Johannesburg, once a beautiful woman, has become an ugly old harlot. Bongani Madondo walks the streets of a filthy city and mourns his lost love
It’s a freezing Wednesday at 7am when I decide to board a taxi – one of those rickety jalopies promising to break apart in the middle of the road while dashing around Johannesburg streets in a scary mix of speed, mayhem and fear.
Out of the corner of my eyes in Bree Street struts a woman, say about 25, sweet chocolate-skinned, horse-shaped face as stunning as that of ex-model and actor Dudu Mkhize.
She comes straight towards me. Or in my direction, lest I flatter myself. I steal a closer look at her, almost as close as the dentist gets to the patient. Aaaghh, as Rastafarians say, the sistah is indeed a queen of Sheba. A ”crea-shaun” of limitless beauty.
But as I look at the surroundings that woman is walking through, my jubilation shrinks to humiliation. Suddenly I felt a stabbing humiliation, thrust down my left upper torso like Brutus finishing off Caesar.
I have ventured briskly into the inner city. As a black person and a resident of Johannesburg, my heart weeps as I look at tattered, old, smoky-smelling Johannesburg.
Just for a moment that woman makes me forget about this decaying once-upon-a time lustrous Johannesburg Central. The CBD. Mjondolo.
But as soon as she walks past this daily nagging reality, the rot and dirt on Johannesburg streets upon which my eyes feast every day – the spilling sewerage, drug-infested needles, piles of vegetables and fruit composting on street corners — something indeed dies in me.
I am lying. Something long ago died inside me about Johannesburg.
I remember that when I was a hopeless literature student at a ”bush” varsity I half attended almost a decade ago, only one thing inspired me to attend English lectures. It was Nathaniel Nakasa’s tour de force feature: Johannesburg, Johannesburg, published in a book titled The World of Nat Nakasa. Young and incurably impressionable as I was, the story brought a flush of pride.
I had always loved Johannesburg. But Nakasa’s use of imagery cemented my love for dear Johannesburg. Even when mama Miriam Makeba sang the spirit-tormenting lament: Gauteng, Gauteng, banna ba rona ba shwetse komponeng[Joburg, Joburg, our husbands died in hostel compounds]. I swore never to swerve from my love of Jo’burg.
It’s Wednesday, and I am taking an across-the-city stroll in a city I used to love. Tears threaten to roll down my cheeks. That Von Wielligh corner shop to which I travelled for more than 100km while a teenager to buy a swanky Fifties- type Humphrey Bogart shirt is no longer there. Instead there is only a fried chicken outlet. Johannesburg is heaving with fried chicken everywhere. Upmarket, street gizzards, you name them, it’s deep chickenland.
The subterranean citizens of the seedier parts of town on the eastern wing of Doornfontein mostly take over their territory when night falls. Down on the west wing of the CBD, Diagonal Street is still the most civil to street traders, and Indian curry shops still add a touch of glorious old Jo’burg.
As a visitor here you have to be ready for a battle for your senses – between the blazing chillis and cinnamon from the Asiatic corner cafe and the vusa nduku herb shop next to it, ironically owned and run by an Indian trader.
As you thrust further east along Bree Street, you soon realise that the countdown to 8.30pm when a nightclub that used to host the very best, the smartest elites, Club Countdown – now called kwa Bangani – has already begun. It’s getting late, and you can see the wobbly, boozy silhouettes of dangerous young men with fish-tail haircuts milling around.
A big girl, barely dressed, passes by. With a riot of whistles, call-and- response dialogue between her and the burly bouncer, you get to know her name is Gugu. Apparently she can be very generous. ”How much do you have?” asks the bouncer. I quickly move on.
Walking below the fresh blue sky underneath the Vodacom sign beaming atop Ponte City, you see ladies of the night ”voda-going” around Ponte City, even though it’s still daytime.
I stroll across Jozi, as far as my old haunt Mai Mai, the traditional market down in Jeppe, where I used to savour the delicacies of tshisa nyama and chakalaka. It’s no longer the same. It lacks that over-abundance of pre-’94 colour and brandishing of ”traditional weapons” by the Zulu hostel dwellers living nearby. As for the inner city itself, its dirt defies tolerance.
Ask me today whether I still love Johannesburg. Ask whether I am proud to be a resi-dent of Johannesburg, and I will tell you straight to your face: are you crazy? How can anybody love such a barbarically dirty city? Me, a resident of Johannesburg? You must be kidding. You have to rephrase your question: you must have been trying to say ”residue” of Johannesburg, rather than ”resident”.
Look around the entire Jozi landscape, if your eyes can manage to sieve through the Himalayas of dirt and grime permanently layered on the city’s streets, balconies and just anywhere. Go atop the new Ponte City or up the Hillbrow tower.
Stretch your neck giraffe-like towards northern suburbia. What do you see? Spanking clean suburbs. Protected and cleaned. Fresh air might even caress your nostrils there, in suburbia. This is the story of many cities in one.
The stuff rich whites always (mis)complain about: that Johannesburg resembles a banana republic. I disagree with that view. Yet I also disagree with my renaissance-drunk friends that Johannesburg’s infectious dirt and grime makes it the ”truly” African city that it ought to have been long ago. Unlike, they say with patriotic fervour, Cape Town, a piece of colonial Europe permanently plastered over the bottom of the dark continent.
A visitor touring Johannesburg central
and the adjoining suburban troika of hell, Judith’s Paarl, Yeoville and Hillbrow-Berea, will think we are living in different cities to those far-northern or eastern burbs.
A new health hazard warning: walk or drive around Johannesburg’s overriding grime and catch an instant eyesore – dirt, general chaos, deteriorating buildings with paint peeling from the walls and dysfunctional drains. You’d swear, like Maputo or Luanda, it has been shelled by inner-city guerrilla warlords.
Every Tom, Dick and Skwiza buys a packet of fruit down at Ma Mlambo’s stall near Park station. They fill the stomach and dump the banana peels all over the pavement. A kaleidoscope of plastic and rubbish papers lay strewn across the streets. On a non-windy day, this army of rubbish plastics looks like tasteless street decor.
Depending on the weight of stinking, filthy air wafting by, the bones of the already gedonderde Chicken Licken are left licking the streets. At the intersection of Twist and Plein, a passenger leans out the window of a taxi and – boom! – throws out a can of Coke.
You go deeper around the back alleys of the shops and your nostrils are attacked by an instant overdose of flu from the yellowish-sepia-toned walls heavy with faeces and the aroma of informally brewed whiskey: takunyisa-soaked urine.
Excuse me, am I spoiling your Friday breakfast with this? Sorry, I am not good at psychotherapy, the feel-good factor. At the front of those shops – all clothing shops, not a single bookshop – a young man with greenish teeth and Bangladeshi accent battles with a jumble- sale gogo from the townships for a place on the pavement. Talk about the free market, Johannesburg style.
Music booms at a million decibels from a corner music bar. It’s Brenda Fassie singing that she is not a weekend special anymore. A BMW tears past at bullet speed, traffic cops hot on its tail. Two minutes after being stopped, its driver swaggers away from the traffic cops in a hip ‘n bounce pantsula attitude, grinning wildly. I am tempted to ask him: so traffic cops give you a lotto ticket for speeding?
Three girls with over-made-up faces and hairstyles your mama warned you about are still in the car. They beam at their BMW driver: ”How much?” The pantsula bloke, with a whole Carletonville gold mine on his neck – moqwebo honey – responds dismissively: ”R20.” ”Is that all?” ask the girls. ”Sies, traffic cops have become so cheap. Next time you’ll just have to dole them fish and chips, they’ll let you free.”
Passing a whisker’s breadth close to Kohinoor Records, a Sixties heaven for superfly writers such as ex-Zonk editor Mazurkie Phaahlane – Kohinoor, a record bar which has been intrinsic to the soul of Jo’burg the way Tower Records is to New York, the way Ronnie Scott’s jazz den is to London – I hear rap at full blast.
As a jazz collector-wannabe, I used to camp out next to Kohinoor. Passing by today, instead of hearing spirit-rousing riffs of Houston Pearson’s Young, Gifted and Black, my ears are attacked by a fast ‘n furious rap from a ”young, gifted and whack” hip-hop saint Tupac Shakur rhyming a cut: ”I wonder if heaven has a ghetto”. I scurry past, muttering to myself: babes, heaven does have no ghetto! If it had one, that ghetto sure wouldn’t be named Johannesburg. Mjipa, even.
Not far from Luthuli House, the Diplomat Hotel looks like a raunchier version of the Polana Hotel in Maputo. On a good day, you can get a peep show for less than R2. There’s nothing diplomatic about it. It has lost its lustre. Only dim new lights tell you that it was once a hotbed for the Johannesburg haute elite.
Just across the road, in Bree Street,
the once-five-star Rand International Hotel where I first met siren Busi Mhlongo for breakfast six years ago is now a police barracks where you meet officers spewing out expletives.
On to the corner of Plein Street, where a man in his thirties, looking swell in made-in-Thailand Levi’s denims, is busy watering the pavement with kilolitres of piss. I look disapprovingly at him.
He turns around. ”Why are you looking at me? Are you one of those gay men, who get fascinated looking at other men?” ”No,” I say. ”Bhuti wam, why are you urinating in the street?” He quickly turns around to utter unprintables. I can’t catch what he says, but you can tell when someone’s not wishing you nice things. Rude as a sailor, he says something to do with human anatomy.
”Voetsek!” he finally says. ”What are you, police? You educated types se niyang nyanyisa. Why don’t you go to the suburbs where the likes of you live with whites! Ungazontshela. Wena ubani? I piss wherever I wish, swine.” He finishes a monologue that would have stolen for him the Samuel L Jackson role in the flick Pulp Fiction. I quickly sense danger. Dash away quickly. Why should I die for Jo’burg? And that is why the city resembles a hovel. Nobody is prepared to die for it .
Now, I have a question for the Johannesburg Metropolitan structure and Gauteng Provincial Legislature, which interestingly is located in the inner city: what is happening with dear old Johannesburg? Why is that we always read stories about ”revamping of the city”, yet those whiffs of positive news are countered by the shocking, dirty reality on the streets of eGoli?
While I was a political aspirant, I used to argue – rightly so – that the Democratic Party and the other reactionary whites fucked up Johannesburg. I also blamed the flight of big business from the city as a destabilising factor. But now, I ponder deeply, did the flight of big business bring about this dirt or is it the other way round?
Recently I went to Pretoria, which is on Jo’burg’s doorstep. The inner city and its outlying eastern wings are becoming slightly unsightly, but compared to Jo’burg, Pretoria is a 10-star Sheraton Hotel to Jozi’s minus-five stars.
A friend went to Pinetown, next to Durban, last week. The first thing he told me was: ”Buddy, it was so fresh. No dirt on the streets. No prostitutes – at least not as visible as in Jo’burg. No speeding cars doing a Grand Prix within inner city streets.”
I’ve known the guy to be the sort who loves business the same way fish like inhabiting the bush, but, said my friend, ”Sbali, I even conceived a business plan. A day out of Jo’burg is like heaven!” Sure, he is gifted in the art of verbal gymnastics, but you catch his drift, don’t you?
This, I can’t help it, is bound to be controversial, especially when black people have been told time and again by apartheid that they are dirty, animalistic and useless. But I have to ask, with all due respect: bafowethu – why is it that we seem to be littering and soiling ourselves, reducing our areas of domination to ruin?
Of course, the council needs to clean up or be cleaned out. Shopkeepers pay expensive rent. All of us pay skyrocketing taxes. Why is it that we contribute to this dirty image, playing right into the destructive images that are being heaped on us? Besides white sex labourers – ”prostitutes” sounds better and cutting edge – I can count only five white people.
The only faces I see, some gleaming with pride, others masking suffering, are black people’s. Can’t we wake and smell the coffee? Our daily surroundings are so dirty we don’t even see them anymore. This must come to a screeching stop.
Yes, to use Joel Netshitenze’s words, some of us use very ”apocalyptic terms”. But look around Johannesburg: there is a riot going on. Frank talk: Johannesburg needs effective implementation of the law. Those caught dirtying or ignoring dirt should be punished.
Sies tog. Johannesburg!!! Phoaarr, bare hao hlape [You are like a pigsty]!