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Johannesburg, South Africa
Wednesday, March 26 2003
setting: Africa
Gretchen's childhood friend Dina is a reporter for the Associated Press stationed in Johannesburg. What with the war in Iraq, South Africa is not a big exporter of breaking news these days, but Dina continues to collect her salary and do what she can to cover her beat. The distraction of Iraq has kept Dina's most important story, the horrid conditions in Zimbabwe, completely out of the American news. A few weeks ago Dina was in Zimbabwe and ended up spending the night in a scary jail cell with a few other members of the South African press corps.
Dina was to be our host for the first part of our pre-honeymoon vacation. This morning she picked us up from the airport and drove us back to her place. At this point the Johannesburg revelations began coming to me fast and furious.
For starters, Johannesburg looked to all appearances like a modern first world city, complete with wide, well-maintained freeways and billboards advertising high tech luxuries and useless commodities like diamonds and perfume. The vegetation somewhat resembled that of Los Angeles, though plants here grew with considerably more lushness and the grass was green, not brown. I noticed that most of the trees were eucalyptus, leaving me to wonder if perhaps Johannesburg was originally treeless.
All the advertising and signage was in English, immediately erasing my language concerns.
I was startled to realize that people in South Africa drive on the left, not the right. We'd made plans to fly down to Cape Town and then drive back, but now I was wondering if we were going to be able to make the adjustment without killing ourselves. The drivers on the freeway seemed to be lots more aggressive than American drivers, routinely tailgating and forcing people over onto the shoulder to pass. Complicating matters were the many Minibus drivers hauling around poor black laborers. They were terribly overcrowded and their drivers had a tendency to make sudden, perilously dangerous driving decisions, sometimes with respect to each other. Dina explained that many of the Minibus drivers are unlicensed and uninsured and that every day one of them careens out of control somewhere and kills a good fraction of its hapless passengers.
After we'd left the freeway, Dina drove through various suburbs and I observed that the streets, though densely lined with cheerful trees, was isolated from the homes on either side by high concrete walls. These were all topped by something unpleasant: electrical wires, concertina wire, or sharpened steel blades. People in these suburbs lived in private fortresses, preserving their first world luxury from the onslaught of third world hordes besieging the city. Dina said that until about ten years ago, there were no walls around homes in Johannesburg. But with the demise of Apartheid, blacks, many of whom are desperate as well as poor, have been free to enter formerly whites-only areas. Many of them make a business of selling flowers, newspapers, and even lava rocks at intersections. But there are also those who come there to wrest what they can from anyone who looks like he has something worth taking. Johannesburg is the mugging capital not just of the Southern Hemisphere, but of the entire world.
Dina's apartment was in a large ugly brick building in the near-northern suburbs of Johannesburg. She pushed a button to open a gate so she could drive in, and then parked in the basement garage. A guard (he was black, of course) stood watch continuously.
While Gretchen and Dina went off and did things in Johannesburg, I took a prolonged nap to catch up on sleep that had eluded me on the two legs of my airplane experience.
I woke up to the sound of Dina's housekeeper tidying the place. Since the cost of labor is negligible, every white person in Johannesburg hires someone to do the nasty work of keeping entropy at bay.
Desperate for news from Iraq, I went into the living room to try listen to the radio. I quick scan of the dial revealed over a dozen stations broadcasting in a variety of languages. Amusingly, even the most click-rich African languages were rich in English words, particularly for referring to numbers and dates.
Gretchen came back late in the afternoon and came to fetch me. She was riding with Dina's "driver," a guy serving as a one-man car service, mostly for people in the Johannesburg press corps. Unlike in Brooklyn, there was no hurry while he waited out in the parking lot. Things happen much more slowly in Africa.
He drove us downtown to show us how it looks these days in the so-called New (post-Apartheid) South Africa. Superficially, it looked like a slightly-post-prime world-class city, complete with gleaming office buildings and statues of a variety of important white people. But among these trappings of first world glory was the motley bustle of the new heirs of the city - poor black Africans. Most of them had no business in any of the buildings and appeared to be scratching out whatever living they could from the street. Some sold things, others begged. Had we come here at night and idled too long at a stop light, we would have discovered first-hand that a few are carjackers. This hungry desire to extract a living at ground zero of the African economy has rendered downtown Johannesburg unfit for conventional western-style urban business. Many of the locked buildings downtown are gradually being abandoned as their occupants relocate to safer digs in the lily white suburbs to the north. A pervasive dusting of grime is consistent with the ten or so years since the end of Apartheid, a system that had violently kept poor blacks "in their place" and made Johannesburg a safe place to be rich and white.
Our driver took us to the top of the Carlton Centre, the highest building in Johannesburg and, for that matter, the Southern Hemisphere (South Africa is very proud of the things it has which hold the hemisphere record). Security was intense in the building, but that didn't stop a teenage boy from soliciting me for spare change.
Later Gretchen and I bought a welded metal rooster from a woman in a small ad hoc market area.
In the evening, Dina took Gretchen and me out to Pomegranate, a restaurant in the safe neighborhood of Melville, a place where white people can imagine they've died and gone to Santa Monica. When we went to park, we had our first exposure to what Dina's housemate Serah terms a "parkeologist." Parkeologists wear reflective green vests and have territories along streets and in parking lots, and when people park in their territories, they're expected to tip the parkeologist in exchange for his keeping an eye on their cars. The usual tip is five Rand, about sixty American cents. Gretchen and I soon took to joking about "advanced studies in Parkeology," but the truth is that the quality of parkeological services can vary greatly. Advanced parkeologists will help direct you while you're parking and pulling out, and they also work to police their territories and keep them free of trash. In Johannesburg, the sheer number of idle fingers picking up trash (and then sometimes converting it into art) has made it far cleaner than any other city I've ever visited, even Reykjavik, Iceland.
We had dinner with a gentleman with whom Dina has or had some sort of romantic interest. He was a very mature, cerebral gentleman, and that appeared to be his greatest romantic liability. Earlier in his life, he'd been involved in "the Struggle" (against Apartheid). Back then he'd befriended an Indian gentleman who tonight just happened to be dining at another table in the restaurant. It appears that the world of Pomegranate diners is a small one. Eventually this Indian guy joined our table and talked with us about various things, particularly his involvement with "the Struggle." After Apartheid, he'd managed to work his way all the way up to the position of South African Transportation Minister, but now he's tired of struggling and is more interested in comfort. He has gone on to parlay his experience and connections with the ANC power structure into a lucrative career in banking. Though he might be a great people person, he had great difficulty understanding Gretchen's sense of humor, what with her continuous deadpan assertion of absurdities. That's the thing she does when her brow isn't furrowed with empathy.
Later Gretchen, Dina and I ducked into a little live music venue nearby and watched a couple people doing a sort of guitar-and-vocals Indigo Girls type thing. Such music doesn't always come off well in recorded media, but it was unexpectedly intense tonight when performed live. I looked around the room at the white people in the audience watching the white people play on stage and I felt a certain guilt - or perhaps embarrassment - that this was happening here in what should really be, you know, a black country. But then I had a feeling of empathy - these white people, you know, they're people too. I'm a white person myself and I mean no one any harm when I listen to the music I like, largely performed by other white people. It's not a bad thing to be part of a culture as long as you're not obnoxious about it. These white people here tonight - many of them couldn't help it that they were born in Africa, and that their parents were born in Africa. And if they want to play their white music, more power to them.
After a day in Johannesburg, Gretchen and I realized that life here is amazingly similar to life in Los Angeles. It wasn't just the look of the place, with its palms and eucalyptus trees. But society itself functions in a similar way. The wealthy venture outside as little as possible, moving between here and there in the isolation of their cars, eventually returning to the gated security of their homes to disappear, good weather be damned. Also like Los Angeles, Johannesburg has a vast pool of unskilled workers eager to do society's dirty work.
To our sensibilities, it's a horrible way to live. In terms of urban living conditions, we prefer the inherently more-egalitarian pedestrian-based culture of New York.
See some photographs from the South Africa trip.
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