean that I'm having a quaint experience. There is tremendous hardship in Ivory Ebony Park, but what I see is a lot of white South Africa missing out on the positive qualities of black culture, because they exclude themselves from participating in it. 

Bismillah.

Fountainhead

19^th Feb, 2011

I have long been feeling that I am living in a fog. In my younger years it was a narcotic fog, herbal, filthy chemical, whatever could create the fog. Recently, in somewhat more sober years, the fog has seeped out since witnessing the damage I do to myself working therapeutically with people, holding them in their trauma, walking, sometimes stumbling out of the horror, the crippling pain and the decimated self worth. All those workshops, the sledgehammer to my body and my delicate energetic system, I am done with it. Done with it. I put a further 6 months into iDecided, which is a website where people working with trauma can swap sessions, debriefing and supervision, but that lay down flat on the African earth in December last year, and has refused to rise. I realised I had to flog it, to chase people up and down badly designed corridors, be stood up for meetings, pursue communications with no response from the very people I was trying to help. Sometimes, the message comes loud and clear.

I have just closed the yellowed, worn pages of a badly printed book, the cover long fallen off, depicting a platinum blonde who one would expect to see perched on a red Ferrari, or in a Bond film. The designer of this cover had clearly never read the book, the most extraordinary fiction ever written, with the most important message I have ever read. The Fountainhead – Howard Rourke’s opus. It has cut through my fumbling attempts to live this life given to me, and what I discover is that the very thing I am offering to others, Activating Genius, is the very thing I have been longing for, all my life. What a mess of a life it has been, surrounded by humans who believed they knew how to develop an individual. Occasionally ham fisted family, beautiful intentions but blind to individuality, sworn enemies of anything inner, firmly committed to pruning, clipping, moulding, beating the impetus out of the little animals in their care. Constipated contracted school, clueless, posturing, hopeless in any capacity to nourish something more delicate than fictionalised history and formulaic mathematics. Religion, friends, work, you know the drill, the waiting passageway of humans busy with other humans, determined to shape humanity so that their very own genius never gets a spot of airtime.

What was it I wanted to do? I wanted to sing, to write, to create music. I just hope its not too late to make contact with that of me, like it was for Peter Keating, when he finally painted, it was gone.

I also understand my devotion and admiration to P now – he was fiercely, uncompromisingly individualistic, but I also suspect the violence of his creation was to scare people into submission. Compared to him, J is a  mere man in a suit. A second-hander. In his brother’s shadow, brilliant, I do believe it was a fight all his life to stand out. Genius, but I wonder what his real genius is?

And what mine will be? How about I approach The Enterprise Powerhouse not as an altruistic project, but a piece of work that is to serve my genius, my individuality, my unique configuration. Yes, this will be good. All the altruism didn’t feel right, it was the fog, and I think that’s part of this hunger for a partner, a man, that disowned part of me created a hunger for it in someone else. I served J, disconnecting from myself around him, in his space. Perhaps he picked it up and was repulsed by it, perhaps that was the key that set me free from him, it would have been so horrible to be with him, had he said yes to me in January.

The song I discovered this week, the tablecloth that holds the map of the singer's desire, tells him, “You’re the wrong turn, a big fat no, the fifth drink before a long drive home …. You’re the bars to my cage, you’re all I think about every day … every time you walk by, I am drawn to you. Desire, such a wicked little high, when the one you want, is blind to you ….”

His blindness, or clarity will set me free. It is a feeling I have that we would be great together, but he will destroy me. As will altruism destroy me.

My intention that I put out to the universe: An investor will come on board, and want me to start The Enterprise Powerhouse as soon as possible, latest September 2011, and will generously renumerate me to do so, with 12 extraordinary, motivated, committed geniuses enrolled to the course.

Thank God for Ayn Rand, thank God for The Fountainhead. What I wrote down this morning from the hallowed book:

The creator is not concerned with disease, but with life.

And ….

There is no substitute for personal dignity. There is no standard of personal dignity except independence.

How different might my life have been if I’d have realised this in my twenties? But it is how it is, and it is not too late.  I will make music, and I will write, and I will be successful with The Enterprise Powerhouse, in shAllah. I have licence to be myself, to abide by my own barometer of “yes” or “no”, and even though other people are hovering around the project, the shall be great wide open spaces for lateral stretches of creativity to breathe in four dimensions and expand into something brilliant, breathing genius. 

Security

14^th Feb, 2011

I’m not quite sure how to feel, about to sleep inshAllah in this Bryanston house, perched on the first floor, the ground floor secure, the stairwell terribly secure with inch wide solid metal bars hacked shut by a heavy padlock.

Up here, in the king size bed of foam, perched on the wall is a small dvd player, on its own little custom made stand, wired into the alarm system, flashing scenes from the four cameras which cover the entrance gate, the front door, the back yard and the parking area. What a nightmare it must be to have insomnia, and to lie here watching the grim grainy black and white images switch so clumsily to each other.

A moth flies before the lens, hogging the limelight, shamelessly.

Whilst I was cooking my spinach earlier, I looked down and noticed my armour. On my upper chest lay my tawiz, protection from Shaykh Nazim, the prayer inscribed within the sewn leather triangle. Further down, around navel height, dangled the panic button, hung from an unattractive, cheap silver chain. And at my ankles, lay the lovely Ms S, pit bull terrier, more sweetheart than any pit pull I have imagined. Probably the dog with the finest manners in Johannesburg, aside from her rancorous farting.

So I am not sure what to feel up here in this bedroom. With all the security I wonder if I should suspect some horror has already occurred here? I do not know this area, have only heard of too many robberies, too many hideous home invasions (they don’t call them home invasions here – I’m not sure those orgies of torture and pillage have their own title as yet). The spectre of events I have heard or read about hover in my mind, this being a wealthy area. I have no desire to live here, in the north, where apparently beauty only resides within homes, the pavements merely a supporting role to the high electric fences.

This screen on the wall sends its tired message into this room, and I wonder what my mind will think of tonight. I wonder what I will dream in this new room, this house where I have had so much emotional discomfort in the last month. InshAllah, I will sleep deeply, and the dreams that come my way will continue to inform me, to teach me and remind me. InshAllah. To choose not to plug into the house’s personal fear matrix will free my sleep tonight, so, I push down the little screen with its grainy images, the dull light leaves the room, g’nite. ….

            

North of the Zambezi

North of the Zambezi – 10^th Feb 2011

This morning at 8am I stepped onto my yoga mat, preparing for the day I prostrated to the north-west, “Haq”, I bow to the truth. Trucks rumbling in the background, the sound of the building supervisor’s voice became louder and louder as the concrete mixer rotated. He started yelling and I was reminded, I’m north of the Zambezi, as my friend B put it, north of the line that separates Jo’burg and Rosebank to the south, to everything in the north. I am WAY north of the Zambezi, here in Irene, surrounded by Centurion, rapidly becoming one of my least favourite places on the planet.

When I heard the supervisor scream, “Come on man, you fucking useless, hurry up,” my rage surged. Off the mat I marched to the building site in my yoga gear, passing A, the old Zulu man in his overall who works in this complex full time, who was standing watching the performance from a distance. “Eish, hy vloek die manne, ne?” (“he’s cursing the men hey?”)

“Eish,”  he replied.

I tried to get the supervisor’s attention to let him know that we could hear him and could he tone it down. He ignored me, so I got a bit of paper and a pen and pointedly stood taking down the company details, ready to burn his sorry ass. At which point he came over and asked what the problem was. By this time I was furious, and let him have it, which I don’t often do.

“Its unacceptable that you are talking to these men like this and telling them they’re fucking useless. We can hear you loud and clear …” I went on, basically in a fury telling him they deserved dignity and we didn’t want to hear his abuse. He apologised, and when I stormed off, I realised that what I’d wanted to say was that this kind of behaviour is why some black people hate white people so much. Remember Eugene Terreblanche? What is with these kind of South Africans that they can’t see the correlation between violent crime and command language, control behaviour, treating people like dumb animals? What does this fellow think the consequences of his vitriol will be?

God, this place is heavy. This far north of the Zambezi does my head in. Its ugly, lacks progressive thought, makes me want to flee south, to the arms of Jozi where less of this goes on.

Mind you, when I was furniture shopping near Northcliff, I think the area was called Albertskroon, with my friend last week. The blonde Afrikaans lady who served us, ciggie in one hand coffee in the other, not an ounce of fat on her tiny body, declared her dominion by leading us to the workshop at the back of the shop and yelling at the top of her voice, “Hey … WARASSA! Shut up, julle raas,” (“you’re making a noise”) to a group of black men crafting tables, chairs, cabinets. Ugly, unnecessary, she was quietly embarrassed when she realised we didn’t occupy the same side of the Great Divide as she did.

Awful, dark country this is. Awful and dark when the men choose to stay in the employ of the Nazi, as we now refer to her, where these confounding relationships are perpetuated, where the filth of dominion, disdain, disregard and victimhood smears itself over our days. Oh I’m dark today, I apologise, but I feel terribly, terribly dark.

My friend pulled me up on the weekend, on what I said about the risk of the current socio-political discourse becoming a cliché. He identifies as black, occasionally taking  the righteous pedestal, and feels to correct me about this: he thought I was saying that the post-apartheid discourse was a cliché, and that I was, like a typical whitefella, disregarding the suffering of the blackfellas. This is not at all what I was saying; I am looking for tangents, byways, other avenues of the cultural discourse, to reveal some enlightening perspectives. I realise I have the freedom to do this, by virtue of my historical privilege, bolstered by the deeply entrenched sense of entitlement that hums within me. 

But from this morning’s horrible story, and from the daily scenes of black people being berated, commanded, ignored, corrected, badgered, diminished by white people, those backroom scenes, sometimes in public, but often I guess lonely, humiliating scenes, I recognise that there is a need for the solid post/anti-apartheid discourse  to hold firm, to remain rooted deep in the earth and not be shaken, even though some people switch off, some roll their eyes, glaze over, some simply observe.  That perhaps now, more than ever, is a time for vigilance, whilst we distil and implement the constitutional and legal process, perhaps it is timely to break out fresh language around human rights.

Unfortunately we are often ruled by the dictates of the markets, our virtual Hitler, with all the fear mongering and manipulating of the national psyche around job numbers. Hallowed job numbers. These numbers are part of the game, critical aspects to dividends and prospects, quarterly earnings and political sales pitches. Without brilliant leadership, which is absent, the one way we can move this society into empowerment is through individuals affecting local pockets and the ripple effect that will result. Economic policy is meaningless to the guy spreading the liquid concrete under the viper tongue of the supervisor and his black moustache; he will probably only get paid R50 or R100 for the days work anyway. My contribution is a program to develop entrepreneurs, inshAllah, as I don’t believe in relying on job creation or being an employee to guarantee the freedom of your soul or your pocket.

Get me out of here. Out of this headspace and into something softer. But this, snor city, (moustache city), this Pretoria,  is what I chose when I arranged to stay here for these days. I trust my soul, I trust these distastefully uncomfortable situations that ignite my ire. These days fuel my fire around injustice and abuse, and bring into close range the power that I gained from my cultural heritage that I can harness and use for good now. It is risky, stepping into the warzone of race and human dynamics, I may get annihilated, I may be humiliated. I may be responding to historical triggers that are unresolved in me. But what I do know is that I can’t stand by, I cannot simply observe people’s struggles. As much as I wish someone would help me, even rescue me, love me, respect me, care for me, protect me, so I must do for others when situations arise.

Usually I am more cautious, circumspect before entering the fray, but I am further fuelled by the ferocious energy of Gauteng, of this land that has been ravaged by mining concessions, and pays us back with toxic acid water. Bakes us with heat, submits to our manic highways and byways, only to drive us forward with the urgency of creation on the edge. I do not know any other city in the world that propels its citizens with such raw, voracious, insatiable energy.

What I do know is, here, north of the Zambezi, I miss the progress of Jozi, I miss the embrace of my old lover and can’t breathe much in the mist of the conservative population that manages this energy. This is an old feeling, an old distaste that carries with it all that appalling legacy, and when I see it re-enacted it brings a whole Mail & Guardian, Vrye Weekblad history and vigilance, and I want to be done with the contractions of the past, done with the need to diminish and control  each other, done with the division of labour that has not really changed, in for example, the building industry on show today.

Tell me – am I simply a naïve woman? Gone too long and too sensitive? What I am interested in is a life beyond fear of each other, and with every abusive encounter, how we set ourselves back to a fearful, bitter, back-biting society. Maybe I’m too much of an idealist, or I believe too much in alchemy, what can evolve from merging disparate elements. Maybe I spend too much time on my own, so that I can entertain ideals. Maybe I’m out of touch, but my curiosity is heartfelt, as is my frustration with the days that fail to produce the possibilities that I hold. 

North of the Zambezi

This morning at 8am I stepped onto my yoga mat, preparing for the day I prostrated to the north-west, “Haq”, I bow to the truth. Trucks rumbling in the background, the sound of the building supervisor’s voice became louder and louder as the concrete mixer rotated. He started yelling and I was reminded, I’m north of the Zambezi, as my friend B put it, north of the line that separates Jo’burg and Rosebank to the south, to everything in the north. I am WAY north of the Zambezi, here in Irene, surrounded by Centurion, rapidly becoming one of my least favourite places on the planet.

When I heard the supervisor scream, “Come on man, you fucking useless, hurry up,” my rage surged. Off the mat I marched to the building site in my yoga gear, passing A, the old Zulu man in his overall who works in this complex full time, who was standing watching the performance from a distance. “Eish, hy vloek die manne, ne?” (“he’s cursing the men hey?”)

“Eish,”  he replied.

I tried to get the supervisor’s attention to let him know that we could hear him and could he tone it down. He ignored me, so I got a bit of paper and a pen and started taking down the company details, ready to burn his sorry ass. At which point he came over and asked what the problem was. By this time I was furious, and let him have it, which I don’t often do.

“Its unacceptable that you are talking to these men like this and telling them they’re fucking useless. We can hear you loud and clear …” I went on, basically in a fury telling him they deserved dignity and we didn’t want to hear his abuse. He apologised, and when I stormed off, I realised that what I’d wanted to say was that this kind of behaviour is why some black people hate white people so much. Remember Eugene Terreblanche? What is with these kind of South Africans that they can’t see the correlation between violent crime and command language, control behaviour, treating people like dumb animals? What does this fellow think the consequences of his vitriol will be?

God, this place is heavy. This far north of the Zambezi does my head in. Its ugly, lacks progressive thought, makes me want to flee south, to the arms of Jozi where less of this goes on, I like to think.

Mind you, when I was furniture shopping near Northcliff, I think the area was called Albertskroon, with my friend last week, the blonde Afrikaans lady who served us, ciggie in one hand coffee in the other, not an ounce of fat on her tiny body, declared her dominion by leading us to the workshop at the back of the shop and yelling at the top of her voice, “Hey … WARASSA! Shut up, julle raas,” (“you’re making a noise”) to a group of black men crafting tables, chairs, cabinets. Ugly, unnecessary, she was quietly embarrassed when she realised we didn’t occupy the same side of the Great Divide as she did.

Awful, dark country this is. Awful and dark when the men choose to stay in the employ of the Nazi, as we now refer to her, where these confounding relationships are perpetuated, where the filth of dominion, disdain, disregard and victimhood smears itself over our days. Oh I’m dark today, I apologise, but I feel terribly, terribly dark.

My friend pulled me up on the weekend, on what I said about the risk of the current socio-political discourse becoming a cliché. He identifies as black, so takes a righteous pedestal, and feels to correct me about this: he thought I was saying that the post-apartheid discourse was a cliché, and that I was, like a typical whitefella, disregarding the suffering of the blackfellas. This is not at all what I was saying; I am looking for tangents, byways, other avenues of the cultural discourse, to reveal some enlightening perspectives. I realise I have the freedom to do this, by virtue of my historical privilege, bolstered by the deeply entrenched sense of entitlement that strides within me. 

But from this morning’s horrible story, and from the daily scenes of black people being berated, commanded, ignored, corrected, badgered, diminished by white people, those backroom scenes, sometimes in public, but often I guess lonely, humiliating scenes, I recognise that there is a need for the solid post/anti-apartheid discourse  to hold firm, to remain rooted deep in the earth and not be shaken, even though some people switch off, some roll their eyes, glaze over, some simply observe.  That perhaps now, more than ever, is a time for vigilance, whilst we distil and implement the constitutional and legal process, perhaps it is timely to break out fresh language around human rights.

Unfortunately we are often ruled by the dictates of the markets, our virtual Hitler, with all the fear mongering and manipulating of the national psyche around job numbers. Hallowed job numbers. These numbers are part of the game, critical aspects to dividends and prospects, quarterly earnings and political sales pitches. Without brilliant leadership, which is absent, the one way we can move this society into empowerment is through individuals affecting local pockets and the ripple effect that will result. Economic policy is meaningless to the guy spreading the liquid concrete under the viper tongue of the supervisor and his black moustache; he will probably only get paid R50 or R100 for the days work anyway. My contribution is a program to develop entrepreneurs, inshAllah, as I don’t believe in relying on job creation or being an employee to free your soul or your pocket.

Get me out of here. Out of this headspace and into something softer. But this, snor city, (moustache city), this Pretoria,  is what I chose when I arranged to stay here for these days. I trust my soul, I trust these distastefully uncomfortable situations that ignite my ire. These days fuel my fire around injustice and abuse, and bring into close range the power that I gained from my cultural heritage that I can harness and use for good now. It is risky, stepping into the warzone of race and human dynamics, I may get annihilated, I may be humiliated. I may be responding to historical triggers that are unresolved in me. But what I do know is that I can’t stand by, I cannot simply observe people’s struggles. As much as I wish someone would help me, even rescue me, love me, respect me, care for me, protect me, so I must do for others when situations arise.

Usually I am more cautious, circumspect before entering the fray, but I am further fueled by the ferocious energy of Gauteng, of this land that has been ravaged by mining concessions, and pays us back with toxic acid water. Bakes us with heat, submits to our manic highways and byways, only to drive us forward with the urgency of creation on the edge. I do not know any other city in the world that propels its citizens with such raw, voracious, insatiable energy.

What I do know is, here, north of the Zambezi, I miss the progress of Jozi, I miss the embrace of my old lover and can’t breathe much in the mist of the Afrikaner population that manages this environment. I’m sorry to be racist, I particularly apologise to my Afrikaans family, but this is an old feeling, an old distaste that carries with it all that appalling legacy, and when I see it re-enacted it brings a whole Mail & Guardian, Vrye Weekblad history and vigilance, and I want to be done with the contractions of the past, done with the need to diminish and control  each other, done with the division of labour that has not really changed, in for example, the building industry.

Tell me – am I simply a naïve woman? Gone too long and too sensitive? What I am interested in is a life beyond fear of each other, and with every abusive encounter, how we set ourselves back to a fearful, bitter, back-biting society. Maybe I’m too much of an idealist, or I believe too much in alchemy, what can evolve from merging disparate elements. Maybe I spend too much time on my own, so that I can entertain ideals. Maybe I’m out of touch, but my curiosity is heartfelt, as is my frustration with the days that fail to produce the possibilities that I hold. 

Emaciated

Today I gave three ladies a lift. The sky was bruising, dark, with lightning snaking in the south, thunder shaking the earth right across the Gauteng. I’d been in a shopping mall, in a supermarket with maddeningly flickering lights, you know those fluorescents that set off epileptic fits? Shopping for my mother’s 80^th birthday proved a lengthy process, just finding the right ingredients for the cake, then the wine, the birthday cake candles, the cream cheese, the lollies. Mostly quite foreign to me, the placement of items according to some other logic. The whole supermarket landscape annoyingly unfamiliar, I didn’t want to hang around, browsing, so impatient and efficient am I, in my Western way.

I’d been previously irritated by having to walk a long way to the bank, and then with a tedious, repetitive half hour conversation at my hateful airtime/data provider, Vodaphone. Driving home I took photographs of the sky to the south, the cold functional landscape, giving the finger to any aesthetic, no heed for the eye’s connection to the soul. Only highways, construction, showrooms, advertising; vulgar, shamelessly self serving, adding nothing to the environment but a blurting call, void of care what anyone may think, of the impact on the senses.

Like the beggars who push themselves into your space, the theatre at the traffic lights or on certain streets. The young man who stood within a meter of a man and I who were about to melt into a passionate 11.50pm kiss on a street of cafes and bars, all wildly alive and drunk. The young man inserted himself into our passion, insistent that we support his cause, give him money. Beyond chutzpah, the only way we could shake him was to pace down the street and swerve into a nightclub. It was a stupendous act of carelessness, a kiss I’d been waiting for for months. He got no money from me.

Gauteng’s streets are alive with sales – mostly stuff you really don’t need, mobile phone chargers, sunglasses, superglue, feather dusters. Rarely do the traffic light vendors take no for an answer; today one did. He had unusual wares, looked like he was from the north east of Africa, rosaries draped from his left arm, while his right proffered pumice stones. I regretted not buying a stone, purely because he conversed with me and didn’t pull out his performance to guilt me into giving him money.

I was feeling bleak on the drive home, grumpy, as if grit was lining my veins and I had suddenly reached my limit in the aesthetic vacuum of Gauteng. How considerate Australian society is, or is that just law abiding? I find myself wanting to instigate campaigns against people who put their little advertising boards up on the few remaining unspoilt country roads, grumpy, an old woman I am becoming.

As the thunder shook out a dark dome over all of our heads, I turned onto Nelmapius Road, which runs along the border of the Centurion Golf and Country Estate, one of many security/golf villages, which people seem to like. A genteel country existence encircled by razor wire, electric fence and Africans paid to secure the perimeters. Depressing. To me, anyway.

Grumbling to myself, aware that I needed to police my own thinking, that too much of a good time on the weekend left me depleted, wakening to the sadness of another vacuum, my friends in Australia, who embody love, kindness, acceptance, empathy, for whom I don’t have to perform, adjust myself  or watch my tongue. My friends who love me regardless. It’s hard work here – and I seem to attract self absorbed people, narcissists (who probably reflect my self absorption ....) Currently, there are a few of them, whom I can spend a few hours with and who will not enquire how I am doing, in this big transition. Its all action: what needs to be done, what has been done, business, home improvements, furniture purchases, complaints, dull, dull conversation that could be knocked off in seven minutes but takes an hour. I know I don’t divulge too readily, as I am cautious, particularly around new friends. What I am used to is a deep empathic holding from my circle, a gentle availability to hear me, each other. 


A recent new friendship here is a caricature embodiment of the masculine – although its not that amusing to inhabit the dynamic – he senses I am triggered by something, demands I immediately disclose what is going on, and then moves straight into either repair mode, “what have I done wrong now?”/martyr mode, or straightforward ultimatum mode. Zero empathy. Its like exposure therapy, where you re-experience the stimulus of the trauma over and over until you don’t react. Shock therapy. God knows what I have been doing in that relationship. Some kind of resilience experiment, I imagine.

But I digress, with my somewhat emaciated relational life, enough of that. Let me tell you about the ladies I gave a lift to, the one whose proud face is beautifully burned into my memory. There is no really interesting story to tell, aside from the broiling threat of a storm stretching from beneath the earth and above our heavens. Simply that I turned into Nelmapius, and pulled up in front of two ladies who I guessed would be walking to the station, some 30-40minutes walk away. There are no taxis on this route, and there are always pedestrians, such a wasted business opportunity, such a wasted civilian opportunity to help each other. These ladies were my age, and had been working in Irene Estate, happy for the lift. We stopped halfway down the road to pick up an older lady who got in laughing and greeted us in Sesotho, and there was much chatter, which I liked, instead of shy, deferential silence. I chatted to the lady next to me, a beautiful upright woman with an open radiant face, her green headscarf framing this exquisite countenance.

“Hopefully you won’t have long to wait for your train,” I said. “Maybe three hours,” she said, and my bile rose again, how these people are held hostage by the transport authorities. What a bunch of bullshit, I just can’t tolerate this lack of protest from the commuters and the lack of integrity from the providers, including the taxi mafia.

The ladies live in Tembisa; the one with the headscarf inquired as to where I am staying, and I said up the road with my mum, and that I have been living overseas. “Ha,” she said, beaming into me, “people from here never offer us lifts, only from overseas.” She was beaming love into me, gratitude and respect from a very radiant, upright place, for such a small gesture as a lift. It makes me want to drive up and down that road giving people lifts so I can chat to them, find out who they are and where they live.

Ordinary people, but people inhabiting and rooted in this place.

This weekend just passed, I went to a rather fabulous braai which had a different group of people, exotic, with a whole other sense of entitlement, but the most charming manners. An American friend was having his housewarming in the posh northern suburbs. I’d helped him select furniture for the big empty spaces, and prepare the food for an unknown number of people. What a glorious assortment arrived: quite a few African Americans, one delightful lawyer from New York who said she’d done so many  African studies that she eventually thought, lets just GO to Africa! Another born in Liberia and raised in the US, an exquisite Rwandan woman married to a handsome American man, a magnificent Egyptian woman, a polite man from Cote d’Ivoire who can’t figure out why South African s don’t travel much. An assortment of South Africans bearing Jozi passports, all of us citizens of Jozi, zero’d in from Mafikeng, KZN, East Rand, Cape Town, Pretoria, UK. All of us at home in this glorious city, dancing to the fabulous beats of the DJ under a clear night sky, laughing, singing along, dancing sexy, drinking, making fun. Every now and then my heart would surge up and spray out to existence how grateful I am to be home, how delicious it is to be in this exciting metropolis, in the arms of my dirty old lover, how loved I feel to be simply on the earth that gave me birth. Weaving with the people who now call this place home, winding around them, every now and then a physical connection, a lovely embrace of our human flesh, alive in Africa.

Johannesburg Art Gallery

The Johannesburg Art Gallery is a strange oasis in a sea of throbbing energy: downtown Jo’burg. I’m sure many, many people have written about this before, this grand old lady who is rumoured to have been built the wrong way round, but did the architects ever think that she would be cushioned by thousands of commuters, daily, relentlessly, like an island in a wild Zambezi where you must take command of your passage, on foot, or in vehicle? Years ago Kendall “Cock” Geers did an installation in one of the big rooms and placed absolutely nothing in it, from what I recall, or it may have been a small brown suitcase, a comment on the luxury of space within these walls whilst outside people are crammed into every square meter.

It’s a bastion, solid, impenetrable, skirted by 20ft steel fencing, in some areas doubled up. I went in the back door, after a brief reconnaissance to the front where I saw no security and felt better about leaving the car round the back, which turned out to be a great idea as it is where the cops hang out. So in I went through the one official non-public entrance, and the first line of rooms was empty. The magnificent wooden doors with the elaborate brass hinges and studded brass work,  exquisite and picture enough on their own.

I snuck in another door and was suddenly right next to Irma Stern, then the various grandes dames of South African art. Jane Alexander’s dark and creepy work (does she ever see light?), and all of a sudden I am surrounded by the works of Dali, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, Monet, Lichtenstein, Warhol, I guess the usual national gallery fare to some, but this gallery was practically deserted, so I had heaps of time and space to giggle and delight about where I was and how I came to be there.

Most of my friends would be horrified that I went there alone, even A, who, during my last visit, gave me an ultimatum – “Either you stop being afraid of we’re going to attract the wrong kind of attention.” Even she was a bit taken aback that I had gone downtown alone. Naivety is a great passport, but to be honest, I can’t even say that I own that one. My friends C & D worked in Joubert Park for twelve years, and they said they just saw people, and that’s what it is, just people, trying to get someplace or else watching others get someplace. Of course there are the skollies; the beautician I saw earlier this week who lives in Dobsonville, Soweto, says that every two weeks someone tries to take her bag in this area. She has got sick of it so now shouts at them, and they seem to leave her alone.

M, who cleans the house I’m currently staying in, agrees, and says that no-one will help you, so you must SHOUT.  Eish, its terrible, that no one will help you, she mutters. To that she adds, “Eh, Jo’burg is fucked up,” I am mildly surprised to hear this grandmother curse so softly.

There is a room with the Gerard Sekoto’s, soft, rhythmic pictures of longing and life as usual. The massive Jackson Hlongwane sculptures are in the same place they always were, with Jesus playing Soccer there too. I met Mr. Hlohgwane in the early nineties, when I was working with the BBC; we went to interview him in Venda, one of the most magical trips of my life.  He kindly gave me a carved spoon, which I have in my treasure chest. We sat in the veld and listened to his lengthly religious expounding, Danielesque tales of apocalypse and life beyond.

There’s a Judith Mason, strange dark creature pencilled in delicate, deft strokes. My university friends and I used to visit her in her beautiful Simonstown home, with its stone walls and central fireplace, views to the other side of False Bay, drawing dark Dante forms.

The doors to the sculpture garden were locked, so I couldn’t go and say hello to my old friends there, Andries Botha and some others. But I did make a new friend in the gallery shop, N, and we chatted about the woes of the country for twenty minutes. I’d spotted a beautiful photographic poster of a man in deep bliss, hand on his heart and a sublime smile on his full lips. The picture is titled Amen, and declares that, “In Africa, football in not a religion. But it is everything a religion should be.” I bought it for the unavailable man, but I bought it for me too, not sure how to navigate these uncertain waters when one delicious being is not as open to the other, as the other.

This morning, on my way to the gallery, I bumped into M, the cleaning lady and her granddaughter, whom she rescued from her son’s errant lover and brought to Jozi to raise. N is a lovely shy little thing who has just started school. M told me that N was so excited about school that she was up and dressed at 5am on the first day. She loves it so much!

I took M into the city as I was going to the gallery, and we had the conversation that I have with so many black people who don’t have or use cars. On average, they spend between four and six hours a day commuting.  Four and six hours a DAY???? Isn’t that outrageous?? I am shocked that there hasn’t been a revolution based on this alone, that the taxi bosses have everyone so subjugated that there is nary a protest. What a fucking disaster … I cannot imagine having to wait and deal with the tedium of getting to and from home every single day. THIS is a political issue, THIS is oppression, when people have no choice but to waste their lives in queues and at the mercy of dangerous drivers in dangerous vehicles.  To have your day thus devoured ….

I left the gallery from the front entrance, and made my way round the side. I wish I could convey the noise of the city by words or by picture, but it’s not possible. Its loud, a mixture of many different stereos dancing out their tunes, a thousand engines revving through dense pedestrian traffic, everyone fighting for their right of way. Voices, sirens, trains, a multi-track audio bouncing round the city, off the huge apartment blocks, almost visible in its thickness. 

In the vacant parking lot on the east side of the gallery are two police vehicles, I think they were known as Ratels in the bad old days, or maybe Hippos, I can’t be sure. Next to them is a trailer of coiled razor wire, waiting, silently under a jacaranda tree, and it makes me wonder about all the news we never hear about. All the horror stories that haven’t a hope in hell of making it to any newspaper, the incidents that in any other place would warrant a front page spectacular. But here, In Jozi, its like the ocean, there are big fish, small ones, careless ones and predators. And there’s a rose garden at the north entrance to the gallery, just over what looks like a moat,  with pink and white blooms set against the emerald green lawn where lovers hold each other, and others lounge about, enjoying the heat and the spectacle of the blustering slate coloured storm clouds in the north.

Today, Egypt is burning, Yemen too. The SABC pronounces that the people in north Africa have had enough of dictators, of the widening gap between between rich and poor, of not having access to resources, of corruption. As the announcer speaks, I think that these words apply here too, and I wonder what might spark from distant Arabia, if anything. Or if people will simply continue to wait, and to wait for their journey to continue.