26 June, 2009: Trip to Joburg

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.