Joburg is the ugliest city in the world, in the most astonishing place on Earth.
Nowhere else, on a clear day, will you see a sky so wide, so vast and so transparent that the black vacuum of space appears as a dim but discernible shadow hovering above the thin layer of breathable air that separates your daily frets and hopes from an eternity of nothingness.
Nowhere else will you see thunderheads gathering so rapidly into such unimaginably high white skyscrapers of cumulus that you fear the sky itself will burst, fall and tumble down to bury and suffocate you under the weight of their majestic pilosity.
Nowhere else will you see, hear and feel bolts of lightning so sudden and unexpected in their intensity, so explosive in their crackling ferocity, and so electric in their effect on the breathable air around you that every hair on your body is aroused to stand at attention, either in fear of instant immolation or in tumescent expectation of the Rapture.
Pick any day of the week and look up. You’ll see white, blue or black if you don’t see nothing. What you won’t see is a misty English sunset or a wet rainbow over glistening green downs. You won’t see skies suggesting Mediterranean palaces of azure and ivory. The sky above Joburg isn’t the kind of sky that gods could inhabit. Not even one solitary God. There’s nothing to hold onto. There’s nothing to sit on. There’s nowhere for Him to wash His hands.
Up here on the Highveld you don’t have to try to imagine there’s no heaven.
It’s as much about attitude as it is about altitude. Now that everything of any value has been removed from the two-and-a-half-mile-deep crust of Joburg’s earth, and now that everything else has gone down the drain, a sublime indifference to the fate of those left to scratch a living on the surface reigns supreme among the haves, while a blind indifference to the value of the lives of others festers day and night among the have-nots.
South Africa has the highest Gini Coefficient in the world, which means that our income inequality is more extreme than in Namibia, Suriname, Zambia, Sao Tome and Principe, the Central African Republic, Eswatini and Mozambique.
Only El Salvador, Jamaica, Lesotho, Honduras, Belize, Venezuela, St Vincent and the Grenadines, and St Kitts and Nevis have a worse per capita murder rate.
Since the discovery of the Witwatersrand goldfields in the late 19th century an estimated two billion ounces, or nearly fifty percent of all of the gold ever mined in the world, has been extracted from them.
Today, on the 18th July 2022, a single ounce of gold is worth $1,707. Add nine zeroes and multiply by two. I’ll do it for you:
$3,414,000,000,000.
Let’s not add the diamonds.
For those South Africans fortunate enough to have any income at all, the average annual salary is $1,932.
There’s a reason it’s called the Rainbow Nation. The extremes of light and dark were once about skin colour. Now they’re about everything.
South Africa is marred by remarkable economic, social, and environmental extremes. Inequality, unemployment, poverty, violence, including that against women, levels of HIV/AIDS infection and tuberculosis, diabetes, hunger, and obesity—all stand amongst the highest in the world. So do carbon emissions, as a consequence of a coal-dominated energy system. And so too do social protests.
The Essential Guide to Critical Development Studies, 2021 - Sam Ashman
Look at the Joburg around you. Look at your feet. Kick your tyres, check your oil, fill her up. Look at the walls, the fences, and the bars on the windows. Locks and bolts; keys and chains. Look all the way from Halfway House to halfway south. Look at the mansions, the shacks and the shanties. Look at the chlorinated pools in the gardens and the dirt roads of melted hail and raw sewage that buckets of it couldn’t clean. Hear the Kreepys sucking and breathing, breathing and sucking. If there was as much money for crime as there is crime for money. When Providence died, squatters moved into her Hillbrow flat.
Tell, if you can, the fixed that can’t be broken from the broken that can’t be fixed. Glass, wire, iron, stone. Brass, lead styphnate, antimony sulfide, barium nitrate. Flesh, blood, bone and braai. Smell the cyanide seeping out the wells where the diamonds were. Breathing and sucking. If they made them for wells. If they made them for fathers’ gins and mothers’ tears. Joburg is a dump bigger than all the dumps they took the gold out of. First once, then twice. Under that ravishing sky it stinks of dumps. It’s one big dump. Look at your hands. Look at the colour of them. Smell them.
On the face of it, then, the Rapture seems less likely than plain evaporation.
I wasn’t thinking about all this stuff when I arrived in Joburg to start working at the SABC in 1975. Maybe the part about heaven, but not the rest.
Was I conscious, at the time, of the irony of having been funded to complete a degree in English literature by the propaganda arm of the largely Afrikaner apartheid government?
Not really.
Was I aware that I would be working for three years for the people who did the bidding every morning, noon and night on national radio of the very people I had picketed against on the campus of the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, when they passed the Riotous Assemblies Amendment Act, No 30, of 1974, which prohibited the gathering of more than twelve people in a public space? —that I would be writing the propaganda of the paymasters of the police who set their Alsatian dogs on me and my fellow protestors in King Edward Avenue, and that but for the fortuitously unlocked door of a nearby squash court I might have ended up temporarily chained or permanently maimed?
Yes, and yes.
Did I care?
Not when I didn’t think about it. The difference is that in those days everything still worked. For us.
But so, yes, in my feigned innocence, and despite the absence of my shadow, it was a beautiful Joburg day. And here I was, liberated at last from the manacles that had bound me all these long months to a typewriter at the obscure end of the long wooden news-desk in a far-flung corner of the fifth floor of Broadcast House.
Here I was, no longer a mere writer of news stories handed down in Afrikaans whispers to the lowest common denominator capable of dividing his South African patriotism from his English sensibilities.
Here I was, handpicked by the News Editor himself to undertake a perilous journey into the great unknown, no longer a mere news-writer but a real reporter, a serious correspondent, a glamorous newshound, a romantic hack, a dedicated pressman — my body burdened by the weight of the Nagra tape-recorder strapped rakishly over my shoulder, my conscience burdened by the greater weight of my responsibility to seek and find the flame of truth that surely burned just across the road from De Villiers Street where the noise of police sirens was coming from: to find it and bring it back alive, to protect and nourish the fragile flickering flare of it with the fuel of my brilliant investigative insights and my profound analysis until it was primed and ready to set fire to a great taper of truth that would burn away the dross of general ignorance and cast a revelatory light on some hitherto unknown but deeply significant aspect of South African political life for generations to come.
And which is more I was a journalist, my son.
Sometimes something happens that becomes so symbolic in retrospect that it’s almost impossible to remember it unfolding in real time, in the real world. The World Cup of 1995 was like that. I was there in Ellis Park with my friend Eugene Strauss, the late, great, widely lamented Eugene Strauss (of whom more later) when Mandela revealed that he was wearing Francois Pienaar’s rugby jersey. I can’t remember the rugby itself apart from half the Springbok scrum tackling Jonah Lomu five metres from our line. And Joel Stransky’s drop-kick, of course. But the symbolism of it will stay with me always.
This day would be like that.
Like every other public utility in South Africa, from schools to hospitals to buses and beaches, Johannesburg Station was strictly segregated. There were trains for white people and trains for black people. There was a ticket office for white people and a ticket office for black people, and there was an entrance for white people and an entrance for black people.
My walk from the office to the eastern end of the station would have been less than a mile, a lot of it uphill. The white entrance to the station concourse was another four or five long blocks to the west, but the black entrance was right in front of me. And since I was beginning to feel the heat, and since the Nagra was getting heavier than my conscience, and since I was here on official government business, so to speak, and since the ticket hall inside the black entrance looked unusually deserted from my perspective on Rissik Street, it seemed to me that no harm would be done by a little trespassing if I could get back to Blake with an atmospheric soundtrack of whatever was happening inside the station in time for the six o’clock news. Clark Kent wouldn’t have thought twice.
So I found a bench, unpacked the Nagra, put on the headphones, lugged it back over my shoulder, checked my levels, switched to standby mode, and poised my finger over the Record button. Nagra is famous for the sensitivity and clarity of its microphones. I pointed the rifle-mic in the direction of the concourse. The din of Joburg traffic faded into a background susurration, like waves breaking on a distant seashore, and in its place, in the telescopic foreground, I heard the steady chanting of a thousand voices, faint at first, but reverberating the way that choir did in the Cango Caves when we’d visited them as children on a trip to the Eastern Cape, there by Outdtshoorn.
Down the stairs, out of the light and into the gloom, it became louder and steadier. It was an African chant, as rhythmic as Shosholoza but more heated, more vociferous, and it was accompanied by the syncopated stamping of two thousand boots on the concrete beneath me, and the rhythmic clapping of two thousand hands.
I pressed Record, waited for my eyes to adjust to the relative darkness, and strode with the purpose of Livingstone into the deserted corridor ahead of me.
The singing grew louder. I followed it into a second corridor where I began to bump into the backs of people, black men in suits or overalls, or black women in maid’s or nurse’s uniforms, or wearing traditional headdresses and carrying shopping in plastic packets from OK Bazaars, some of them on their heads.. They seemed to be stragglers at the back of a queue because they were standing on tiptoes and craning their necks to see what was going on up ahead. They weren’t singing.
When I said “Sorry” or “Excuse me” they stepped aside, very politely, and ushered me forward. I thought they must be used to young white men bearing suspicious mechanical equipment and invading their non-European space because they didn’t seem in the least surprised. But I also wanted them to know I was English. Ish.
It got more awkward as I pressed forward. The crowd grew thicker, hotter, more animated. The chanting was all around me, louder and angrier. I found it more difficult to make my apologies heard. I had to wait for the right moments to squeeze my way through the narrow gaps between the crush of basses, baritones, tenors, contraltos and ululating sopranos — trying not to push, trying not to be rude, trying not to feel so white.
Suddenly the tunnel opened up into the cavernous concourse of trains and platforms, forty or fifty yards wide and two-hundred or three-hundred yards long, and every square inch of it was occupied by a clapping, stamping, chanting body, and every one of them was trying to see what was happening at the far end ahead of us where a brick archway appeared to lead into a hallway or anteroom of some kind lit by bright white fluorescent lights.
I have only the vaguest idea of what it was that compelled me to try to get to the front. It wasn’t out of any overriding sense of duty, and it certainly wasn’t out of curiosity. Considerations of ambition, professionalism, reputation or any other kind of personal advantage had long since given way to a very straightforward appreciation of the fact that I needed to get out of there — not because I thought I was in any kind of danger, somehow that never crossed my mind, not even for an instant — but only because this thing looked like it was going to go on long into the night, and I suddenly wanted to get on the bus and go home to my flat. And I remember thinking how embarrassing it would be to have to turn around and excuse myself all over again to the people who had so courteously let me through not more than twenty or thirty minutes ago.
I had to get out of there, out of the claustrophobic oppression of it. I was suffocating, not for lack of oxygen but for lack of explanation. Why did people have to do this to be heard? Who would hear them underground? How much lower would we have to go?
I needed to breathe the air above me. I wanted the sky to open. I wanted to feel those fat Joburg raindrops splatting on my head and trickling down my forehead and the back of my neck. I wanted it to pour and hail in a massive cloudburst that washed all of this away. Someone else could find the truth.
But I pushed on. And again, amazingly, the crowd parted to let me through. There were even smiles and pats on the back; there were words I took to be of encouragement, not slurs or curses or racist imprecations. And as I got nearer and nearer to the fluorescent hallway I began to hear, through the breath-taking clarity of the Nagra headphones, the unmistakable barking of dogs — big, snarling, slobbering, teeth-gnashing dogs.
It occurred to me only then, stupidly and pathetically, that the route I had taken hadn’t led me to the riot, it had led me into the riot, through the riot— from the back of the riot to the sharp, angry, vociferous front of it — to the bleeding edge of this great mass of brave, black protestors where I now stood aghast among the bravest and most vociferous of them, a young, blonde, awkward, embarrassed, well-fed if badly dressed white youth, not so much a lamb among lions as an irrelevance, a redundancy, a pale nothingness, a shameful superfluity.
The dogs were right there, not more than five or six feet in front of me, growling, barking and straining with foaming maws at the leashes of their handlers in the bright white light, their white handlers straining to hold them back from leaping at me and tearing out my throat and the throats of the implacably calm protesters beside me who made up the front rank of this whole great chanting, sweating, singing, breathing gathering, the specific point of whose anger on this occasion would merge, in retrospect, into just another reason to set Soweto on fire one year later.
Behind the dog-handlers stood a gallery of men in camouflage with unshouldered arms who looked at me as though I was the person they would most enjoy shooting, this white Judas, this verraaier, this traitor to his skin.
I tried to smile with my lips, that universally recognisable shit-eating grin of the idiot found out. The ribbon that held the plastic badge that would identify me as a bona fide puppet of the apartheid state had got tangled up in a knot of tweed, leather buttons, my tie, my collar and the straps of the Nagra. A fugue of clicking safety catches accompanied my attempt to retrieve it with my free left hand from the inside right pocket in which it appeared to be snagged. A white officer in the blue uniform of the South African Police gestured to them to lower their barrels. The crush of the crowd pressed me forward. They raised them again.
“S.A.U.K.,” I said as calmly as I could in my best Afrikaans. They couldn’t hear me above the din. The dogs barked, the crowd chanted, the crush crushed.
I had a choice to make. All I had to do was find my card, step forward, and explain my situation. “Ek het verdwaal, meneer. Jammer, meneer.”
I could turn around and tiptoe backwards, blushing vividly enough for them to see I had made an honest mistake, the kind of mistake that any 23-year-old white kid who grew up on a farm a long way from Joburg could make. The officer would smile too, the ironic smile of an Afrikaner who knew that the worst of all punishments an Engelsman could suffer was embarrassment. I would melt back into the safety of my whiteness, the guns pointing not at me but at the black crowd I would be facing from the other side of the bare strip of concrete between us.
Or I could stay where I was.
It’s only the symbolism of it that I remember now — not the act itself, nor the conscious decision to make it; not what they said to me; not how I found my way home.
In South Africa the distance between the right side and the wrong side of history is only five or six feet of bare concrete.
Suck it up.