Phaswane Mpe on life in Hillbrow You alight from a minibus taxi in Noord Street, Johannesburg, for the first time in your life. Suddenly, you feel that there is a problem. Only, you are not sure whether you are the problem or the problem is around you. You remember what you were told when you left home:”Walk with your eyes open in the Golden City!” You wondered why your relatives and friends had to say this. You knew that it was crucial to open your eyes at all times. But now you see the point. With such congestion and active movements of people in the late afternoon, it becomes clear that your bags and other possessions are hardly safe. One swift snatch and you are doomed to visit a shop soonest. You begin to feel anxious. And your guide, from Noord Street to our notorious Hillbrow, where you might have to stay, has not yet arrived to fetch you. In the few minutes before the guide’s arrival, you witness a robber shot dead by a member of the Flying Squad. Another robber has been too quick in his flight to get caught. Someone shouts”Voetsek!” to a poor soul. As it gets scarier, you realise that the supposed victim and the thrower of insults are, in fact, minibus taxi drivers, playing some of those linguistic jokes that you do not ordinarily expect from joyous men. No black-on-black violence yet. But you are still at the taxi rank, and your Walkman radio continues to feed you stories of taxi violence. You hear that a serial killer has been arrested in the East Rand a few minutes ago. And that a serial rapist from Pretoria might have found elusive shelter in Hillbrow. You are, in fact, looking at the JG Strijdom Tower, Hillbrow, although you do not know that as yet.
More news, reminding you of migrants’ stories that you fed on in your high-school days, of menacing Hillbrow. Love and betrayal. Drugs. Rape. Prostitution. Drunkenness. And, now, makwerekwere and HIV/Aids. As you venture into Hillbrow with your guide, you witness a number of spectacles. There are women and, your guide intimates, increasingly babies, displaying their bodies, especially the southern hemispheres, against the brick and concrete walls of the tall buildings. You remember the story a friend once told you. A woman was driving past Hillbrow when a child, with whom she was travelling, spotted such display of the bodyscape.”Why do they dress like this?” the child asked. All the aunt offered was:”In Hillbrow everything is allowed.” A taxi driver disgraced himself, then, by retorting:”They are whores, child.” Upon which the child asked her disgruntled aunt:”Aunt, do whores also have babies?””Yes, child. Where do you think taxi drivers come from!” Your mind returns to Noord Street.
As you walk along this endless chain of spectacle, you become conscious of something else. Strange languages. Not just Zulu, Xhosa or other South African languages that, although you do not understand, you still recognise. Languages that your guide calls Sekwerekwere. You do not recall ever coming across a language, or languages, by that name. Fortunately, you have met a French missionary who introduced you to some French, and you realise that even this French is included in the category of Sekwerekwere. Because your guide does not recognise it for what it is; and Hillbrowans (by virtue of birth or simply staying there) have taken to labelling, negatively, any black people they suspect of coming from other African countries as makwerekwere, and anything that they do not understand, done or said by these despised Africans, as Sekwerekwere. Just as taxi drivers and prostitutes are despised, so are makwerekwere. If taxi drivers are rumoured to be harbingers of violence and prostitutes those of venereal diseases, our foreign friends are supposed to be carriers of drugs and HIV/Aids into South Africa, especially into Hillbrow and Berea, where they are concentrated. As you continue to stay in our Hillbrow, you learn that survival cannot be realised by simply reducing everyone you did not know and everything you did not understand to stereotypes. You are to witness fellow rural villagers splitting one another’s skulls for under-waist bliss, while their wives and girlfriends are waiting eagerly for their return to the homesteads. Fighting over the very prostitutes that they had claimed to despise. There are the rural women … Opening their thighs for the supposedly uncivilised makwerekwere, who have come, as it was claimed, to take away our jobs and women.
You see police officers taking bribes from both the illegal foreigners, who wish to avoid deportation, and the locals, avoiding traffic and other legitimate fines. You witness the locals taking and selling drugs to fellow locals and to foreigners. Muggings across social and class barriers. You see many forms of eating. Of police helping the illegal immigrants, for a nominal fee, to secure national identity documents and passports. You see immigrants, with assistance from the locals, arranging fake marriage certificates to secure some kind of sanctuary for their own sake, and for the sake of their loved ones far away. There will also be celebrations some of them very strange indeed. Like the crowds of jubilant soccer lovers, after Bafana Bafana win important matches, hurling bottles into the streets from flat balconies. And the same procedure repeating itself in celebrations of New Year’s Eve each year. Occasionally, people who do not seem to know what to do with their defunct furniture and other disposables will grab such opportunities to endanger our lives in the streets. So, for survival, moments of celebration sometimes have to be guarded against by locking yourself in your flat until some calm and sanity prevail.
But you also will come to realise many Hillbrowans are good people who, unfortunately, get terrorised by a minority of thugs, robbers and drug dealers. Just that, for reasons you are still trying to understand, certain types of bias attribute misdemeanours to foreigners. There are those, like yourself, who make the effort to work hard on their studies or in the workplace. People whose survival depends on the sweating of their bodies and brains. Selling tomatoes, cabbages, chomolia and other edibles in the streets of our Hillbrow and other parts of Johannesburg; people serving academia and professional services; people involved in construction work. You learn that survival is a complex thing. Like your student friend, coming to you with tears in her eyes, crying because her lecturer, in his grappling with survival at work, called her”an educationally, intellectually and linguistically deprived child”. You say, angrily:”But he can only speak English! And what does he know about the many other things that you know?” And your fellow villager complaining how much his employers hate him, and how”racist they are!” Only, you learn, he misses work nearly every Monday, with his eyes red and almost popping out their sockets, having spent the previous night in a pub. At home they said, when he lost his job, that he must have been bewitched. Why him of all the employees in the company? Even the decent, hard-working ones have a few things to complain about. The supposed practitioners of the said witchcraft identified and necklaced to death. The Metropolitan Council, hard at work, trying to”clean Johannesburg”, chasing hawkers from its pavements and driving the most desperate of them to commit acts of crime. Politicians and administrators, in various attempts to rejuvenate the inner city, in the interests of big business, cultural tourism and, you are told, the well-being of ordinary people, erecting new buildings and imploding some old ones. And, in the process, throwing ordinary people like you into confusion as to what, exactly, is happening in their city. If survival in the city, as Kgafela oa Magogodi has sharply observed, sometimes involves”tak[ing] a zero/ to make a hero”, you may add M Scott Peck’s words:”Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes between success and failure.” You, like so many others, being neither zeros nor remarkable heroes, continue to walk on the tight fence, constantly on the lookout for that slip that could hurl your achievements, as a survivor, into the dark abyss of failure. You wonder what it means, precisely, to be a zero, a hero, a rapist, a policeman, a whore, a taxi driver, a student, a hawker, a lekwerekwere, and so and so … Where is anyone heading? You realise that the challenges of the city lie both within and beyond the city: in the rural areas; in the government; in individual and domestic lives; in other countries … It is into this muddy pool of the city existence that you have to plunge and seek whatever catch you can find in its deepest recesses. Now you can share some narratives of survival in”our Hillbrow of milk and honey and bile”. Phaswane Mpe is the author of Welcome to Our Hillbrow, published by University of Natal Press