John Matshikiza
With the Lid Off
The great Caliph Haroun al-Rashid (peace and blessings be on his name) used to disguise himself as an ordinary citizen, and go about the streets of 14th-century Baghdad, checking to see if his citizens were Doing the Right Thing. In the course of these nocturnal wanderings, he not only came across enough waywardness and weird behaviour to fill a book (later called Tales of a Thousand and One Nights), he also put himself in a position to really understand his people. He used some of this information to help him decide whom among them to reward for their goodness, and whom to chastise for being incorrigibly bad.
I sometimes idly wonder when was the last time President Thabo Mbeki or even Premier Mbhazima “Baz” (“don’t-call-me-Sam-no-more”) Shilowa walked up Bree Street, Johannesburg, in the direction of the Traffic Licensing Department, disguised, like the great caliph of old, as a nobody, and without the giveaway presence of hovering bodyguards with cellphones and bazookas on their muscular hips. Either one of them would be met with a sight for sore eyes, and might be galvanised to rethink the nature of the leadership task they have taken on.
Why Bree Street? Because Bree Street is where I found myself walking one sunny afternoon this week, and the raw energy of Bree Street, as it progresses from west to east, from the forlorn and eternally rebirthing Newtown Precinct to the shattered streets around Doornfontein Station, is like an indicator of the state of the nation.
Normally, we motorists hit the throttle flat and close our eyes when dealing with Bree Street. It’s no good trying to steer a normal course, because the cacophony of taxis and trucks won’t allow normal behaviour. You accelerate and hope to come out the other side in more or less one piece.
But the price you pay for being a motorist, apart from extortionate petrol rates and the likelihood of losing your hard-won motorist status in the course of a hijack, is that when you need to do any business surrounding the registration of your car, you have to go to the Traffic Licensing Department, and the Traffic Licensing Department has been strategically placed in the worst part of the city, round the corner from Bree Street. And since there is never any street parking available in the vicinity of said department, the only option is to leave your car somewhere where it seems relatively safe, and do the Bree Street Walk.
Bree Street is like a clap in the face. The sidewalks are packed with illegal hawkers hawking odd things from Singapore and Taiwan, all of them identical. Sometimes the monotony of plastic clocks and nylon slippers is broken by a pavement butchery that offers up an array of chicken heads and general offal, being steadily cured by passing diesel fumes. Progress is slow, blocked by streams of casual shoppers standing around in the narrow passages left by the hawkers, idly picking over the wares, conversing with friends or whistling at passing strangers. There seem to be a lot of unemployed people in Johannesburg, and yet these same people seem to have some kind of income to dispose of here in town, which is the hawkers’ reason for being there at all.
At the bus stop a long line of pensioners sits pinioned to the narrow wooden bench, mouths agape at the mad world rushing by as they wait anxiously for their buses back to the township. They too have been obliged to run the Bree Street gauntlet, because the pension office is also in town.
There is no such thing as a cop on the beat, as you might expect in any major city. Bree Street is a law unto itself. If anyone calls the shots, it is the taxi drivers, yelling an endless stream of information back and forth to their cronies on the sidewalk, taking their time, stopping dead in the middle of traffic lanes, oblivious to any other authority on earth or in heaven. Everybody else just prays.
You get to the Traffic Licensing Department, and you wonder what on earth its fancy title means. Listless petty bureaucrats sit smoking at slow computer terminals. A black man takes your duplicate forms and puts them in a plastic tray in front of a peroxide blonde who is chatting to her boyfriend on the phone. Black people and white people wander around, picking up pieces of paper, photocopying them and putting them back in the plastic tray. You wait. Finally you hand over money, they give you a piece of paper, and you stagger back into Bree Street.
On paper you have become legal again. In the real world of Bree Street, nobody gives a damn. You are a minor character in another episode of A Tale of Two Cities, and there isn’t even a caring caliph to appeal to with your tale of woe. Baz is cracking open Cuban cigars at the Rand Club, and Thabo is off talking tough talk in Algiers.
You find your car, with the wheels miraculously still attached, and drive back through the time warp, back across the Queen Elizabeth Bridge, and into the world you know.