We’re talking about the failure of power here. But I guess I would be the last one to know about it. Like the rest of us.
On Monday a whole electricity substation in Hurst Hill, an obscure suburb of Johannesburg, went up in flames. There was some kind of explosion, not immediately attributed to al-Qaeda or the general trend towards aggressive anarchy that we have come to take for granted as part of our daily lives. Perhaps the thing just blew up by itself.
Apparently this was not taken very seriously by the authorities whom we have inherited from the old regime, because for several hours a lonely fire engine and its lonely crew battled to control the conflagration without any kind of serious backup support. They sprayed water into the escalating flames and imagined that they could make a difference to how the people in the surrounding region would be able to continue with their lives.
In any event, the substation subsequently burned to the ground, leaving wide areas of northern Johannesburg in darkness. The only important piece of information about this is that I live in one of those affected suburbs, namely Melville, home of anarchy, good times and generally overpriced mayhem, day and night.
Melville and Westdene, the neighbouring suburb (the one where the whites put pressure on the Nationalist government in the 1950s to permanently eradicate the so-called ‘black spot†of Sophiatown, where people were busy having fun, electricity or not) were blacked out for an indeterminate period of time. Day and night became the same shade of black.
In other words, you suddenly realised that having no electricity meant having no power to do anything, such as turning on the washing machine, or more basic things like cooking supper. Even more especially, you got depressed because you realised that you couldn’t press a switch and open your security gate and slip your car into your protected homestead, unnoticed by tsotsis. Everything became manual again, like the old days. Like you were still living in Sophiatown. Everything had to be done with paraffin stoves and candlelight.
If the tsotsis had been given ample warning that this was going to happen, they might have taken advantage of the situation. As it was, they were caught napping. All those elaborate, electronic anti-tsotsi devices were temporarily disabled, but the tsotsis had had no time to react.
So we slept nervously, fitfully, but comfortably in our various tsotsi-free beds.
People react differently to being power-free, though. My friend Shakes (the Indian one, not the coloured-looking one who’s into black economic empowerment) reacted by panicking about how he was going to keep his business going. He’s one of those Indians who has taken advantage of the new dispensation and opened a popular clip joint on Seventh Street, the main drag of the formerly discreet suburb of the same Melville that I was talking about.
So Shakes shuts up shop in the small hours of the morning, having continued to conduct business by candlelight, in spite of the electric substation inexplicably blowing up and plunging the whole area into darkness. He gets home, reminding himself that he has to open up shop in the morning and make money, like Indians do (don’t tell Mbongeni Ngema I said that).
He gets into bed and sets the alarm, thinking calculatedly that he will have to get up extra early to warm up some water in his cooking pot on the stove in the kitchen so that he can have a hot bath, considering that the power failure will mean that there will be no warm water coming out of the geyser due to the general failure of the electricity network. He thinks he’s outsmarted the system. And so he falls asleep.
Morning comes. He wakes up, puts the pot on the stove, gets back into bed and lights up a cigarette so that he can chill while the water comes to the boil.
Time passes. He feels that the water should be about right for his bath, so he gets out of bed and goes to get the pot off the hob. It doesn’t cross his mind that it is an electric hob, and if there is no electricity, the hob won’t be giving his water any heat. His mind is still working in sync with a system that is no longer working.
So he pours the water out of the pot into the bath, washes his body happily, and goes off to do his work.
It is only when he is telling me about this two days later, when the electricity is mercifully back on stream in the suburb where we both reside, talk nonsense and do business, that he realises (at my prompting, I must confess) that he had had a stone cold bath out of the pot on the stove, and hadn’t even noticed. His Indian brain had told him that when you take a pot off the cooker, it must, naturally and surely, be hot enough to put in the bath (but don’t tell Mbongeni Ngema that I said this). And so he had his bath and went to open up the shop.
Is there a moral in all of this? I don’t think so. Someone from a different racial group would probably have done the same thing.
Yes, the power is mercifully back with us in Melville. The town council must be commended for getting our lives back on track with remarkable efficiency. We can get in the bath and not have to stress about whether the water is hot or cold. The alarmed gates are working and, as far as we are concerned, the tsotsis are back at arm’s length, where they belong.
It is almost as if this whole nasty episode never happened.