John Matshikiza
WITH THE LID OFF
Whose town is this Johannesburg, anyway? The city centre swarms with an aggressive cacophony of black bodies that is unrecognisable if your mental picture is still stuck on the metropolis that was thrown up into the highveld sky by the heirs of Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Beit. Jo’burg has changed for ever.
Who understands who these new citizens of this African Sodom and Gomorrah really are? Who dares to venture into their world unless it is strictly necessary? The Barbarians predicted in JM Coetzee’s early novel have finally arrived, and the Empire looks on, too tired to react, unable either to launch a counter-attack or stage a dignified retreat.
It’s a fake scenario. Johannesburg is a fake city, its settlement justified neither by proximity to water nor by the safe embrace of mountains. It’s just there, ugly and temporary, a shell on the prairie waiting to sink back into the earth as the gold reserves steadily trickle to zero. Even the mine dumps, the only feature that gave the city a sense of identity, have been looted – by the mining companies themselves.
In the old days, the boulevards and parks of central Johannesburg were kept pristine through the agency of influx control. The borders of South Africa were locked tight against the insinuation of an African reality from the north and east.
Today downtown Johannesburg is a gauntlet of hungry bodies moving with breakneck stealth through the shattered alleyways. The stock exchange has its eye on Sandton, and until recently the landmark De Beers diamond building was up for rent.
At any street corner, you can catch a glimpse of men and women diving casually in and out of subterranean drains that were designed to filter rain water out of the city. Above and below the ground, new boundaries have been marked out with the lethal precision of wolves depositing their pungent territorial smells. A different kind of law exists here. The police have withdrawn to their barracks.
Jonathan Morgan’s grandfather rocked up in Johannesburg out of Lithuania in 1924. In those days things were orderly. Old Man Magun settled into suburban life, changed his name to the goy-sounding and empowering “Morgan”, and bequeathed to his heirs a new lease of life in Africa.
By the mid-1990s, his grandson Jonathan was beginning to wonder what he was doing in Africa. He had succeeded in carving for himself an identity independent of the chains of the stetl and the kibbutz, and was committed to living in the Johannesburg he had been born into, along with his Japanese wife and his Tswana- Japanese step-daughter, with a Judeo- Japanese baby on the way. Things were as normal as they get for a confused Jo’burg boy in his mid-thirties.
He was trying to write every young man’s definitive novel of sex, violence and drug- related intrigue, set in his own home town. The only trouble was he no longer had any idea what his own home town was about. He needed an entry point, a guide who had a sense of the dialect and the body language of the new Africa that had taken over white Johannesburg. He needed a key to the characters he was creating in the fertile recesses of his brain.
He found it at an obscure newspaper called Homeless Talk, the rag we all buy when it’s forced on us at the red robot, so that we can throw it away and forget about the terrifying lives we think are contained in its pages. Who wants to hear what the homeless think? It might just destroy our own will to live.
What Morgan found, when he ventured through the looking-glass into the homeless world, was a mind-boggling tapestry of who the ordinary people of downtown Johannesburg really are. It was such an eye-opener that he dropped his novel, with its facile assumptions, and sat down to carve out a great saga of real life with the writers he found clinging to the fragile lifeboat of Homeless Talk. The result, published under David Philip’s new “ink.inc” imprint, is called Finding Mr Madini.
Sipho Madini is just one of the extraordinary characters who came to life in the workshops Morgan started conducting in the newspaper’s ramshackle offices in the heart of Jo’burg. In many ways Madini was the group’s guiding spirit – its finest poet, an enigmatic figure with a fine handle on the philosophy of survival in the mean streets of Egoli. Shortly after the group had begun its work, he disappeared – killed or arrested, no one knows. The point is, like the other members of the group, he had become more than a statistic. He was intelligent, he had a background filled with hope and pain, and he had come to Johannesburg to make something out of his life.
His absence left a hole within the group of budding writers, but he also became a rallying point that made the successful completion of the project more urgent. When a “homeless person” goes missing from his residence in a sewage drain in the middle of Braamfontein, within sight of the imposing entrance of the Senate Building at the University of the Witwatersrand, his loss is somehow more awesome to his friends than that of someone in more steady circumstances. His disappearance was a symbol of the fragility of each of their existences.
The book, with Madini’s sporadic interventions from whatever world he is now inhabiting, is extraordinary. It is the flesh and the voice of a huge slice of humanity that has fallen through the cracks of a world we take for granted.
BUT ITS GREATEST SIGNIFICANCE IS IN THE GRADUAL REALISATION THAT EACH ONE OF US, STRANGERS IN A WORLD OF STRANGERS ON THE HIGHVELD, IS AS UNROOTED AS ANY OF THE SPRAWLING MASS OF THE HOMELESS WE SEE EVERY DAY. IN STRUGGLING TO FIND MR MADINI, WE STUMBLE UPON OURSELVES.