Hillbrow is the place of breathless TV specials: documentaries following paramedics on New Year’s Eve, dodging refrigerators thrown from tenement-block windows in some kind of high bacchanalian consumer backlash; Louis Theroux cringing coquettishly behind private security guards in bulletproof vests storming up the stairs of abandoned buildings that have been hijacked by squatter slumlords.
As a teenager, my friends and I used to drive through here on our way to the alternative club, the Doors, where you had to check your goth-wannabe weapons at the door. We never told our parents where we were going. Singing along to Tori Amos or Sisters of Mercy, jumping red lights on the lonely streets, always with that jagged catch of danger in our throats that made us feel restless, electric, alive. Because if there’s one thing everyone knows about Johannesburg, it’s that it’s capital-D Dangerous.
I read everything I could on Hillbrow: Bongani Madondo and Charl Blignaut’s essays on the nineties scene, Ivan Vladislavic’s restless meditations, Kgebetli Moele’s spiky provocation of a novel, Room 207, but it was a blog about the death of Johannesburg that got under my skin. I won’t name it, but it’s one with those smug, hand-wringing then-and-nows contrasting photographs of how vibrant the inner city used to be and the wrack and ruin and decay it has fallen into.
The thin subtext of the captions and comments is that it’s because of “the blacks.” Always the blacks. As if apartheid’s (white) secret police, the ironically named Civil Cooperation Bureau, didn’t meet at the Quirinale Hotel on Kotze Street in Hillbrow to orchestrate atrocities, assassinations and political unrest in their efforts to derail democracy. As if a hundred years before that, Cecil John Rhodes and the (white) mining magnate Rand Lords didn’t scheme in the library of the gentlemen’s club downtown to bring the colonial empire snaking into the interior on railway tracks and the corpses of countless dead.
But for all its shrill hysteria, the photographs on the blog don’t lie about the decay. Businesses have fled the city center to soulless business parks surrounded by soulless townhouse complexes in Midrand, a purpose-built suburb halfway between Johannesburg and Pretoria.
The premises they left behind have become dilapidated, boarded over and, in extreme cases, bricked up, to prevent them being gutted for copper piping or taken over by squatters. A few kilometers away, Forest Town, the suburb where I grew up, where President Jacob Zuma now lives, has jacaranda trees that bloom in purple archways over the streets. Whereas the Hillbrow “blossom” is the plastic bag, tangled and shredded in the branches of spindly trees.
There are a thousand pocket worlds in the central city, rubbing up against each other. The students and arts scene in Brixton and Braamfontein, the black hipster hang-out of Newtown around the Market Theatre and Café Sophiatown, the suits and shiny cars in Bank City by the Diamond Building. Hillbrow has always been a separate animal.
The twin towers of High Point used to be the most desirable blocks in the most cosmopolitan neighborhood, packed with restaurants and bars and clubs. When my dad was considering divorce in the seventies, he planned to buy an apartment here as the perfect swinging bachelor pad.
That was before Hillbrow turned bohemian: sex and drugs and rocking disco soul thanks to the likes of Brenda Fassie, the “Madonna of the townships,” who hung out here, got high here, made love here, in the middle of the hip multiracial scene of artists and musicians and gays and lesbians in the eighties and nineties.
Now it’s the place people bring their hopes, packed up in amashangaan, the ubiquitous cheap plastic rattan suitcases used by refugees and immigrants from small towns in the rural areas, looking for work, looking to break in. Low income, high aspirations.
Mike, swaggering for my benefit, goes to the edge of the ledge and calls down to a man on the street who is tossing away his cigarette: “Hey pick that up, you can’t throw your stompie here!” Each building is a private fiefdom and the security guards are the protectors of the realm with batons and mace. What happens across the road is none of their concern. They manage the building, keep crime out, deal with troublesome tenants.
“We caught a rapist in the building. It took three days, but we knew he lived here, so I stood outside the gate with the woman who was, you know . . .” João takes a swig from his Coke to hide his discomfort. It is exactly the same red as his canister of pepper spray. “Until the guy finally came out and she pointed at him and we grabbed him and took him down to the cops.
“But there was this other time, I felt kak, hey, because I had to evict this old black guy who hadn’t paid his rent. And I had to hit him with the baton to get him to move because he wouldn’t go. And it made me feel swak, like he must think of old times, like apartheid, this young white oke beating him, but it’s my job, what am I supposed to do?”
Johnson nods in understanding. When he’s not playing fixer for journalists, he runs his own security firm for other buildings in Hillbrow. He has the same problems with tenants, but even more so, he says, with their guests. “As a security guard, you learn to understand the characteristics of people. You can get to know people in the building and their behavior. But visitors are a problem. You cannot understand the visitors.”
There are old attitudes that endure. The ghosts of the city. But people find ways to live with ghosts, and that’s why we’re here, because despite the horror stories, the flying refrigerators and the drug dealers on the corner with their sharp shoes and cellphones, and the low-rise across the way that João says they raided last week with the cops to bust a sex-trafficking operation, Hillbrow is somewhere people live.
The city has changed. Cities do. It’s in their nature. Like language. Tsotsi-taal (gangster-speak) is the word on the street here, a patois of English, Afrikaans and Zulu that has stolen the best slang from other tongues and remixed them.
And maybe that’s the best way to think of Hillbrow and the inner city. As a remix.
Unlike the manicured pavements of the leafy suburbs or the glossy consumertopias of Sandton and Rivonia, the city streets are flush with people. Hawkers sell cheap plastic flip-flops alongside sandals handmade from Nguni leather, in front of cellphone shops and Internet cafés and fashion boutiques and a church occupying a reclaimed mall. Flyers pasted to a brick wall advertise the services of the Prophet Nkhomo, the St. Paul’s Preschool, safe abortions, youth worship services. The big brands are moving back in—KFC and Jet fashion—to compete with the cheap clothing stores and the place on the corner that does Lagos-style chicken. It’s seventies Harlem: hectic, alive, on the rise.
As Moele describes it in Room 207, the city of gold is actually the city of dreams. Because dreams, like ghosts, are unpredictable. They can be good or bad. You have to live with them.
It’s driven home when we venture downtown to the Central Methodist Church. I have been intending to set a major scene in Zoo City here, and have arranged with Bishop Paul Verryn to attend the Sunday night service.
We’re here a few months after a nationwide outbreak of horrifying xenophobic violence, where black South Africans turned on black Africans. A group of Somalians were thrown off the roof of a building, like refrigerators. A Zimbabwean man was burned alive in the streets.
There is a forty per cent unemployment rate. Someone has to carry the blame, and the middle classes are safe in their suburbs with their high walls and their private security and their jacaranda trees. So it’s the “blacks” again. Blacker than black. Us versus them. The colonials knew this, exploited this, indoctrinated this. They taught that there is always someone blacker than you.
People have fled to the church to take shelter from the violence, the same way activists hid out here during the struggle against apartheid. But now there are new struggles. There will always be a struggle. It’s the legacy we’re left with, from all those whites with all their schemes.
The friends who drop me and Johnson off outside the church are reluctant to let us go. There is a mob clustered around the fence and the Portaloos around the church. The anger i
n the air is a living thing.
It is the first time I feel a spike of fear. Nothing like in Hillbrow (which was daytime, admittedly), not even when a boy brushed past me and hissed, “Put your cellphone away, they’ll rob you.” And not like driving to the Doors a decade ago, the acupuncture prick of dread. This is a pitchfork twisting my guts like spaghetti. “Don’t worry,” Johnson says. “They’re my people. Zimbabweans.” And although there are also Malawians, Zambians, Congolese, he’s right. Far and away, the greatest numbers are those who have fled Mugabe.
We make our way inside the church, to the upper pews. There is a constant murmur, people talking through the preamble of announcements and hymn-singing. Kids tumble over the stairs. There are chains of coughing, babies crying, a choir of cellphone ringtones. A man is coughing bloody sputum into a tissue, his whole body wracked with the effort. He has no shoes. His bare feet are like knots of wood, his toenails cracked and yellow.
We find a place to sit next to a nurse, Melanie, dressed immaculately in a white linen suit, just as Bishop Verryn is about to deliver the sermon. He seems exasperated. “It is not satisfactory for you to live like this. I am not saying I don’t want you here, but I worry about the humanity of people in this place.” He seems worn down.
It has taken this to make me realize that dehumanizing is not only something that other people do to you. It can be self-inflicted, too. Switch off the light behind your eyes. Focus on the lowest rungs of Maslow. Get through the day, however you can.
From the pulpit, Verryn rails against the city council that keeps trying to move them: “Treat us like human beings. Don’t move us like furniture, because we are not furniture.” Outside, a young man tells me, “They use us like a ball. They kick us everywhere.” He also says they go looking for trouble, seeking out Zulu guys and beating them up. Reprisals for the way they have been treated. He is thinking of going home. Even with no jobs, the messed-up politics, Zimbabwe is better than here. But he can’t afford the trip. He is stuck.
Melanie, the nurse, explains that she came here via Harare, via London, via Cape Town. She offers to show me where she sleeps and confides, “I don’t have friends. Only to share my jokes with, but not to share my secrets.” She doesn’t tell me how she manages to keep her white linen suit so spotless.
It is surreal or maybe hyperreal, following her down the stairwell to the basement, pushing and shoving through a crush of warm bodies in the dark, stepping over people who are bedding down for the night, on a scrap of cardboard for a mattress if they are lucky. On bare concrete if they are not.
We break free into the basement where the women and children sleep, the sum of their belongings arranged around them in amashangaan and battered suitcases. We are standing shoulder to shoulder, packed like tin cans. I cannot see how there will be room to lie down. Several women are bathing babies in buckets. “From Musina. The border,” Melanie says. “The guards demand sex sometimes for getting you across.”
I reel away from the horrors of a refugee camp condensed into a church building, out into the crisp Joburg night air, where young men cluster restlessly on the pavement, and into a warm car that will whisk us back to the suburbs. I feel shaken and raw.
“How was it?” my friends ask, and Johnson, who has been tjoep-stil, dead-quiet this whole time, bursts out in furious contempt, “It was pathetic.” He shakes his head in disgust. “Pathetic.”
I’m speechless. He told me earlier about how he came to South Africa as a refugee fourteen years ago. How his wife is a refugee. How these are his people. And now he is denouncing them.
It’s a coping mechanism, I realize. He is distancing himself from the possibility that he could ever find himself living through a similar experience. He is saying that somehow he would be different in the same circumstances. We all want to be the exception. We all want to believe it couldn’t be us.
But then we were only visitors there. Who can’t be understood. Or understand. We can only imagine.
Dear K—,
Itell you that you’re beautiful all the time. But never just that word—“beautiful”—with all its connotations and reductions.
I say: “Baby, do you know you’re beautiful and smart and funny and kind?” Because it’s the combination of all those things that make it true.
And you say, “I know, Mama,” with tolerant impatience. Not because you are vain, although you like to wear colorful clothes and a mermaid tail and a fairy princess dress and a tiger hat, and you have already decided that you like your hair to be brushed in a particular way. But because this is not especially interesting to you. It’s a self-evident truth, like saying that mountains are high or tadpoles are wriggly.
You are much more interested in figuring out the world. It intrigues you that black is the hottest color. You pick up snails in the palm of your hand and bring them home. You observe that “every car is going to a place” with melancholy philosophy. You wonder whether there is a Cat Jesus and if he hangs out with Father Christmas. You wish you could climb into books and you stop me reading mid-story so that you can talk to the characters, berate the bad guys or warn the goodies about what’s about to happen.
You are full of spark and empathy. You are driven by endless curiosity and ferocious righteousness. You are opinionated. You speak up and you speak out. But you are also sweet and caring. You used to burst into tears when you stood on someone else’s toe. You are still sensitive, but you’re learning to put it in perspective.
Like beauty.
When you were two years old and we were watching Erykah Badu sing the alphabet on Sesame Street, you said “She looks like you, Mama”; and what you meant is beautiful.
I try to show you the range of physical beauty. I point out the posters of Paralympians who are beautiful and strong in their wheelchairs or with their prosthetics, and the punk black girl with green dreadlocks we pass in the mall, the old lady with her button necklace, the boy princesses in the documentary I made on a female impersonation beauty pageant.
I change the words in stories as I read them. Whenever a girl is described as “beautiful” I add “and brave” or “and clever.” I ignore the words “fat” and “thin.” But soon you will learn to read by yourself and I won’t be able to apply the filters.
And that’s what is so wonderful and terrible: that the world rushes in, and you are hungry for it, and I cannot control it.
You come home with other notions of what beautiful is and how important it is in relation to other things. That beautiful is not who you are, but how long your hair is.
And soon, too soon, you will realize that there are other definitive parameters that are so narrow barely anyone fits into them. That “beauty” is white and young and skinny and blonde. And soon, too soon, you will grow up and worry about all the stupid, poisonous slang we feed ourselves—words like “muffin top” and “thigh gap.” You will worry about being sexy instead of sexual. Of looking good instead of reveling in your body.
We battle about watching Barbie and the Dreamhouse or Monster High because they’re all about clothes and boyfriends and popularity, like the Kardashians for kids, and I try to nudge you to My Little Pony and She-Ra and The Powerpuff Girls and even Winx Club, where they have cool outfits and go on adventures. Where it’s about more than being beautiful.
And I cannot believe that this all starts so young. That our culture wants to box you in and limit you to being merely physically beautiful. As if that is enough.
As if that is anything at all.
It makes me so angry. How the world treats women makes me afraid for you. Not just stupid advertising or bad kids’ TV shows or salary disparities and lack of maternity leave, but the ugliness of men who hate women with casual ferocity, only one mouse click away.
Or the violence and horror and repression of women that happens a stone’s throw from here, to people we know, and across the world to people we don’t, people who are attacked for all the things I love in you: curiosity and a sense of adventure, f
or daring to go to school, or having an opinion or wanting a choice in their lives.
I can’t control that. I can’t control or stop the things people will say, what magazines will tell you that you can or can’t wear, the way men will call after you in the street and think they’re doing you a favor, how your physical self will be turned into a weapon against you, in the outside world and, worse, inside your head.
I can’t filter it, I can’t protect you from it. That’s the worst way to live your life—sheltered from the world. But I can arm you as best I can. I can try to nurture your self-confidence. I can try to tell you what real beauty is.
It’s everything you are already. Right now.
Hold on to that. Hold on to it as tight as you can—your delight, your burning curiosity, your sense of humor, your mad imagination, your clear sense of justice, your joy in your body, in running and climbing and swimming and playing and dancing.
Real beauty is engaging with the world. It’s the courage to face up to it, every day. It’s figuring out who you are and what you believe in and standing by that. It’s giving a damn. You are interesting because you are interested, you are amazing because you are so wide open to everything life has to give you.
Your first teacher told you that one day you would grow up to be a great woman. And you will. But you will also be a beautiful woman—in all the ways that count.
ADT: leading provider of residential and commercial security solutions in South Africa, as well as an American security company
Ag: similar to oh
Amakipkip: multicolored popcorn, a popular packaged snack in Johannesburg, and another name for the sartorially colorful fashionistas known as the Soweto Smarties
Amashangaan: inexpensive, large red and blue checkered carry bag
Anti-retroviral medicine: a combination of drugs that suppresses the HIV virus and slows the progression of HIV to fullblown AIDS
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