I like Johannesburg, its energy and possibilities. It has a bit of everything about South Africa in it, of Southern Africa. You can plug into any Johannesburg that you are interested in — if you like to hang out in Hyde Park, Melville or Yeoville, you can do it. There’s enough madness for the different kinds of crazies we are in Jo’burg.
Small cities tend to have character and you have to be one of those people or you’ll feel liminal. I don’t think I could live in Cape Town — it’s the opposite of everything that is wonderful about Johannesburg. When I am in Cape Town I don’t feel like I am at home unless I am in a township or a certain part of town. When you are in Cape Town, you get crap service at restaurants and you occupy one of two black tables. I don’t have time for that. But I have family there. My sister is in Cape Town, my partner’s family lives there [her partner is art historian and artist Thembinkosi Goniwe]. So I understand that there are people for whom Cape Town works differently.
The CD I am currently listening to is quite old, The One Love Movement on Bantu Biko Street (2006) by Simphiwe Dana. I love how she combines politics and beautiful singing.
At home we eat a lot of curries and seafood because my partner doesn’t eat red meat. He didn’t used to eat meat at all, but now he eats white meat, so we cook a lot of chicken and fish. My favourite restaurant is Lucky Bean on 7th Avenue, Melville; I love their risottos and ostrich burgers. I love ostrich meat. I like the fact that it confuses me — even though it looks like red meat, it’s from a bird.
If a friend from overseas came visiting and wanted to be shown around, I would take her to Melville and to Newtown. I like Newtown because it’s a cultural precinct and you can lose yourself in interesting artistic things. You can do the venues without driving (I am not that crazy about driving).
For shopping, I would take visitors to Rosebank. And I would take them to the Apartheid Museum and the famous Vilakazi Street.
I am about to start reading Zu-kiswa Wanner’s Men of the South and Chris van Wyk’s new memoir, Eggs to Lay, Chickens to Hatch. My favourite South African reads of the past year have moved beyond fiction to poetry, especially Phillippa Yaa de Villiers’s The Everyday Wife and Natalia Molebatsi’s Sardo Dance. But I also really enjoyed Thando Mgqolozana’s A Man Who Is Not a Man. Mandla Langa’s The Lost Colours of a Chameleon is one of my favourites of all time.
I am very ambivalent about sport. I come from a sports-mad family: my mom’s side is football mad, my dad’s side of the family loves rugby and cricket. I don’t play sport at all — I was really appalling. I go to the gym but that is hardly sport although it works for me.
We watch a lot of plays and poetry performances. Last week I was at the Body of Words at the Market Theatre Lab. I also go to a lot of exhibitions because my partner is in the art world.
One of my best friends is a sangoma. I talk to her all the time about everything in my life, though not professionally. But I suppose I get her professional advice for free too.
If there was a big problem I would talk to a lot of people close to me — and one of the people would be my friend, the sangoma.
Pumla Dineo Gqola’s What Is Slavery to Me? (Wits Press) launches this Saturday at Xarra Bookshop in Newtown, Johannesburg, at 1.45pm. She was speaking to Percy Zvomuya