/ 28 February 2023

Contemplating South Africa’s great depression … in the dark

Load Shedding
South Africa has marked 40 days without load-shedding, with no imminent power cuts on the horizon, but despite this trend, rolling blackouts are unlikely to vanish by year’s end. (Leon Sadiki/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

After three consecutive days without electricity, I was going to write about the fury and depression of living in the dark with rotting meat. I was going to tell the story of how three tickets raised with City Power were passed off as resolved without resolution and how I might have accepted a callout fee from a city official who works for double pay — by the city and then by consulting during regular working hours using city resources. A story of a hidden economy of extortion in plain sight. 

I had intended to write about how I run on Johannesburg’s Louis Botha Avenue while trying to avoid the raw sewage gently spilling from a manhole onto the road and being splattered by cars onto passers-by. How gaping manholes are a threat to pedestrians, as much as the proliferating potholes are a danger to motor vehicles negotiating our roads. 

But I now work in the far south and my daily commute from the northern suburbs humbles me and widens my empathy beyond my middle-class preoccupations. So, City Power is off the hook. For now. Instead, I invite the reader to come along with me beyond the desolate mine dumps that elevate the highveld landscape in the deep south of Johannesburg. The number of new informal settlements that sprung up on this large swath of land, about 80km from the city centre, during the coronavirus lockdowns, is unclear. Estimates have it as just over forty new settlements. 

Most of these settlements do not have electricity, water, sanitation infrastructure, roads or housing. Many residents live in makeshift structures made of iron sheets. Eskom’s woes and our angst do not register for the residents. They are unaffected by load-shedding, load-reduction, power cuts or inefficiencies. 

Instead, they are menaced by other demons. Tired of being permanent tenants and desiring land to pass on to their children and grandchildren, the older women who have moved from back rooms in Soweto and now live in Nana’s Farm, Patsing, Tjovitjo, Phumulamqashi and Kapok, must walk in the dark to urinate and defecate. These are the things that middle-class people do in their houses before flushing away the evidence by lowering a lever or pressing a button. In Patsing, to relieve oneself is to negotiate the dangers that lurk in the dark. Urination might end in a fall, rape or death. Death lurks in the vacuum when dignity is impossible. 

Further south, in the wake of the opening of the sluice gates of the Vaal Dam, hundreds of people are living in the aftermath of person-made floods. Their houses, infrastructure, material possessions and dreams have been washed away. There, too, power networks have collapsed and communities contemplate bleak futures in the dark. This is the stuff of depression when, like a juddering engine on the brink of collapse, the psyche closes down and succumbs to darkness. 

Residents of Coffee Bay in the Eastern Cape know this feeling only too well. Their children, bridges and livelihoods have been carried away by floodwaters. Their weeping will end, but for now, from behind their mourning veils, their vision is darkness and pain. Dreams, love and infrastructure have been swept into the roiling ocean. 

In this climate, suburban Hugo, Gogo from Patsing and the families of drowned toddlers live in a climate of depression. My class position does not insulate me from the feelings of living through the disintegration of the state. Even my costly inverter cannot save me from the dark. 

We have front-seat views to the collapse of governance and the evaporation of the social compact. There is nowhere to turn. Even the great white hope, Andre de Ruyter, has proved to have feet of clay. President Cyril Ramaphosa lost his capitalist shine a few years ago and we move between being scandalised and bemused when he tells us to stop whining. No commission of inquiry or judge in green robes can arrest the swirling depression gathering in the dark. 

It is depressing to live in Johannesburg. I daresay, for most of us, it is depressing to live in South Africa. If hope was threadbare in the final years of the Zuma administration, it is gone now. The emperor, also known as the rainbow nation, is naked. Those who bequeathed us this tacky epitaph have since died. The building housing parliament sits in smoke-stained ruins. Dreams of smart cities are a joke. Litter mounts high where trains used to run. 

Rousing speeches cannot save us. Remixing former president Thabo Mbeki’s “I am an African” from the Cape Town City Hall, rings hollow and desperate. It is a failure in creativity. We are embarrassed by the parades that are the State of the Nation ceremony and the charades that the states of the provinces are. We know the truth. It is all pointless. 

As creatures of habit, we take small comfort from routine and little escapes. Television is one such escape. Without it, we sit in the dark and alternate between rage, loathing and self-pity. Predictability has been replaced by Eskom’s whims and chaotic scheduling. The children are irritated and Zoom meetings are constantly postponed.

Prolonged power outages disrupt our sociality. My daily calls to my aged mother in Lusikisiki are often met with the disembodied voice of the automated answering service because power cuts disrupt what little network service rural areas have. I used to call her at the time of day when she was most alone and lonely but this coincides with power cuts and no network service. Those of us tethered to love and connection on online network services are left bereft. 

To live alone in this environment, is to be accompanied by a deafening silence. To live with people is to share your irritation. The depression experienced by our public infrastructure and political life has entered our homes and sits between us like wet coal. The very air is rent by the whining sound of depression. 

We often talk about hope in the air but we seldom turn our gaze to atmospheric depression. This is the kind of depression that sucks the air dry and travels between us, spreading like a viral contagion. In our weary rides on taxis, trains and buses, we bond over negative feelings. We shake our heads, no longer in disbelief, but with a knowing etched on our faces. We are dizzy from the musical chairs played by politicians in local government chambers, even as the walls threaten to cave in. 

We are living through a great depression in all senses of this description. Economically, socially, politically and emotionally. In the mounting ruins, where murder, gender-based violence, unemployment and crime are rife, the realisation that this is where we are serves to deepen the pervasive sense of depression. 

I see the fear in parents’ eyes as they contemplate their children’s futures. In Reiger Park, Boksburg, the school playground has been dug up by desperate people in search of copper cables. Laughter does not ring through the playground. Fear lurks where childlike pleasure once reigned. 

A few years ago, I might have baulked at this hopeless characterisation of our social life. I might have cautioned against sounding as if we are suffering from apartheid nostalgia. I may have warned that we should be wary of projecting individual depression onto a population of 60 million people. But, today, I would question the sanity of people who are happy with their lives and with the social, economic and political life of the country. 

We do not long for apartheid. But joy has left the building and in its place is darkness — sometimes on schedule and at other times stretching over three days. I suspect that even social media platforms like “I am staying” are running short of motivation. Perhaps its members are furtively contemplating ways of leaving.