Are We There Yet?

by David Smiedt

  After sympathetic staff at a nearby bank helped me take the necessary action to ensure Mr Two-Piece wasn’t going to take his girlfriend on a coke-fuelled Mauritian getaway thanks to my generosity, I called my sister who lived nearby to tell her what had happened. Her reaction? “Welcome to South Africa.”

  From its very birth Johannesburg has been a city of scammers, shammers, vagabonds and opportunists looking to make a fast buck. And it was an Australian who started it all.

  George Harrison was an itinerant stonemason and prospector who found some casual building work for a widow on a farm called Langlaagte. It was located about seventy kilometres south of Pretoria, the capital of the independent Zuid Afrikaanse Republiek which had been founded by the Boers after they left the Cape to escape British rule. The year was 1886 and I like to think that George was taking a smoko and casting a lazy gaze around him when a glint on the ground caught his eye. What he correctly identified as gold was in fact the tip of a mother lode over 500 kilometres long. A monumentally important discovery was followed by a monumentally moronic decision. Having received a free discoverer’s claim, Harrison sold it a few months later for £10. With that he walked away from a reef so lavish that within eleven years it was supplying 22.5 per cent of the world’s gold.

  Only three years after Harrison disappeared over the horizon in the direction of a no-horse town called Barberton, Johannesburg was the biggest settlement in South Africa.

  The burgeoning mining town was flooded with diggers from around the world. Most had big dreams and few morals. Working with picks, shovels, hammers and pans, many made fortunes in months and lost them in weeks or days. The predictable coterie of hookers, pimps, moonshine bandits and standover men were also drawn to the goldfields like collagen to a fading starlet. By the time the new century rolled around, Johannesburg’s miners could see it in at one of ninety-seven brothels in the city – each offering around a dozen ladies at £1 “a time” or £5 for all night.

  So debauched was daily life on the reef that an Australian journalist who visited the area in 1910 was compelled to note, “Ancient Nineveh and Babylon have been revived. Johannesburg is their twentieth century prototype. It is a city of unbridled squander and unfathomable squalor.”

  The loose ways of the new city did not sit well with the staunchly Calvinistic government just over the horizon to the north. However, geology soon put paid to their fears of a Sodom next door.

  Although the reef delivered consistently spectacular amounts of ore, it was of a particularly low grade and extended ever more deeply underground. This meant that the continued exploitation of the gold seam would require four crucial components: massive investment, vast quantities of cheap labour, technical ability and administrative experience in running an enterprise of this magnitude. Enter the monolithic mining companies that had emerged from the scramble for diamonds begun in the Kimberley area to the west in 1873. Just as they had done in the diamond fields, these Titans flexed their considerable muscle and muscled out the individual diggers.

  This suited the government rather nicely – as it would, considering the fact that these Boers were bankrupt. It also corresponded with the recommendations of the chief of the Mines Department, one CJ Joubert, a farmer who by all accounts didn’t know his ore from his elbow. After holding numerous meetings with diggers and mining magnates, he set out a plan which was as eerily prophetic as it was far-reaching: “We do not recommend that the fields should be thrown open to individuals as the need for costly machinery calls for a large amount of capital. There is a danger that men who have staked off good claims will be unable to work them, but be forced to leave and, through necessity, take to lawless ways.”

  And so it remains in the City of Gold. One of the few major world cities located on neither a river nor a coastline, it was founded and sustained by avarice. Sitting at 1500 metres above sea level on a wind-blown plateau, it bakes like a Christmas turkey in summer and is coated with frost most mornings in winter. The only reason people came here and continue to do so is to worship at the altar of cash in the holy house of conspicuous consumption.

  Want the money for that BMW (which in the townships stands for Break My Window), luxury apartment or diamond to melt your girl’s heart? You have two choices: learn to earn or shoot to loot. In a country where unemployment hovers around the 40 per cent mark and the social welfare system has imploded, fists, blades and bullets are for many the only means of rectifying economic disparity.

  In 1998 surveys indicated that 83 per cent of the total South African population believed the police had “zero control of crime”. When it came to simply feeling safe, 56 per cent of whites said, “Not me”, while 43 per cent of the black population felt the same way. And who could blame them? Between 1994 and 1998 the attempted murder rate climbed by 7.8 per cent, rape increased by 16 per cent (topping the world rankings), assault – and if that’s not enough, how do you like this for a qualification – with intent to produce grievous bodily harm shot up by 11 per cent and residential housebreaking soared by 17 per cent. To put this in perspective, for the 3.5 Australians murdered per 100,000 in 1996, 61 South Africans suffered the same fate.

  With the staggering amount of relative wealth concentrated in Johannesburg’s ritzy northern suburbs, it’s hardly surprising that many residents live in a perpetual state of anxiety brought on by the lifestyle they – or, as is often the case, their parents – worked so hard to attain. Homes have become citadels in which every window has bars, each door is double-bolted and the family’s bedrooms are sealed off from the rest of the house by an internal gate. On the perimeter, enormous concrete barriers masquerading as fences are topped with razor wire and spikes designed to penetrate bone. High-voltage cabling is another popular deterrent. These houses resemble that middle portion of a mozzie zapper, complete with intermittent blue sparks and a low hum.

  Many homes have panic buttons in every room and the cutting-edge electronic surveillance systems normally reserved for embassies. One alarm is all it takes for a private SWAT team bristling with high-calibre hardware to be on your doorstep within seconds. Visit one of these palatial abodes for a traditional Sunday braai (barbecue) by the pool and the topic of immigration will inevitably arise. At which point someone will counter, “But where else in the world could we live like this?” Unable to penetrate the domestic fortification, Johannesburg’s bandits lie in wait outside and attack as residents leave or return.

  Sentry boxes now stand at the top and bottom of streets I once tore along on my bike. What makes this all the more poxy is that, for all its faults and sins, Johannesburg has some of the world’s most beautiful suburban streetscapes and is regarded as a globally significant noncommercial forest. In some places you can’t see the security for the trees.

  Thanks to the deep pockets and aesthetic whims of the city’s founding fathers, the area north of the CBD is one of the most extensively wooded urban areas on the planet. I grew up in the suburbs of Parkwood and Saxonwold on streets that ran beneath a lilac canopy of jacaranda boughs and were lined with verges of soft buffalo grass. As far as vestiges of privilege go, they were bewitchingly beautiful.

  Curious to see whether this was still the case, I left Sandton City – one credit card lighter – and returned to my childhood street, Rutland Road. I asked a security guard manning the boom gate if I would be able to wander through for old times’ sake. He struck me as the type who had a nickname for his gun – along the lines of Hot Lead Mama or Princess Recoil.

  After explaining that I was on a journey of rediscovery which would eventually form a book, and acknowledging that I technically didn’t have any business on the street, he picked up his two-way radio to confer with a colleague. An animated conversation in Sotho punctuated by broad smiles and laughter followed.

  Having ascertained that the risk of my carjacking a resident was roughly equal to that of Yasser Arafat converting to Judaism, he said he’d let me proceed for R50 ($10).

  It was worth every ce
nt. One of the things no one tells you about migration is how many memories stay behind. The big ones – weddings, bar mitzvahs and anything else that demands a buffet – travel with you, but ones like the smells, sounds and even the way the light dripped through the trees on the street where you lived can only be accessed by going back. Of course, as much had changed as remained the same. When I lived there – not in a double or single storey, but split level, thank you very much – it was whites only. Even if a black, coloured or Indian had the means to buy a property here, they would be barred from doing so by the Group Areas Act which forbade such intermingling.

  Now the cash bought you the flash, and a broad ethnic mix of residents viewed me with mild concern as I shuffled along the block with the glazed grin that can only be brought on by deep nostalgia or misreading Prozac dosage.

  The mores of urban survival are surprisingly easy to acquire and I have felt the suspicion of strangers slipping around my shoulders like a familiar cloak whenever I have returned to Johannesburg.

  My on-edge vigilance was aided by the fact that I had been besieged with warnings at home and on arrival. One of the most memorable came from a colleague who instructed me to jump as high as possible on hearing any loud bangs. “That way,” she said cheerily, “the bullets will hit you in the legs.”

  The two most chilling caveats came from separate cousins. The first instructed me: “Never give a taxi driver the bird – they will shoot you for less”. The second advised: “If you do have to stop at a robot [a traffic light to you and me], don’t pull up right to the white line. I always stop about twenty metres away. It lets me see anyone hiding near the intersection plus gives me room to pick up speed if I have to knock someone over to make my escape.”

  To the Australian psyche this may sound like paranoia taken to debilitating extremes, but for the thousands of South Africans who have lost not only their sense of security but family and friends as the result of carjackings, it’s simply a matter of making it home alive. This form of crime has become a growth sector in Johannesburg as the result of increasingly sophisticated electronic alarms and disabling systems. To steal a car, someone has to be in it.

  So prevalent is this crime that central-locking mechanisms only release the driver’s door, thus preventing hijackers from leaping into the back seat the moment they hear the alarm being deactivated.

  And it’s not just the vehicles that are targeted. Many a motorist has felt the cold steel of a gun barrel against their temple along with the demand for a mobile phone, sunglasses or sex.

  Some areas, such as highway on- and off-ramps near townships, are worse than others. Another no-go zone is the central business district. I used to spend a week of every winter school holidays working at my father’s company, which was located in the city centre over three sawdust-scented floors of a warehouse on Commissioner Street. The CBD was a thriving centre of commercial activity where crowds of workers bustled between glittering flagship department stores, lunch counters and office buildings. There was a single lock on the premises’ door, the frontage was washed each day and the pavement was swept every few hours. Casual good-morning nods had in some cases developed into acquaintanceships and my father knew a number of the merchants whose premises bordered his. It was a community of sorts.

  I was advised that going back here on my own would be akin to playing a dyslexic version of Russian roulette in which every chamber bar one contained a bullet. So I secured the services of a guide named Oupa (grandfather) who picked me up in his shiny red Nissan Pulsar. A slight man in his early fifties, with tufts of grey around his temples and eyes which twinkled behind bifocals, Oupa was an avuncular mix of encyclopaedia and softly spoken entertainer. Along with giving out nuggets of information, he took mischievous delight in exposing my naivety and ignorance.

  He and I set out towards a CBD that had long been deserted by companies like my father’s in favour of safer suburbs that were once either exclusively residential or semirural. Even the stock exchange had shifted north and now sits alongside plush hotels and multinational head offices in an enclave where the faces may no longer be white-only but the collars certainly are.

  Approaching the CBD from the north, a series of leafy parks slide down rocky ridges and rim the edges of small streams that are probably best viewed and certainly best smelt from a distance. Known as the Braamfontein Spruit Trail, it meanders fifteen kilometres through a handful of the six hundred green spaces which are under the city’s administration by day and witness destitution, degradation and death when darkness falls.

  In a city where life is cheap, its value has been slashed even further in Hillbrow. When I was a child, this was the entertainment epicentre of the city. On Saturday afternoons my friends and I would catch a (whites-only) bus or even thumb a ride to one of the cinemas in the area. This was followed by waffles that swam in syrup between ice-cream icebergs at one of the nearby eateries with names like the Milky Way and Bimbos Burgers. At night, my older brother and sister would descend on the whites-only area with their mates to jol – the local equivalent of raging – at a relatively new form of entertainment called discotheques. The suburb’s main thoroughfare, Twist Street, was lined with buzzing restaurants, atmospheric oak-panelled pubs and old-fashioned establishments which referred to themselves at “Nitespots” and signalled their presence through a neon martini glass that flashed with the promise of alcohol-fuelled romance.

  Hillbrow had always hosted its fair share of bloody-knuckled bar brawls but this was tempered by its raffish charms and bohemian sprinkling of galleries and theatres. Neither remain. The suburb has become a clutter of concrete apartment blocks that were hideous to begin with but now have the added aesthetic detriments of decay and filth. Poles festooned with laundry protrude from windowless frames, leaking pipes bleed rust for twenty storeys, and hotel lobby doors have either been smashed or hang limply from their buckled hinges. What is left of paint or plaster has peeled and blistered.

  This was once Nana-land, full of residential hotels where elderly folk slipped quietly into elegant decrepitude between hands of bridge and Devonshire teas. My own grandmother had lived nearby in one called the Courtleigh and I vividly recall the typed menus, capacious dining room and bingo evenings in the lounge.

  According to the Hillbrow Community Partnership, a local group trying to resurrect the area’s fortunes, the bachelor flat my Granny Anne called home is now likely to be inhabited by between seven and twelve people. And thanks to a 1946 decision by the Johannesburg City Council to remove all height restrictions in the area, many of these blocks soar between thirty and forty storeys. With the capacity to accommodate that many people in that many rooms in that many storeys in that many buildings, it’s hardly surprising that this area has seen its population explode as the original residents fled in fear or were slaughtered for petty cash on the way to the corner shop.

  According to the census, 30,000 people called Hillbrow home in 1996. Five years later that figure topped the 100,000 mark, thanks mainly to an unprecedented influx of illegal immigrants. The highrise apartment blocks and hotels are what Oupa termed “a refuge for the scum of Africa”. He pointed out that criminals on the run from authorities in countries as far away as Nigeria and Ghana can disappear for months in Hillbrow until the heat dies down at home.

  It’s the kind of place where you can lie low because there will always be someone else attracting the attention of the overburdened police – known as the Flying Squad, apparently for the speed with which they respond to calls for help – who see more carnage on a weekend than many of their colleagues witness in months.

  The day before Oupa and I drove through Hillbrow, a toddler was shot dead on the balcony of her cramped unit. She was home alone at the time. The callousness is incomprehensible. As is the fact that on New Year’s Eve shootings and stabbings are as traditional as Auld Lang Syne was for the whites that once lived in these blocks, and numerous residents toss bottles and bricks from their balconies as an entert
aining diversion.

  “Even the cops are scared to come here at night,” said Oupa. “The problem is drugs. It’s mainly the guys who come in from Nigeria illegally and deal in cocaine, heroin and mandrax. They are fearless, cashed up and give corrupt cops freebies or kickbacks to turn a blind eye.”

  Those shopfronts that weren’t bricked up were swamped by what are known as “informal traders” selling everything from fruit that flies were refusing to touch and telephone calls from lines that disappeared into unseen exchanges to hands-free mobile phone sets and packs of plastic hangers.

  And these were the guys just trying to make an honest buck. Glue-sniffers who had barely reached double figures and were unlikely to live through their teens watched our car through jaundiced eyes and made half-hearted hand-to-mouth gestures to indicate they were hungry and wanted money.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Oupa warned. “Most of these guys wouldn’t think twice about slicing away a chunk of your hand if it meant you might drop your wallet.”

  The next three blocks were filled with a sad succession of mostly black, but some white, women in sweat-stained lycra who sold their bodies for hits. They had the haunted, skittish look of those who know what it feels like to be belted as they sleep. Hovering in the background, steel-eyed pimps in Beemers played Jah Rule and made silent threats.

  Above this scene on a rocky ridge, Oupa pointed out what is now known as Constitution Hill. Originally the site of a fort that Afrikaner President Paul Kruger constructed between 1892 and 1898 to repel the British, it later became a jail and is now South Africa’s new Constitutional Court. Oupa loved the idea. “This place accommodated Ghandi and Mandela because they dared to oppose the South African government’s racist policies,” he said. “Now instead of symbolising a regime that maintained order through surveillance, intimidation and incarceration, it’s going to be the home of what I believe is the most socially progressive government charter in the world.”