How scared are you right now? If you haven’t heard, the barbarians are coming. And I’ve just realised they’ll be coming for me first.
Driving home from a Saturday morning shop, the newspaper posters lining the streets of Jo’burg are conspicuously un-weekendy.
‘Mob violence grips Gauteng!” says one.
‘Xenophobic terror reaches city!” says another.
And a third: ‘Waaaaah! The sky is falling!”
The crazy people who traditionally walk around in long coats calling ‘The End is Nigh!” don’t make their own placards any more; they steal them off light poles.
I don’t understand, though.
Surely they’re not saying this somehow affects me. I’ve just hit the mute button on Cartoon Network to listen for the sound of hordes approaching from over the horizon.
Nothing. Just the guy playing Nintendo Wii next door.
I get back to making a late breakfast of pancakes, a fat-free crème fraiche equivalent, and seasonal berries.
My domestic, Evy, looks up from her ironing to warn me:
‘They’re coming for you next, Lev!”
But why? Unlike Evy, I have no strong ties to Zimbabwe.
‘But you live next to Hillbrow,” she explains. ‘And you look funny.”
Evy laughs.
Apart from reminding me about that pay cut she’s due, Evy has a point: after they’ve sorted out the Zimbabweans and the Congolese, it stands to reason they’d start on the funny looking. And they won’t have to travel far to get me.
Let me tell you about where I live:
Parktown is shaped like a triangle and I’m at the sharpest end, sandwiched between Houghton and Hillbrow. The former is notoriously larney. The latter is notorious in the way Durban taxi drivers mean it when they paint it across their back windows in Day-glo pink and green.
From the lounge of my flat you see nothing but the non-indigenous trees of a plush, well-tended, 60-year-old garden. Step out the front door into the corridor and Hillbrow Tower’s close enough to hit with a catty, a keen eye and a good-sized ball of bubblegum.
Should I start regretting my move to this hip, cheap city property?
Three years ago, when I moved to Johannesburg, sensible people pointed at Hillbrow Tower and warned: ‘Arrr! Thar be dragons!”
They even did a pirate accent when they said it.
I laughed them off the way you have to laugh off suburbanites, with their private schools and private police forces and matching socks.
I wanted to live in the city.
Well, the edge of the city. I’m not crazy. So I settled on a spot close enough to smell the danger, but not close enough to taste it.
I was going to live like Jerry Seinfeld and Carrie Bradshaw. And, for the most part, you might be surprised to learn it’s just like it is on TV. Compared with suburbanites, city dwellers dress better, are funnier, and have more sex.
I invite you to gasp at how adventurous I am to live this close to one of the scariest places on earth. And you want to know how scary it is?
Not very. This is Jo’burg, South Africa, and though I’m close to them, the stinky poor stay on their side of the line.
But then there are those newspaper headlines and the pictures on TV. Should I be more afraid?
You see we all know that the recent chaos in Gauteng isn’t really about xenophobia. Newspapers latch on to that word and won’t let go; how often do they get to put a word starting with an ‘X” on their posters?
For politicians it’s a whole lot easier to talk about xenophobia than it is to fix the great unmentionable: poverty.
We keep expecting the hungry to be reasonable. But hungry people are crazy.
Last weekend I queued for 27 minutes to get a bratwurst at the German School’s Bierfest down the road. When I finally got to the counter, I nearly smacked the guy standing behind it. Would that have been xenophobia? No, just an empty tummy.
Can we expect less from the poor?
I’m just afraid one of them will stop for a cocktail sandwich in the middle of looting and setting people alight and have a slightly less crazy thought: it’s not the Somalis who stole my lunch, it’s that guy in Parktown.
I hit the mute on Cartoon Network again. No, no approaching rumble. Not yet.
If they do come, at least I’ll have a nice breakfast waiting for them. I’ll have Evy serve them the best pancakes they’ve ever had.
With the barbarians at the crêpes, I’ll make my getaway.