A new novel steadily uncovers the hell that is life in post-apartheid Hillbrow.
Phaswane Mpe is a short, sharp, earthily intellectual sort of guy, bursting with a love of language and linguistics (mostly English and Pedi), who somehow manages to combine all these things into his short, powerhouse of a novel, Welcome to Our
Hillbrow.
It’s important to establish the kind of language he works in from the beginning. He writes in English, with a wry Pedi accent. To miss this is to miss out on the tone of his narrative voice.
It’s a voice that is personal and personable. He’s talking in your ear, with scant regard for the usual conventions of the English-language novel — a mercifully far cry from some new South African novels that I could name, groaning as they are under the burden of obligatory references to Byron and Wordsworth and the general weltschmerz of Classical scholarship, a wilting vegetable lazily planted into harsh, unforgiving African soil.
This is the real African soil, as it is here and now. It is thick as mud and hard as dirt, and heady with the smell of the African savannah after the first rains. And it’s hard to know whether to celebrate it for its sheer vibrancy and controlled, often elegant, sometimes unbearably in-your-face, sometimes out-of-control narrative, or weep at the tale of real, live, maddening, hopeful, lustful futility that it conveys.
Distancing himself by speaking in a cool, second-person voice to a lost friend, Mpe steadily uncovers the hell that is life in the post-apartheid ‘inner city’ — a place where no decent person will set foot, even in broad daylight.
The Barbarians have breached the walls of the city and settled into its rapidly abandoned dwellings. The forces of law and order now answer to the commands of a new elite and have found urgent business elsewhere. The last vestiges of a human social order are left to collapse in upon themselves.
And that?s just the beginning.
This is our Hillbrow, your Hillbrow, now. There is no time for nostalgia for a fallen suburb of a lost city that few can still remember. There is scarcely any reference to a Hillbrow whose proud, self-consciously modern (in the 1960s, that was) waves of apartment buildings gave shelter to East and West European refugees, among others, newcomers who made do with turning a blind eye to apartheid.
There is no nostalgia for the place that became cosmopolitan in its own bohemian way, South Africa’s first twilight zone, Hillbrow of the 1970s and Eighties, the grey area where apartheid, in its turn, found itself turning a blind eye to the stealthy, steady and inevitable transformation of the face of South Africa — the uncomfortable transition from white to black.
All we have here is Hillbrow, here and now. The protagonists of Mpe’s tale have not even moved from another part of the urban sprawl (Soweto, say) into the relative comfort zone of what has become merely one of the poorer northern suburbs of rich Johannesburg. They have migrated directly from the remote, arid, witch-infested, pre-industrial village of Tiragalong, somewhere in that forgotten colonial outpost called the Northern Province of South Africa, to the Sodom and Gomorrah that is Hillbrow. And there they take their chances with life and death.
It gets more disturbing. The shadow of death moves languidly back and forth, between the village and the city.
Refente, the main subject of this second-person narrative, has moved into Hillbrow, and makes good in the unexpected world of academia — until love deals him a fatal blow. So he kills himself, dashing his brains out from a dizzying height onto the pavements of Hillbrow.
But that is not the end. It is barely the beginning.
Back in the village, his death is blamed on spells said to have been cast by his own mother.
This suspicion is confirmed when the unfortunate mother slips and falls into her son’s grave on the day of the funeral — a sign (as it would have been interpreted ‘in the good old days’) that she must be a witch, for which she warrants the ghastly sentence of a necklacing that prematurely ends her own period of mourning: “Then someone gingerly lit a cigarette before throwing the match into her hut, in which she awaited the Second Coming of the Lord. Huge flames blazed up and caught the thatch of the hut.”
Town and country, old and new, good and bad, all tumbled up together. Welcome to your Hillbrow. Welcome to your brave new world.
Mpe is self-consciously, uncaringly, uncompromisingly a writer who writes about the process of writing as much as he writes about the process of living and dying.
More than once he describes Johannesburg as a “city of gold, milk, honey and bile”. And a young black writer, trying to get a handle on it, is faced with indifference — not just from the public, but also from the potential publisher and his self-appointed censor, the professional ‘reader’ who baulks at allowing the writer to tell it like it is: “Now, for nearly 50 years, the system of apartheid had been confusing writers in this way. Trying to make them believe that euphemism equals good morals …
“In 1995, despite the so-called new dispensation, nothing had really changed.” Apartheid’s (black) censors, clinging to the brittle security of their apartheid-era jobs in the post-apartheid years of freedom, crime and anti-black xenophobia, continue to apply the same blunt scalpel to the same blunt truths.
“Euphemism. Xenophobia. Prejudice. Aids” is how the censor sums up the inner and outer life of the youthful writer, the youthful lover, the youthful and hopeful citizen of the brave, new South Africa.
It’s a harrowing, revealing, human read about a lost generation clawing up through the concrete of the imploded inner city under which it has been buried. And it’s all ours.
Welcome to your world.
Welcome to Hillbrow is published by University of Natal Press
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza