The city (Johannesburg, that is) is moving. Perhaps that means the whole country is moving — ugly, functional, here-today-gone-tomorrow Johannesburg being South Africa’s powerhouse, cultural and economic hub, magnet for Africa’s rough and ready, and barometer of what’s up and what’s down.
In the northern suburbs money is being turned into concrete and steel and throwing up office blocks, multi-storey parking lots, and a bizarre and ever-increasing array of luxury town house complexes built in the ersatz style of Tuscan villages. Rivonia and Fourways have never had it so good. The white and black empowerment muscle behind this seems to be living out a fantasy world of dreams of a distant, civilised past out there in the Europe that it left behind. The luxury 4x4s that purr between its offices and restaurants and casinos have no idea that they are in Africa, and no interest in being relieved of their delusions.
Meanwhile, down here on the ground, the inner city is changing too. Hillbrow and Berea, once denizens of white bohemian civilisation, artists, poets, closet revolutionaries and old Jewish ladies who still remembered when they were not so old and could go down for a decent cup of coffee after the hairdresser, have become a hectic, extended, offshore suburb of Lagos and Kinshasa, with South Africa’s traditional mix of whores and tsotsis ducking and diving in between.
Then there’s Yeoville, just a few steps down the road, within easy shooting distance of the Telkom tower and Ponte City.
Yeoville has become Johannesburg’s new Sophiatown. It used to be white. Now it is distinctly black. Just as Sophiatown transcended its original purpose and became the home of an earlier African renaissance, like Harlem, with all its inevitable highs and lows, Yeoville has moved from easy-going gentility to slum — but a slum with a vibe and a disorganised sense of purpose.
The slum that Yeoville has become is where the people make it happen. Because they can. Because finally, out of the desperation of poverty, alienation and disempowerment on the fringes, they can step out into the street on their own terms, dress up in boubous and furs, and talk loudly out of their own mouths.
Johannesburg has become a tale of two cities — or perhaps it always was that way. The difference is that the two cities are now crammed up against each other, and not bothering to try to make any sense of the arrangement.
The elite hang out at the Rhema Church and the synagogues up there in the north. The povos hang out here in Yeoville, and do the best they can under the circumstances.
After a drab and ugly period of uncertainty, Yeoville seems to have rediscovered an identity. The filth and denigration so eloquently described by Es’kia Mphahlele when referring to his native Marabastad and all the other townships that blacks were locked into is certainly a feature of the new Sophiatown that is Yeoville. But a walk through its streets on a Sunday morning also reminds you of the kind of energy that made Sophiatown buzz in spite of all its problems.
There are churches everywhere, with loud music soaring out of the doors in the midst of the cacophony of hungover reprobates trawling the streets through the litter of last night’s shattered beer bottles, and wondering where the next liquid relief is coming from. Cameroonian women in all their finery drag their carefully groomed children on a shopping expedition towards the West African marketplace, picking out healthy tomatoes and aubergines and chunks of halaal lamb for Sunday lunch, in this buzzing place that sits cheek by jowl with the queues waiting to stock up on essentials in the impersonal corridors of overpriced merchandise at white-owned Shoprite.
White robed devotees of the various amaZiona churches who send their voices to God on the rugged hills overlooking the city stride through this stew of Sodom and Gomorrah with their chins held high in superior disdain. And the Rastas crack open an early libation of Hansa on the roof of what used to be a trendy bar and restaurant called Tandoor.
From on high, and far away in Pretoria and Cape Town, the leaders of the new dispensation that used to be the Republic of South Africa dispense wisdom to the world about the African renaissance. Meanwhile, Africa is getting on with a renaissance of its own: alive, vibrant, dangerous and relentlessly colourful. Just like Sophiatown.
But it seems like the leadership is, after all, taking an interest in all of this. Yeoville, Troyeville, Hillbrow, Bertrams and other marginalised suburbs, which have effectively become in-house townships, are receiving serious attention in the plans of the Johannesburg Development Agency and whatever it trails behind it. The year 2010 and the Soccer World Cup have suddenly made them sit up and think about how to make Johannesburg look like Barcelona, Paris and London.
So they are moving forward with some speed to gentrify Yeoville and those other places, bulldoze the old in the traditional apartheid way, and make them look acceptable by the standards of the civilised world.
There is a huge contradiction here, which nobody seems to be dealing with. While we would all like to see Yeoville looking cleaner and smelling prettier, we certainly don’t want to see it lose its new and exciting African character. It would be a disaster for Yeoville to end up looking, sounding and feeling like those ridiculous neo-Tuscan villages in the north, which have no reference to the soil in which they are lodged.
Yeoville, and Kliptown, and the people who live there, is what the African renaissance really is. It would be interesting to see that translated into some political vision for the future — and allow these to remain places where the people count.