Are We There Yet?

by David Smiedt

  He had a point and one which is effectively illustrated in the arena of gay and lesbian rights. In the South Africa of my childhood, such relationships – or more specifically, the physical expression thereof – were punishable by laws created specifically with backdoor action in mind. In other words, if you were caught being sodomised by someone you cared for or simply fancied, you would be put in jail where it was likely you would be a far less willing participant in the very same act. Today, men and women can request asylum in South Africa because of their sexual orientation, gays and lesbians can serve in the armed forces, and same-sex partners qualify for immigration rights and their unions are legally recognised.

  We rounded a bend in the road and drove alongside a park, Pullinger Kop, where I used to walk with my grandmother. The magnificent trees planted in Johannesburg’s earliest days had lost none of their impact, but the ornate paling fence now had washing hanging from every post, the toilet had been turned into a squatter’s shack, and the man-made brook that had once provided the park with a burbling bisection had been turned off because it was being used as a toilet.

  The CBD was marginally less malevolent than Hillbrow. “Since the installation of closed-circuit TV cameras, crime in this area has dropped by 48 per cent,” said Oupa, trying to sound both objective and optimistic. It was a statistic I was having trouble computing. Mainly due to the fact that we had pulled up to a traffic light beside which a scrawny shirtless white guy in acid-wash jeans and a Jason Donovan circa ‘87 mullet was guarding a retail premises with a sawn-off shotgun in one hand and a beer in the other.

  The volume of pavement traders quadrupled as we ventured deeper into the CBD. Out the front of my dad’s old business premises – now filthy and barricaded behind metal security grates – faded clothes were laid out in makeshift displays on blankets, metal garbage bins served as roadside barbecues, and dozens of barbers sharpened up the appearance of the punters who sat before them on plastic milk crates. Litter choked the gutters and in some cases leapt over them as cars rushed by. There were times when it was difficult to tell where the refuse ended and the goods for sale began.

  When I was growing up the best view of the city was always to be had from the Carlton Centre, a fifty-floor statement in architectural mediocrity that stood in the centre of the CBD. Beside it was the Carlton Hotel. This establishment represented the nadir of elegance and luxury in a society where opulence was the norm. It had top-hatted doormen, subdued lighting, a fountain in the lobby and an oh-so-swish restaurant called the Koffiehuis where guests were presented with a chocolate clog in a white gift box as a souvenir of their devils on horseback and chicken à l’orange.

  It was now a concrete shell. “Guests were too scared to stay there,” said Oupa. “They were mugged every time they went into the shopping mall downstairs. The hotel even arranged for individual security guards to accompany them, but by then it was too late.”

  And the viewing platform? That was gone too. It was still up there, of course, but only the rats and squatters enjoyed the panorama. The owner couldn’t give the place away.

  Still, the streets thrummed with vendors, business types and gangstas in low riders looking to easy marks for fast money. This streetscape was set against the aloof Georgian facades of buildings such as the Supreme Court, City Library and Town Hall. Despite obvious neglect, they managed to retain a defiant magnificence and I like to think that each of their columns gave the Third World mise en scène around them a daily Ionic finger.

  Most of these grand old dames had been encroached on by rusting shacks and prefab ugliness, but none was more striking than the city’s main synagogue in Wolmarans Street. Under its commanding domed roof I had listened to in numerable sermons and copied my father as he slowly beat a clenched fist against his chest on the Day of Atonement. Divided into a downstairs men’s section and balcony for women, according to Jewish orthodox custom, it also featured a choir chamber set high above the pulpit from which voices would erupt in earnest harmony to proclaim: “Hear O Israel. The Lord is God. The Lord is One.” It was here that Chief Rabbi Casper – affectionately known as the Holy Ghost – tore the OBE from his chest and hurled it to the ground when it came to light that Britain had refused safe harbour to a group of Jews fleeing the Nazis. Now there was a Chicken Licken out the back and the inside had been gutted to be installed in an exact replica of the building which had been erected in a safer suburb.

  I was crestfallen. Sensing my disappointment, Oupa offered to end our day with a walk through “one of Johannesburg’s oldest alternative medical centres”. At the southern end of the CBD was a street my trusty guide referred to as “witchdoctor alley”.

  The place was a ramshackle strip of peeling single-storey shops with the odd remnant of a deco flourish; each establishment had a sloping tin awning from which hung a sign proclaiming the proprietor’s skills. Some were sangomas (those who divined directly by reading bones and channels), others were inyangas (sangomas who were also traditional healers dispensing minerals, animal products and herbs) and an intriguing few were multigenerational practitioners who called themselves Doctor.

  One of the latter worked in conjunction with his grandmother and promised not only to relieve one of money and relationship problems – in that order – but to extend a customer’s genitals to more satisfactory proportions. (“Hey Nan, how does the uncircumcised girth chant start again?”) And all within fourteen days.

  The competition next-door raised the stakes even higher. Dr Macsuid and his Rock of Gibraltar Herbs could naturally enhance the night tool’s dimension as well as clearing up impotence, premature ejaculation, stroke, epilepsy, arthritis, diabetes, all STDs and a mysterious ailment known as sexual weakness. He could also supply winning Lotto numbers and exorcise demons.

  Aside from having hyperbolic claims in common, these stores all had a certain look about them. Dark beaded curtains were mandatory, as were armfuls of dried brown herbs and yellowing grasses displayed in metal bowls or hung from the ceiling. Behind the mahogany-stained counters that dominated each space were shelves containing rows of jars filled to the brim with roots, leaves and what were unmistakably animal bones. These stores smelt like a hippie share-house and usually featured a couple of treatment rooms down a dim corridor, beyond which lay a courtyard in which nervous poultry tried not to attract attention. However, their undeniable air of tantalising exoticism was markedly undercut by the fact they accepted Visa and were uniformly tuned to a radio station celebrating Celine Week.

  To better understand the nature of the city, Oupa suggested I spend the next day delving further into its seamy origins at a recreated mining village called Gold Reef City.

  Driving out there the following morning, I had to take a concrete flyover under whose shadow the witchdoctors from the previous day counselled the gullible, the faithful and the curious. On my left, the smart new Nelson Mandela Bridge, a vibrantly coloured meccano set, was being raised near the crumbling Main Station which the ANC had targeted in one of its more successful bomb campaigns during the days of the Struggle. Moments later an innocuous grey building loomed over the highway.

  Known as John Vorster Square, it was a typical government affair: all grey spackle, fluoro lighting and with a swathe of blue tiles added late and ineffectually to counter the dreariness of the structure. It had been the headquarters of the Johannesburg police, and numerous apartheid activists went in handcuffed only to leave in body bags or through windows. In the basement cells, deeds were committed in the name of the law that would chill a war crimes court. Soles were beaten and spirits crushed. Genitals had electrodes attached, skulls were pulped so the brains therein swelled to bursting, and residents whose arms had been broken somehow managed to hang themselves with bedsheets. Now the building was covered with an enormous poster featuring beaming children of all races welcoming the globe to the cricket world cup.

  In the distance lay some of the 400 mine dumps which ring the city like the yellow stains on a smoker’
s fingers. The biggest is at Randfontein and forms a 42-million-tonne white-headed pimple on the landscape which rises to a height of 111 metres.

  A few weeks before my arrival in Johannesburg, the city parks department put forward a plan to utilise these disused mine shafts as burial grounds. Crime and a rampant AIDS toll sees 20,000 Johannesburgers popping their clogs every year; the figure is set to rise to 70,000 by 2010 and the city is rapidly running out of space to bury them.

  Mulling over the inescapable conclusion that a number of the workers who now toiled in the mines would likely end up spending a vertical – much more space-efficient – eternity there should this plan come to fruition, I pulled into the car park of Gold Reef City.

  Just as I locked my door, a black man with a smart uniform and wide grin materialised by my window. He issued me with a ticket on which he scribbled my registration number and explained that I would be allowed to drive my car out the lot only if I could produce this ticket at the exit gate. “That way,” he beamed, “you and Corolla always go home together.”

  I had been to Gold Reef City shortly before emigrating. Not to discover more about the city in which I had lived all my life, but because there was a pseudo-saloon where the can-can girls were reputed to possess a penchant for revealing their nipples between high kicks. It turned out that only one did, but when you’re eighteen, an areolic glimpse plus an elaborate backstage fantasy can sustain one through a surprising number of lonely nights.

  Much had changed at Gold Reef City. For a start, I don’t recall being subjected to a frisk and metal-detector search before being allowed in. The place had also traded in much of its interactive museum emphasis in favour of amusement park rides and tawdry trinkets. Mouse pads covered with air-brushed depictions of big game jostled for shelf space with wooden salad servers whose handles resembled zebra heads, pencil holders shaped like crocodile mouths and miniature tribal shields covered in calfskin. Behind these stood a forest of knee-high “trees” featuring gilt limbs and trunks plus leaves made of tiger’s eyes, agates and hematite. They were enough to have converted Liberace to minimalism.

  I wandered around a nearby hall filled with the kind of interactive scientific curiosities for which I have an undeniable fondness – something I suspect I inherited from my father. One of the items on display was a floor piano on which I played a swinging version of “When the Saints Go Marching In” and was rewarded with spontaneous ambivalence from those around me. There was also a human jigsaw, comprised of a hollowed-out mannequin and a collection of plastic innards. “If you put the organs back in the right order,” declared a notice beside the exhibit, “you won’t need to force them.”

  Beyond this lay a mining museum in a draughty hangar which I had to myself. This was mainly due to the fact that the majority of visitors to Gold Reef City are drawn by a series of rides that promise to spin, dip, twirl, drop and flip you like a rag doll in a tumble dryer. Its slogan should have been “Five types of nausea for one low price! Kids under twelve chuck free.”

  While it should be acknowledged that the mines’ unquenchable demand for labour tore asunder the fabric of South Africa’s indigenous rural communities, the undertaking also produced feats of astounding mechanical and technical innovation. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but greed gives birth to ingenuity.

  The main hoist of the disused mine on which the theme park stands could draw on 8250 kw of power – you’d have to combine 150 average hatchbacks to be in the same ballpark. Down the road a mine was using a fifteen-kilometre steel rope to haul humans and ore to the surface, while the headgear of the nearby President Steyn shaft stood at ninety-nine metres – we’re talking Big Ben plus one. The fervour with which the engineering challenges were overcome becomes clear when you consider that one local mine, West Driefontein, produced around 2 per cent of all the gold ever accumulated by humanity.

  To best get a handle on the reality of the experience, you had to head underground. Equipped with a miner’s helmet and tiny lamp powered by a weighty battery pack, I joined a tour group exploring shaft 14 of Crown Mines. When the facility was in full operation there were fifty-seven working levels and those who toiled at the lowest of these often faced a two-hour trip to the face. The place had since been flooded to the fifth level, where we were to wander.

  I left daylight and my stomach on the surface as the cage in which the half-dozen tour members and myself free-fell 220 metres at thirty kilometres per hour – your average office building variety clocks up about five. Our guide, a rotund black woman, explained that the lift had been slowed down from the forty-five kilometres per hour at which it operated when the mine was fully functional. Apparently, there had been “incidents”.

  It was like Times Square on New Year’s Eve down there as tour groups squeezed past one another and guides battled to make themselves heard. Imagine the scene: a guide not working in her mother tongue explaining mining technology and folklore to a group who had only two things in common: their location and English as a third language. This resulted in our guide’s every sentence being followed with a sequence of translations accompanied by vigorous nodding.

  The miners themselves once faced similar problems as many spoke their own tribal language and their white bosses knew only English or Afrikaans. The response to this Babel was Fanakalo, a language that evolved underground and became the universal mine parlance. Comprising 80 per cent Zulu words and the remainder English, Afrikaans and Xhosa, it featured a vocabulary of 2000 items – 500 of which were profanities.

  For the first thirteen years of the mine’s existence it was not electrified and workers chipped away at rock faces with chisels and hammers by candlelight. With electricity came hydraulic power and drills were introduced. This necessitated a change in the way miners were remunerated and they were now expected to remove a set number of inches from the rock face to be deemed as having completed a day’s work.

  Before the drilling demonstration took place, we were asked to cover our ears. It was a timely warning. As its tungsten tip made contact with the face, the drill bucked and shuddered like an epileptic at a strobe factory. The noise they produced was a closely interspersed staccato burst akin to someone rapidly banging metal garbage-can lids together an inch from one’s head.

  Unfortunately for those in her tour group, one translator had fallen behind the mine guide and the instruction to block the Germans’ middle-aged ears was issued way too late. The net result was twenty-five Berliners in miner’s helmets leaping in simultaneous fright and emitting a chorus of “Gott in Himils” which echoed through the shafts.

  In the industry’s nascent period, the men behind the drills had it relatively easy. Their colleagues assigned to move the fully loaded pans along rail tracks from the face to sorting points were expected to shift a tonne of rock at a time. They were eventually replaced by donkeys that could pull six pans. These pack mules were originally kept underground for months on end, but not only did their health suffer, they were instantly blinded by sunlight when they came to the surface. As a result, vast pens were maintained by the mines and the animals were rotated through the shafts. Many historians have suggested that the donkeys were treated better than their human counterparts.

  In addition to the respiratory ailments that used to plague miners, the working environment was made all the more dangerous by the constant presence of dynamite, which was extensively used to blast new tunnels. Stored in bright red wooden boxes, the dynamite could only remain underground for forty-eight hours. After this it became so unstable that the heat of a miner’s palms had been known cause an explosion.

  Shaft collapses were common. Buttressing was an obvious solution but no native trees could be found to reliably produce straight, strong timber that would not be compromised by moisture. The land that produced the man who discovered the reef also provided the solution to this quandary. A variety of eucalypt timbers were imported from Australia to support mine shafts, and plantations were established in South Africa
that still thrive today.

  The eucalypts were not the only imports on the goldfields. Cornwall, Cumberland and Lancashire supplied a trickle then a flood of skilled miners and machine operators. Low on the social scale of their motherland, their new home split its people not according to class but colour. Their experience was in short supply and they were able to protect their income via trade unions that struck deals for better pay and conditions. Earning well, free from the oppressive nature of the English class system and attended to by servants, these men soon imported their wives and children to settle into a relatively comfortable family life.

  The same could not be said of the African worker.

  Although they were not allowed to own land in the province where the goldfields were located, thousands were employed as worker-tenants by wealthy Boer pastoralists. It was a win-win situation as these indigenous farmers could not only generate enough produce to give the white landowners remuneration or a share of the crops, they could also feed themselves and many of the early prospectors.

  The Boers of more meagre means who regularly complained to government about the “insolence” of the Africans in the marketplace (who were clearly more skilled farmers) found a ready ally in the labour-hungry mine owners. The government appeased both by passing a law limiting to five the number of tenants that could set up shop on a white farm.

  Deprived of a subsistence income, Africans had to seek wage labour and an instant work force was born. Touts from the mines conveniently appeared as the ink on the legislation was drying. Working on a commission for each man they signed up, these flim-flammers lied shamelessly about the conditions and wages. It was only when these workers arrived at the mines, often having had marginal success evading the white swindlers who posed as policemen and demanded shillings at bogus tolls, that they discovered they would be on year-long contracts with no vacation and no guarantee of renewal. They also found out that they would be housed in sterile, violent compounds from which they could not come and go as they pleased and where a pass system would prevent family visits.