Contrary to what has been said in response to my recent and not-too-recent commentaries on the New Chinatown in Johannesburg’s Cyrildene, I actually like the place.
I also like the people. I buy most of my vegetables there (much more interesting, and cheaper, than Woolworths, out there on the streets in cardboard boxes, weighed in front of your eyes) and have a direct interaction with the people who are selling them. Language issues notwithstanding, we come to an agreement.
So am I backing off? Am I changing my stance about Chinatown? Am I softening what has been called my racist, or xenophobic, invective?
I wasn’t backing on in the first place. Whatever I said was about the parts of the New Chinatown that were difficult or sometimes complicated to handle. And so, of course, I had to relate to the fact that in this daily intercourse, language is a problem. It’s not just about having a provocative conversation through the barred door of a massage parlour (more of that later), language generally is a problem.
But that is the nature of Johannesburg. That is the nature of the modern world. One letter writer chastises me for expecting everyone in Chinatown to be able to speak English. This would indeed be a terrible assumption. But it has become the assumption of how to conduct everyday commerce in Johannesburg. Or in Durban. Or Cape Town. Or most of the country.
The only point is that we live our day-to-day lives on basic assumptions, and negotiate everything else from that basis. Sure, English is, or used to be, a colonising language. But it has now come to be accepted as a language that we have become used to in the marketplace. Like the Cold War, much of colonial discourse is no longer valid currency, except as reference to the past.
So English has become the language of the marketplace. And the New Chinatown is, on the surface, at least, part of that marketplace. English, or maybe Fanagalo, or a mangled version of Sotho or SeTswana, or whatever, is the lingo.
I need cabbage. I want to be able to explain what cabbage is. Otherwise both parties lose out. I don’t get to buy my cabbage. You don’t get to sell your cabbage, whatever that thing might be. That is all that language is about, surely? So why all the excitement?
I hardly need to explain that the various people responding to what I wrote about Chinatown completely missed the point of why I was at that massage parlour in the first place. I have been taking therapeutic treatment for built-up tension in various parts of my body. So do many people, male and female, especially when you get to a certain age. The options of how this is dealt with vary.
So you knock on a door that supposedly offers relief, and sometimes get rejected. Or ejected. Others get accepted.
It is almost impossible to get away from racist discourse in the post-apartheid South Africa. Various readers have responded by claiming that I have racist or xenophobic horizons. The New Chinatown is just one of them. The pseudo-anthemic rock song about the Boer general, De la Rey, which is rocking stadiums around the country, and, potentially, around the world, is another.
As I say, I spend a lot of my time in the New Chinatown. The more time you spend with people, whoever they are, the more you get to understand them, and get to understand each other’s language. I have still not been given access to their massage parlour (although we are working on it) but, for the rest, I have no problem. It gives you an understanding that business is business, and that is what this particular community is doing in Cyrildene. Same like the Jewish people who were there before them (although I have been chastised by some of them as well before for even saying this).
Then there is the issue of Boer general De la Rey, recently popularised by a song in his name. Don’t tread on this territory, some say. Either it’s just because it’s a song (and I’m told that it is the only interesting one on the album, and came about quite by chance) or because, in the minds of its biggest fans, it has, indeed, become an anthem.
What kind of anthem? ”Don’t associate the song De la Rey with the issues of the Boeremag,” says an angry correspondent. But how can you avoid it? A call to arms is a call to arms.
And then there is another perspective, also ignored in all these things. If De la Rey had been alive today, I do believe he would have been an interesting and creative character on the national stage. Do we discuss this? Is this part of the national discourse?
Not at all. Our politics, in spite of all appearances, is narrowly race-based, once again. Or issue-based. The Zuma thing. The Cape Town thing with Helen Zille and Ebrahim Rassool. Schabir Shaik in jail and Jacob Zuma outside, grinning. Who knows how to understand anything?
But above all, who knows what we should really understand about where we are going?
De la Rey: was he a hero or a villain? Who would he have been to the place that we now call the ”Rainbow Nation?”
Are Chinese integrating into Cyrildene, or is Cyrildene integrating the Chinese?
As the King of Siam once said: ”Et cetera, et cetera …”