Last weekend I went on holiday to Joburg. When I got there people kept asking me ‘what are you here for?’ Before I left they had asked me ‘what are you going for’? Young, white Capetonians go to Joburg for work. And to see concerts that don’t come to Cape Town. And to go to the British Embassy in Pretoria to beg for visas for the UK. White Capetonians don’t go on holiday to Joburg. This is an oversight. Joburg is a radical city with a buzzing night life and loads of interesting people who are motivated to do stuff- and they’ve got black people in Joburg- unlike many Cape Town spaces. I recently went to Deer Park café for breakfast, next to my flat in Vredehoek and the only African person at Deerpark was a domestic worker who was throwing a ball to a yelping terrier. She was using one of those ball chucking contraptions that look like an ice-cream scoop glued to a plastic shaft, or a prosthetic limb without fingers or toes. The dog was an ugly little fucker.
I went to Joburg to visit friends. My friends Dawood and Lauren had a dinner party in my honour, on the Saturday night. The occasion really was a victory for the rainbow nation. Like one of those adverts where a black man and a white man and a green man and a pink man are watching motor sports on a multi-coloured couch, while there black and white and green and pink wives make different hues of five roses tea in the tie-dyed kitchen. Present at dinner were Dawood and Lauren, who are coloured Capetonians, two Indian girls, an African couple, a half Egyptian and me and my friend Gil. Gil and I are what you would call ‘white people’. Dawood served the starter which was purple borscht (beetroot soup- I always thought Borscht was a Russian thing made of cabbage, but there you go). Halfway through the evening a young African filmmaker called Carlo arrived. Carlo bounced through the door with two young women. One was wearing a red unitard made of spandex, prompting one of the female guests at the table to start hissing the words ‘camel toe alert’ through spoonfuls of her Borscht. The other young women, the one not wearing spandex, introduced herself as Prudence and told us that she was a pole dancer. After a good few of Dawood’s Martinis (and now that they live in Joburg we don’t have to recycle our olives for the next Martini, making the incentive to drink fast even greater), it was inevitable that I found myself in the kitchen erecting a pole out of a broom taped to a mop. When the makeshift pole was unveiled, Gil did his best to bring a smidgen of gender equality to the dinner party and gyrated with aplomb while I held the mop-broom-pole straight.
The night then went a bit awry. The next thing I knew, Carlo was demanding to know why Gil and I had voted for Helen Zille and we were asking why he is in bed with Julius Malema. Now let’s back up for just a second. Voting was a difficult thing for me. With all of the white guilt I have it seemed as if voting could only be comparable to choosing which testicle to cut off (should one be forced to make that choice), but never once did I even contemplate voting for the Democratic Alliance. On the way out I endured Gil’s monologue on the fact that apartheid was nothing in comparison to the six million Jews that died in the Holocaust, in a period of only 5 years. So we were left contemplating whether rapid genocide is worse than systemic racism mixed with extended deaths, torture and human rights violations. So missing the point. Sometimes I feel like this country is fucked, so fucked.
But it’s home.
Later we went to The Woods. The Woods is in Newtown, which has a very strange feel to it. Almost like a deserted post-apocalyptic city interspersed with nightclubs and bars. At The Woods you find Joburg’s young cool brigade. Why is it that Joburg’s young brigade don’t have to try so hard to be cool? I can only describe the difference between the Joburg and Cape Town young cool by making an analogy to how, I presume, these two groups of people defecate. Cape Town’s young cool look like a toddler who- on the inside- is trying his hardest to take a shit but just can’t seem to get anything out and- on the outside- is sitting stone faced on the lavatory, dropping stools without batting an eye. Joburg’s cool kids shit in style. They leave the door open, swagger confidently up to the loo, drop their pants, flick their hair, release, wipe and flush. There is something more raw about the Joburg young cool. They’re in South Africa and they know it. God I romanticize Johannesburg sometimes. These are kids who actually live in Sandton homes that resemble lost Venetian Villas, puked out onto a corrugated iron dominated city. They go out with Louis Vutton and Jimmy Choo and their blonde Joburg hair which has been freshly cut at the mall. Just like many young Capetonians.
Back to The Woods and the Teddy bears picnic was in full swing. Sweat X was playing- proudly Cape Town mind you- and I felt chuffed that a Cape Town band was riling up these young Joburgers. I was standing in a passage, meant for pedestrians, which was semi on the dance floor. A young woman walked up to me and said that I was blocking the way. I said that blocking the way is all relative. Marcus Wormstorm was singing at the top of his voice that he has pussy on his mind, all the time all the time. He’s added a new hit, the lyrics go something like, “tits, pussy, ass”. In that order. The young woman held my ear closed with her finger- you know the way people do that thing, in order to help you hear, fuck knows the science behind it- and said that I sounded like I was a post modernist. Jesus Christ, in a nightclub? God I love Joburg. I told her that maybe I was and for a while we tried to discuss the discrepancies between modernist, late capitalist and post-modern approaches to night club traffic jamming. Marcus was wearing a red bow tie and massive gold glasses. “Tits, pussy, ass. Tits, pussy, ass.”
The next day, Heritage day, saw Dawood- who is a 30 something year old lawyer who has never owned a driver’s license- bolting down the Joburg highway, in traffic at about 180km/h, doing his best to show me how much he resembles a human anus when he drives. As we approached Soweto, a police barricade forced me to the driver’s seat because I do have a license and we then had to endure a session of enquiries as to why we were playing musical drivers like overgrown children at a birthday party.
The Hector Peterson museum then silenced me. It changed my mood, my holiday, my Joburg modus operandi. Completely. It feels so close. So close to what? So close to what this country whispers, sometimes, that it is. There is something so chilling about that photograph. Hector Peterson in his friend’s arms. Dead. I don’t think it’s the helplessness of childhood, as all around children were reinventing politics in ‘76. They were not helpless, they were empowering themselves through the rejection of Afrikaans as a ridiculous medium for racist Bantu education. It’s the three figures that are chilling: one dead, one screaming and one carrying. They couldn’t be more together and they couldn’t be further apart. And the sister is screaming with all her might and there are no ears to hear… where are the ears? We need ears, lots of ears. South Africa needs ears. And now she’s in the museum in Soweto, but what is Julius listening to and what is he saying? And why am I spending my time explaining why I didn’t even think about voting for a white woman who botoxes her face and who, according to some, sleeps with her all-white gaggle of decrepit MECs? This country is fucked, so fucked.
But it’s home.
I got on the plane with my head spinning. I needed a bloody Mary more than Zapiro needs a new subject besides JZ or a showerhead for his cartoons. Then I remembered SAA no longer serve hard liquor on domestic flights. Their only excuse can be that they, SAA, are also half Swiss owned and pretty bankrupt. The air hostess said that they didn’t even have tomato juice. Not even a virgin Mary. But we have Julius. Who isn’t a virgin and doesn’t have anything interesting to say about government parastatals or gender equality or neoliberal economics. Tits, pussy, ass, tits, pussy, ass.
So fucked, but it’s home.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Scottsborough
I’m on the South Coast of Natal at a 10 day facilitation training course. Facilitation is the practice of conducting processes with groups, aiding them with their collective communication and, in the process, raising their self-awareness. It’s about luring unconscious motivations to penetrate the meniscus of social interactions’ murky waters and become conscious, such that decision-making can become more informed.
After a week of this stuff I needed a drink. It was Saturday afternoon and a mild ideological tension was in the air: the two curry cup rugby semi-finals clashed with both English Premiership and local soccer matches. In my hotel room I received the ‘bouquet’ of DSTV channels, which include Supersport 1 and 3, with my team, Liverpool, and their game against Sunderland being screened on Supersport 5. So with a fair degree of trepidation I moseyed towards the town of Scottsburgh, knowing full well that if any sport was being watched in a bar it would be the Sharks-Cheetahs game and if football managed to sneak the stage it would either be Man U (puke) or African locals watching the Sundowns-Chiefs game. To get to the town from the Cutty Sark hotel, one can take a shortcut over a river which flows into the sea. I removed my shoes and socks, took my Liverpool wallet out of my pocket, took off my shirt and tracksuit top and got wet up to my belly button. No problem. I got dressed on the other side of the river and walked to the nearest bottle store, bought a six pack of Windhoek draughts, the cans in the black tin and two extras just in case. At the till I bought a little bottle double shot of bells for desert.
I was about to descend towards the river for the reverse crossing, when the words “Daniel Agger comes away with it” drifted slowly towards my thirsty ears. Daniel Agger is a young Danish central defender who is back in the Liverpool starting line up after a long injury. I looked up and saw a half-open metal security gate, a tipsy man slowly emerging from its jaws. I saw a television on a wall, beaming Liverpool’s new black and gold away strip. I saw a sign that said ‘Scottsburgh lifesaving club, members only’. I asked if it was a bar and, if so, where the entrance was located. A short argument ensued, as the drunkard instructed the bartender to admit me to the premises.
I entered the joint and saw that I was the only patron. I knew I had to play my cards right: the bartender wouldn’t stay open long for only me, even with the stern words of the drunken man. I therefore needed to burn some cash. I ordered a Windhoek draught which he had trouble identifying, going for the Amstel quart and the smaller Windhoek lager, slightly perplexed by my choice of drink. I sat at one of the tables. Fucking Liverpool were 1 nil down to Sunderland. To make matters worse the Sunderland goal was a strange beast, deflected in off an errand beach ball that a Liverpool fan had thrown onto the pitch. The rulebook said that the goal counted. Unbelievable. Anyway, we had another 70 minutes to put things right. I felt relieved to have found the game.
The barman settled in on my left and I realised that in addition to filling his coffers I would have to make small talk to keep this going. It was clear to me that he was either mildly intellectually challenged or very drunk. This was discernible from his very nasal tone and slurred speech. Commenting on the football he said that he’d been in London and Southampton, working as a male nurse and that ‘you got into it’. I told him that I’d ‘been into it since the age of 6’. ‘Really!’ he exclaimed, looking me up and down. Mildly discombobulated he said: ‘but you guys have rugby down there in Cape Town’. To him I was like a child who had been brought up in a solid Christian household but had become an atheist. I decided to sit this one out, to remain quiet. He could make of it what he wished. He settled on the conclusion of, “but you’re a bit small I suppose”. I agreed because it seemed like the simplest way to avoid the topic and it wasn’t completely untrue. In retrospect it would have been a good topic on which to settle.
He was still looking at me. I was looking at the screen. “You guys have lank chicks in Cape Town hey?” Hmmm. This ball was a bit more curved. I quietly coaxed myself: ‘don’t offend or he’ll close up shop’ and answered, “well it’s a big city, you know three million people so I suppose there are quite a few woman”.
“Ja ja, but there lank chicks in Cape Town aren’t there?” I decided to take the cop out stereotype instead of engaging in a but of fake male banter: “ja but you know Cape Town girls are quite stuck up and unapproachable”.
I thought he may sense my disinterest by this stage, but being one of those strange animals that I call the ‘Natal buggar’ (a particular strain of buggar that is socialised in small town boys-only private schools like Michaelhouse, Kersney and Hilton to believe that talking vaginas are what other people call ‘women’, that the percentage of one’s body liquid comprised of beer is a genuinely objective indicator of masculine status and that the game with the oval ball is more sacred than the fossilised masturbatory semen of Jesus Christ found on the remains of his adolescent bed), he wanted more: “there lank gay okes in Cape Town hey.” In my head I thought: Hmmm yes well it’s a very liberal open minded kinda place, the sea, the mountain and all that. He continued with his monologue, “When I worked in Brighton me and my mate got fucked up by some gay okes. Drunk as a skunk and couldn’t control ourselves, causing so much kak. No offence hey?”
I looked at him not quite sure what he meant. Did he think because I liked soccer I might be gay? Was he realising that I may have gay friends? Always the dilemma in being soccer mad; sport seems to have this uncanny knack of attracting such Philistines. By this stage I was far more demoralised by this cretin’s effect on my psyche than on Liverpool’s performance. While he continued to stock his bar, simultaneously excavating the reserves of his predictable repertoire- which included that he doesn’t leave Scottburgh much except to go to the local township to buy booze, where it is cheaper but a bit dodgy and that his sister worked for Price Waterhouse in Sydney- I slipped out and descended the stairs. I headed for the river, where this time I wouldn’t bother with removing my clothes. I wanted, more than anything, to get wet.
After a week of this stuff I needed a drink. It was Saturday afternoon and a mild ideological tension was in the air: the two curry cup rugby semi-finals clashed with both English Premiership and local soccer matches. In my hotel room I received the ‘bouquet’ of DSTV channels, which include Supersport 1 and 3, with my team, Liverpool, and their game against Sunderland being screened on Supersport 5. So with a fair degree of trepidation I moseyed towards the town of Scottsburgh, knowing full well that if any sport was being watched in a bar it would be the Sharks-Cheetahs game and if football managed to sneak the stage it would either be Man U (puke) or African locals watching the Sundowns-Chiefs game. To get to the town from the Cutty Sark hotel, one can take a shortcut over a river which flows into the sea. I removed my shoes and socks, took my Liverpool wallet out of my pocket, took off my shirt and tracksuit top and got wet up to my belly button. No problem. I got dressed on the other side of the river and walked to the nearest bottle store, bought a six pack of Windhoek draughts, the cans in the black tin and two extras just in case. At the till I bought a little bottle double shot of bells for desert.
I was about to descend towards the river for the reverse crossing, when the words “Daniel Agger comes away with it” drifted slowly towards my thirsty ears. Daniel Agger is a young Danish central defender who is back in the Liverpool starting line up after a long injury. I looked up and saw a half-open metal security gate, a tipsy man slowly emerging from its jaws. I saw a television on a wall, beaming Liverpool’s new black and gold away strip. I saw a sign that said ‘Scottsburgh lifesaving club, members only’. I asked if it was a bar and, if so, where the entrance was located. A short argument ensued, as the drunkard instructed the bartender to admit me to the premises.
I entered the joint and saw that I was the only patron. I knew I had to play my cards right: the bartender wouldn’t stay open long for only me, even with the stern words of the drunken man. I therefore needed to burn some cash. I ordered a Windhoek draught which he had trouble identifying, going for the Amstel quart and the smaller Windhoek lager, slightly perplexed by my choice of drink. I sat at one of the tables. Fucking Liverpool were 1 nil down to Sunderland. To make matters worse the Sunderland goal was a strange beast, deflected in off an errand beach ball that a Liverpool fan had thrown onto the pitch. The rulebook said that the goal counted. Unbelievable. Anyway, we had another 70 minutes to put things right. I felt relieved to have found the game.
The barman settled in on my left and I realised that in addition to filling his coffers I would have to make small talk to keep this going. It was clear to me that he was either mildly intellectually challenged or very drunk. This was discernible from his very nasal tone and slurred speech. Commenting on the football he said that he’d been in London and Southampton, working as a male nurse and that ‘you got into it’. I told him that I’d ‘been into it since the age of 6’. ‘Really!’ he exclaimed, looking me up and down. Mildly discombobulated he said: ‘but you guys have rugby down there in Cape Town’. To him I was like a child who had been brought up in a solid Christian household but had become an atheist. I decided to sit this one out, to remain quiet. He could make of it what he wished. He settled on the conclusion of, “but you’re a bit small I suppose”. I agreed because it seemed like the simplest way to avoid the topic and it wasn’t completely untrue. In retrospect it would have been a good topic on which to settle.
He was still looking at me. I was looking at the screen. “You guys have lank chicks in Cape Town hey?” Hmmm. This ball was a bit more curved. I quietly coaxed myself: ‘don’t offend or he’ll close up shop’ and answered, “well it’s a big city, you know three million people so I suppose there are quite a few woman”.
“Ja ja, but there lank chicks in Cape Town aren’t there?” I decided to take the cop out stereotype instead of engaging in a but of fake male banter: “ja but you know Cape Town girls are quite stuck up and unapproachable”.
I thought he may sense my disinterest by this stage, but being one of those strange animals that I call the ‘Natal buggar’ (a particular strain of buggar that is socialised in small town boys-only private schools like Michaelhouse, Kersney and Hilton to believe that talking vaginas are what other people call ‘women’, that the percentage of one’s body liquid comprised of beer is a genuinely objective indicator of masculine status and that the game with the oval ball is more sacred than the fossilised masturbatory semen of Jesus Christ found on the remains of his adolescent bed), he wanted more: “there lank gay okes in Cape Town hey.” In my head I thought: Hmmm yes well it’s a very liberal open minded kinda place, the sea, the mountain and all that. He continued with his monologue, “When I worked in Brighton me and my mate got fucked up by some gay okes. Drunk as a skunk and couldn’t control ourselves, causing so much kak. No offence hey?”
I looked at him not quite sure what he meant. Did he think because I liked soccer I might be gay? Was he realising that I may have gay friends? Always the dilemma in being soccer mad; sport seems to have this uncanny knack of attracting such Philistines. By this stage I was far more demoralised by this cretin’s effect on my psyche than on Liverpool’s performance. While he continued to stock his bar, simultaneously excavating the reserves of his predictable repertoire- which included that he doesn’t leave Scottburgh much except to go to the local township to buy booze, where it is cheaper but a bit dodgy and that his sister worked for Price Waterhouse in Sydney- I slipped out and descended the stairs. I headed for the river, where this time I wouldn’t bother with removing my clothes. I wanted, more than anything, to get wet.
Hitchhikers
Whether or not to pick up hitchhikers is a real quandary for me. When I was at school I used to hitch. A lot. To bars and clubs on Rondebosch Main Road- Springfield and Cactus Jacks- places where we jumped around to Guns n Roses and Counting Crows, drinking Hunters Gold or Redds cider because beer was too bitter for 16 year old taste buds. I hitched to the beach with my Morey Max boogey board which Steve Olhsson sold me, saying that people would harass me to buy it, that it would be the envy of the bogey boarding fraternity. Many kind people stopped for my thumb. So it now feels cold, as a car owner, to smile and drive by while others are parked on foot on the side of the road.
A few weeks ago I picked up a young couple on my way home. I found them on Buitengracht Street, near the intersection with Whale street. They must have been 18 or 19 years old, hair looking jagged, eyes twitchy, clothes well worn. They had hard South African accents; I was guessing from a lower middle-class suburb in greater Johannesburg. One of those which start with a capital ‘B’ and end in ‘oni’ or ‘oksberg’ or ‘rakpan’. The young woman catapulted herself into the front seat and tossed my work bag over her shoulder, causing a number of my personal items to spill onto the floor. She was thick set, her arm hair very present. Not unattractively so, but noticeable. I looked behind and tried to make sure nothing valuable had emerged from my bag. It was one of those moments where you hesitate and try to decide whether to cause a scene in order to be sure…or just let it slide, assume innocence. I didn’t really want to stop and collect my exposed belongings, appear too suspicious or distrustful. So I asked the young couple where they wanted to go. The woman said Kloof Street. Kloof Street…mmmm…Now that was a bit weird because the walk from Buitengracht to Kloof can only be about five minutes. And it’s downhill.
I started to drive, looking up repetitively to see what was going on between my work bag and the young man on the back seat. How familiar were they becoming with one another? I asked where they had been. The young woman said that she’d just picked the guy up from hothouse, the gay club where nine men were brutally murdered a few years back in a disgusting episode of homophobia. He looked like he’d just come from a hot house- the perspiration was grimacing on his forehead like a school kid leaving the principal’s office: butt hurt. I asked them what they were up to. He was going for a drink at another bar. She was going to smoke a joint. ‘Smoking weed is so irey’, she told me, simultaneously causing Bob Marley to reassess his chosen lifestyle and me to reclassify this pair from ‘slightly distasteful’ to ‘a couple of albino rats’. She then made it worse. Squeamish really. She took my hand until I met her eyes. I met her eyes somewhere between my purple Hyundai, Harry, (who btw is more laid back is his late middle age, a far way from the beer bottle recycling bin or drug experimenting vestibule he was in his youth) and whatever hazy strip of the milky way she was located on. She looked at me, ‘meaningfully’, and repeated, ‘S-M-O-K-I-N-G W-E-E-D I-S S-O I-R-E-Y’. To prevent her from repeating the sentence for a third time I quickly concurred. “Yes, yes indeed, spot on friend, smoking weed is unbelievably fucking irey. Possibly the most irey activity one could engage in, besides painting ones body red, green and yellow and smearing it with dark chocolate coated hash. And the depths of your philosophical ponderances are so remarkable for one so young. Shades of the young Wittgenstein before the philosophical investigations”. Okay, don’t fight irritating young goofballs with pseudo-intellectual polony.
Kloof street, arrived thank god. But then they didn’t want to go to Kloof Street anymore. The brains trust of Jamaica put their heads together and pointed towards the planetarium. Fitting. We passed the planetarium and they wanted to go on, further down the fairly dark section of Queen Victoria Street. It’s safe to suggest that things weren’t feeling so irey at this stage. They didn’t seem to be big but struck me as a couple of loons who could quite easily have acquired some kind of weapon. They asked me to stop, in no-person’s land and thanked me. I managed a smile. Like a tweaked nipple getting chafed on a chilly day. Aroused but uncomfortable. I watched them slip into the shadows and looked into my bag. My wallet wasn’t there but he’d dropped it between the car door and the back seat. In the groove. My jacket was gone, as was the scarf Marc had brought me from Bahrain. I drove around for a while looking for the young clowns, but they were gone. I drove home quietly.
A few weeks ago I picked up a young couple on my way home. I found them on Buitengracht Street, near the intersection with Whale street. They must have been 18 or 19 years old, hair looking jagged, eyes twitchy, clothes well worn. They had hard South African accents; I was guessing from a lower middle-class suburb in greater Johannesburg. One of those which start with a capital ‘B’ and end in ‘oni’ or ‘oksberg’ or ‘rakpan’. The young woman catapulted herself into the front seat and tossed my work bag over her shoulder, causing a number of my personal items to spill onto the floor. She was thick set, her arm hair very present. Not unattractively so, but noticeable. I looked behind and tried to make sure nothing valuable had emerged from my bag. It was one of those moments where you hesitate and try to decide whether to cause a scene in order to be sure…or just let it slide, assume innocence. I didn’t really want to stop and collect my exposed belongings, appear too suspicious or distrustful. So I asked the young couple where they wanted to go. The woman said Kloof Street. Kloof Street…mmmm…Now that was a bit weird because the walk from Buitengracht to Kloof can only be about five minutes. And it’s downhill.
I started to drive, looking up repetitively to see what was going on between my work bag and the young man on the back seat. How familiar were they becoming with one another? I asked where they had been. The young woman said that she’d just picked the guy up from hothouse, the gay club where nine men were brutally murdered a few years back in a disgusting episode of homophobia. He looked like he’d just come from a hot house- the perspiration was grimacing on his forehead like a school kid leaving the principal’s office: butt hurt. I asked them what they were up to. He was going for a drink at another bar. She was going to smoke a joint. ‘Smoking weed is so irey’, she told me, simultaneously causing Bob Marley to reassess his chosen lifestyle and me to reclassify this pair from ‘slightly distasteful’ to ‘a couple of albino rats’. She then made it worse. Squeamish really. She took my hand until I met her eyes. I met her eyes somewhere between my purple Hyundai, Harry, (who btw is more laid back is his late middle age, a far way from the beer bottle recycling bin or drug experimenting vestibule he was in his youth) and whatever hazy strip of the milky way she was located on. She looked at me, ‘meaningfully’, and repeated, ‘S-M-O-K-I-N-G W-E-E-D I-S S-O I-R-E-Y’. To prevent her from repeating the sentence for a third time I quickly concurred. “Yes, yes indeed, spot on friend, smoking weed is unbelievably fucking irey. Possibly the most irey activity one could engage in, besides painting ones body red, green and yellow and smearing it with dark chocolate coated hash. And the depths of your philosophical ponderances are so remarkable for one so young. Shades of the young Wittgenstein before the philosophical investigations”. Okay, don’t fight irritating young goofballs with pseudo-intellectual polony.
Kloof street, arrived thank god. But then they didn’t want to go to Kloof Street anymore. The brains trust of Jamaica put their heads together and pointed towards the planetarium. Fitting. We passed the planetarium and they wanted to go on, further down the fairly dark section of Queen Victoria Street. It’s safe to suggest that things weren’t feeling so irey at this stage. They didn’t seem to be big but struck me as a couple of loons who could quite easily have acquired some kind of weapon. They asked me to stop, in no-person’s land and thanked me. I managed a smile. Like a tweaked nipple getting chafed on a chilly day. Aroused but uncomfortable. I watched them slip into the shadows and looked into my bag. My wallet wasn’t there but he’d dropped it between the car door and the back seat. In the groove. My jacket was gone, as was the scarf Marc had brought me from Bahrain. I drove around for a while looking for the young clowns, but they were gone. I drove home quietly.
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