Hillbrow and Muizenberg could be brother and sister. Both neighbourhoods shelter misfits, writers, prostitutes, university lecturers and barber-refugees who have fled war in Central Africa. Yet the difference between Phoswane Mpe’s portrait of a visceral, chaotic Hillbrow, home to rural villagers seeking the bright lights, and Mike Nicol’s nostalgia for Muizenberg before the black refugees moved in, is telling. It reveals the absurd difference in world views between an enfranchised black writer, making peace with where he lives, and a white writer uneasy in post-apartheid South Africa, fleeing a neighbourhood he no longer understands.
Both books have a strong sense of place, and portrays areas of South Africa that have had scant literary attention. But Nicol, ageing and unsettled by a year in Berlin, where he has no roots, is in search of another, more elusive place: “I wanted light and air and space.” Mpe, on the other hand, delights in the specifics of Hillbrow — the long walks his characters take are made concrete with a litany of street names that read like a prayer.
Welcome to our Hillbrow is the story of Refentise, his lover from Alex, his ex-lover from back home and his best friend, under fire from Aids and struggling between the assumptions of higher education and rural beliefs, who fall in love and betray that love. Though his plot gets muddled, Mpe’s linguistic twists are brilliant, especially when writing on the sexual folly of black men: “Terror wanted Lerato’s thighs for a playing field in which his penis would be player, referee and spectator simultaneously.” Hillbrow, though, is the real lover here — “The Bone of my Heart” — celebrated and mocked both in English and Sepedi.
Read together, one writer’s strength is the other writer’s weakness. Nicol has a talent for writing on historical quirks — like his search for the last whale harpooner in Cape Town — and odd characters — like the bergie who told him while he was buying fish in Kalk Bay: “You mustn’t call them hottentot. This is the new South Africa, you must call them Cape silver bream. And us Cape silver bream people don’t like being called what you just called that fish.” Nicol is happy to empathise with odd, black characters, as long as they don’t move in next door.
Mpe can evoke the streets of Hillbrow like a stand-up comic — “street kids, drunk with glue, brandy, and wild visions of themselves as speeding Hollywood movie drivers, were racing their wire-made cars through red robots” — but pays little attention to Hillbrow’s long history of immigrants. Nicol, though, has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the past and can point out that whites’ fears that it was coloureds who started the raging Peninsula fires last year dates back to 1798 when colonists accused their slaves of setting fire to Cape Town.
On the other hand, Mpe’s novel has a thematic rhythm that Nicol’s non-fiction book lacks, closing each chapter with a stream-of-consciousness delivery on the contradictions of Hillbrow that ends in the chorus: “Welcome to our Hillbrow.” The repetition of “our” harks back to the collective voices of Tiragolong, the home village in Lebowa that many of his central characters have left behind.
In comparison, the linking narrative in Sea-Mountain, Fire City — Nicol and his wife fleeing Muizenberg and building a nice house in Glencairn Heights — is weak. I prefer the in-between stories — searching for the sole descendant of Tuan Guru, a Malay prince, on the Cape Flats, or the hometown of the Afrikaners who shot a Khoisan renegade and preserved his skull. Other than when Nicol leaves a seal’s skull behind in a hardware store and finds it impossible when he calls later to persuade the salesman that he is not looking for sealant, the story of how brave Mr Nicol built a double-storey house far from the refugees and found the right door knobs reads more like the minutes at a meeting of the ratepayers’ association.
Nicol feels marginaliseed by marginalised people. This is ironic, and in no way should Nicol be censored for not writing about being poor and black. But for a book so frank about its middle-class perspective, there is little irony about Nicol’s vitriolic outbursts: “The new inhabitants had usurped the streets … They spat, defecated, had sex before my eyes … The houses they rented deteriorated daily simply because there were too many people sitting on the walls and leaning from the windows … They dragged Muizenberg down for all of us.”
Mpe eschews euphemisms about Hillbrow, spelling out the violence, the casual sex and the residents’ xenophobic hatred of its most recent arrivals, despite being migrants themselves: “Life was not a long night of cosiness.” It is this cosiness that Nicol has lost — he doesn’t understand the languages spoken on his street anymore — though in another sense Nicol’s search for a place where he can write in peace is an age-old conflict. We all want sanctuary.
The one belief that both writers share is that there is sanctuary to be found in writing itself.
But Mpe’s characters also find sanctuary in unexpected places — in the ugliness of Hillbrow, in the “video room in Heaven” — and he is as much at ease describing the superstitions of Tiragalong as he is describing the superstitions of Oxford University. What is objectionable is not Nicol’s flight from disorder and filth, but his idea — with a long history in this country — that sanctuary can be found by building a home in a demarcated suburb, safe from “them”: “And in 1652, Jan van Riebeeck planted a hedge …”