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QUEENSTOWN, SOUTH AFRICA -
Once seating on a park bench, thinking about ways of simplifying my life, wondering behind what cloud was my star hidden, I made the decision to go to the city of Port Elizabeth. Before me stood a construction van whose main office address was in Port Elizabeth. I thought Why not I give the 'windy city' (Port Elizabeth) a try? After all, it might not be called a 'friendly city'for nothing. I was hoping my luck would change there since my chips were down.
Port Elizabeth was the only city in our country I did not know in my youth. That felt criminal, since it was only four hundred kilometres away from my home and a major city of our province, the Eastern Cape.
The day was bright and hot with shimmering heat. It reminded me of the first day I went to Johannesburg for my tertiary education almost two decades ago. The air was humid and windless. The clouds kept throwing shadows on the ground and I kept trying to identify the form they made as they fell. Just then a dishevelled man with a hollowed and haunted look blocked my view. He startled me a little with a facial expression of mounting disdain.
"Could you tell me, my son, if this road goes to Johannesburg?" he asked.
I felt it a strange coincidence that on the day I was going to Johannesburg someone should ask me for directions to Johannesburg. Johannesburg is more than nine hundred kilometres from where we were in my hometown, Queenstown.
"No father. This road goes to the white suburbs. The road to Johannesburg is the other way," I said in a helpful mood.
There was a smell of poverty about him; stale urine mingled with accumulated sweat and dirt. His beard was unkempt, crinkled and bushy with white remnants of whatever he had eaten on the rim of his mouth. He had huge gaps b etween his raked black teeth. His eyes seemed like the only living part about him, bright brown and inquisitively lively.
"When I was down there near the shops, I asked and was told I'd have to climb the bridge," he said with a rasp of suppressed anger in his voice. At that moment I noticed babyish features about his face whose mouth drooped a little.
"They must have meant the other bridge," I said pointing to the other direction, trying my best not to exacerbate his irritation.
"Well it doesn't matter. I don't trust you anyway," he said, hunching his shoulders and giving me his back. "I shall continue on this way until I reach Aliwal North where I shall be spending the night. Tomorrow morning I shall be hot on the hills of the sun and push for Bloemfontein. You don't understand things I have to do ... " That was all I could hear as he walked away. The heels of his shoes were drastically slanting towards each outer, giving him a crab-like gate.
Aliwal North is a town along our Johannesburg path, two hundred kilometres away. A person starting his journey on foot at 15h45 had no chance of reaching it before nightfall. And Bloemfontein is three hundred kilometres further down. It was obvious he was a troubled man, so I did not want to pursue the matter any further. He walked as though he had rheumatism or gout, respecting the ground as he put down his foot. I wondered how long it'd take him to get to Aliwal North at his pace but had to get home to finish my packing so as to catch the train leaving at 18h00 for Johannesburg.
My family left me at the platform gate with an aching heart and a curious eagerness for discovering a new city. It was to be my first time in "the golden city" (Jo'Burg). I boarded the train with my hardly nineteen-year-old mind feeding on disquieting thoughts of arriving at that unknown big city alone the following morning. I took a last look at the bald mountains of my home, wondering how long it would be before I saw them again. Many things crossed my mind. I didn't even have an idea where I'd get money for my studies, but I was determined to try my luck.
While I was still lost in my thoughts, I heard a tap on my window. What do I see but the old man [from the park] again! The train conductor was blowing his first whistle. I quickly opened the window. The old man begged two Rands of me. I gave them to him. Then he suddenly became dour. I felt this strange, since I thought the two Rands should rather have made him happy. I could see him make an effort to collect himself, adjusting his dirty jacket whose tattered collar was greasy and infested with lice. He gave me a message for his brother who was a mineworker at Jo'burg. I didn't know him or his brother. I was even sure he didn't remember me from earlier on when we met in the park.
"Tell my brother," he said, talking briskly, "to stop sending money through his wife, because she became too familiar with road workers from East London and left with one of them. She now cooks at their tents and slums in Ziphunzana (Duncan Village). We're told she's expecting a bastard. Tell him our father did not survive last year's frost. We didn't have money to bury him so we pretended not to know him in order for the police to bury him. He's now buried above the stadium with a name of 'Anoni' (anonymous) on his grave. What's the matter with those policemen? Don't they know that his name was Philimoni (Philip) not Anoni?
"Tell my brother the cat for us is sleeping at the hearth (no food to cook). Last week I had a good mind of walking to inform him that our sister is blowing our blind mother's pension money with a married man that loves her only when she has money. She becomes angry when we ask her about house groceries. I'm tired of being hungry all the time. Sleep goes away in my eyes at night because my stomach is always grumbling and I'm forever angry in my mind.
"Tell him Nomasomi, his first born, has yielded to a boy whose prepuce has not been cut yet. Things are not good here, our women are cursed with lust. The borders of wickedness have reached even the churchyard. Our reverend was caught with a married woman. He is now living boldly in sin with her. Nothing will persuade him otherwise, not even the talk about the God he has lost. No one sees any use in hoping in God anymore. Everyone drinks according to their purse. Last week our nephew was so drunk he spent the whole night galloping around the house like a mad horse. They say it's the weed (dagga) he's been smoking since he was eleven. We think he's no longer right upstairs, that there's a misfire in one of his wires.
"As for me, tell him, my heart is still following the ways of our mother. Nothing will take my hope from God. Man, born of woman, leaves a short life that's full of misery. Still my heart will not swell against God.
"Ask my brother why he no longer comes to visit home? If he thinks he has reason to be angry let him wait until I tell him news. We lost our house to our uncle long time ago. He claims he has papers for it. No use going to the courts because he greases the hand of the magistrate. I tried reminding our uncle that our father raised him in the same manner as ourselves, but he became puffed up. He has taught his mouth to speak lies. He habits houses of iniquity. I suspect he's been sharing his blanket with Nomasomi though she's his nephew's. She's the only one allowed in his house and they both have shingles, which as you know is the first sign of the thing that outside up (AIDS). I suspect the bastard Nomasomi is carrying is his. Mercifully he'll die before we're faced with the dilemma of raising an incest child. They're using the stripling who stays down the road where they sell mbamba (toxic liquor concoction) as a scapegoat. Foolish poor boy. He'll learn to count cants he puts his cock on. Nomasomi wears the garments of gladness (still prostitutes) even though she's pushing a wheelbarrow (pregnant). She fishes for truck drivers at the truck stop. People are talking.
"Tell him our dogs have fled by the ways of the fields and the paths of the hills. We couldn't afford to feed them. It is quiet now at night. No barking. They had already lost their joy anyway, no more fawning and wagging tails. Tell my brother to send me money so I might come and stay with him at Jabavu (a section in Soweto). Things are worse here ... "
The message went on until the train started to pull away from the platform. The old man was by then sweating, occasionally rubbing his face with a dirty handkerchief that had bloodstains on it. He trotted next to the train and gave me a heart-warming goodbye when I gave him ten Rands more. Nobody has ever been that differential to my leaving before. It gave me hope. He started singing a folk song I knew very well. On his voice, though, it acquired a delicious woefulness. He packaged it with the personality of his difficult life:
Lomlungu uTeba ndiyamzonda This white man Teba I grudgeThe old men ran along the platform with the train, panting and coughing until I was concerned for his health. Just before the platform ended he shouted, "I trust you now!"
ngoku thatha isithandwa swam for taking my lover away from me.
Uzu bathuthe loliwe, bathuthe loliwe, Take them goods-train, take them goods-train
Andisoze ndiye eGoli. I'll never go to Johannesburg.
Ubathuthe loliwe. Take them goods-train.I was flabbergasted. I was not aware he remembered me. The last I saw of his face were his eyes filled with excessive pain and accumulated fatigue. His head dangled in an unbearable way as he faded from the distance. My tears baptised the moment.
I'm haunted by those eyes. Like Emerson, I'm moved by strange sympathies. My thoughts often twine around that old man. Virgil called such things lacrimae rerum (the sense of tears in mortal things).
IIIt had been about a decade since I travelled out of "Jozi" (Johannesburg) on my nerves before I went last [back again] month. The Freudians are wont to remind us that desire is another side of repugnance. I usually have little patience for modern prophets and their penchant for liberating through subjugation. But my relationship with Jozi city avers to this Freudian postulate. What draws me to Jozi, or any city for that matter, is what I love to loath: the miasma brought on by love of material gain; the ruthless presumptions of the rich, the fierce indifference of the affluent; the generosity of the poor; the gutter poverty of the destitute; the variety of human experiences, shallowness in concomitant with brilliance; fussy, skittery social values alongside patient faith; contrived beauty, spirited artifice; and all that deadening despair living side-by-side with glamour.
Life between friends in the city vacillates between genuine concern and staged amiability.
When my friend picked me up from Rotunda bus terminal last month, I felt like Noah's dove returning to the ark. We drove smoothly through familiar streets in his luxury Toyota Prius. He talked a lot about its hybrid abilities, how "it merges technology with environmental conservation and seats that were designed to massage your back so you never get tired driving it; fuel efficiency since it uses an electric and motor engine, the silent way it pulls, you almost don't hear it drive" and all and all.
I envied his self-satisfaction with the signatures of success and started to question my tortured idealism. By succumbing to a life of material comfort, he seemed to have found himself. By that I don't mean I've a problem with genuinely worked-for success, only when it makes one superficial.
Jo'burg's streets are silent and swallowing in the early hours of dawn. I remembered how we use to walk them in altered moods and exalted mind-states from our nightlife. Those were the days of the confusing blood rush and, it must be admitted, the vulgar and polymorphous perversity that goes with the sanative stage of happy faults. I once read that a healthy life must always make concessions for the controlled hallucinations of its vulgar frailties. I get comfort from that when I think about my past life in Jozi.
We approached Sandton (an upmarket suburb where my friend stays) through roller-coastering freeways, leaving behind the nasty prints of the mephitic smokes of city centre. We entered avenues of espaliered trees and synthetic lawns. I felt out of depth as we passed through Sandton Square, the realm of artifice and invention. The glass and cement cliffs didn't cascade so magnificently the last time I was there. Now it's called Nelson Mandela Square after that great man of consular dignity.
On reaching my friend's townhouse, I took a shower and excused myself to the visitor's bedroom. I could feel the day and the thrush grumbling from a comfortable distance and realised a part of me missed the hub of the city. I slept until just before noon. My friend had left a note explaining that he had gone to work and hoped I'd pop in his surgery later on so he could show me around reinvented Jozi.
I left earlier than the designated time [in order] to give myself the chance of visiting familiar places like Hillbrow and Berea where the cup of our youth was brimming over only a decade ago. The afternoon was one of Jozi summer, crisp and bright. The cosmopolitan Hillbrow I knew was now, using prudish language, the seat of Babylon. It's a garish democracy of fast food shops, hawker and costermonger stands; bars, mostly gay; massage parlours; bright boutiques selling vibrators, dildos, adult videos and other sexual help equipment. Pawnbrokers and music shops are ubiquitous. The whole thing jolted my mind.
I walked Kotze Street until it intersected Summit with restless desire, anxious to see more. The Summit Club, where I once stayed and got a first glance of the spirit of Mephistopheles in me, was now an adult centre and a massage parlour. I stood diagonally opposite trying to locate the balcony I had spent many a Saturday afternoon. Those days of my life unfolded like a dream in my mind. The face of a girl I loved then with desire (these days I only love by will) came rushing into my head. The evening she laid satisfied, exposing her nubile apricot thighs, after coming in waves when I was inside her.
Only unbroken moments flash in my mind.
I shouldn't have waited for the inevitable fall. I should have left her with her innocence and not have implicated her in my shadows. We're a personification of each other's paradoxes. We live on radical self-criticism with a splinter of ice in our hearts. Or we live in carefree glee with emotions much more than our ability to express. We go down heroically with our blazing guns or bruised with blind conceit glossing over the ugly parts. All the same cruel spikes dug into all our tender flanks until they calloused. The secret is not to weigh the significance of our breaths by things that blow with the wind but to be ever goaded by eloquent silence, the curse of shepherds and wonderers.
Two months later she, the girl of my remembrance, dumped a dish of cold water on my drunken face after finding me in the arms of another. That evening I sat on my desk trying to write her a letter of apology with the helping lies of poets. I never sent the letter. I packed it with intentions, bought a bottle of Fish Eagle brandy and drunk the ashes of my heart pale and slept the sleep of the defeated. Who's to say we don't sometimes will our doom?
Some force sung me to the streets of Hillbrow. Down Kotze was a carnival of sites to see. People moved in incessant termite movements. I moved in drug thrilled excited fatigue. Splendidly null and voluptuous signboard verbosity accompanied me. Bizarre cultish hair cuts knocked me sideways. Reeking slime crawled up the sidewalls before decrepit buildings and leapt to my nostrils. Traffic screeched on me nerves. Multivalent sounds and compounds of smells shepherded me: grilling meat, pizza herbs, baking mozzarella cheese; popcorns, candy floss, stale beer, carbon monoxide, diesel and petrol fumes and hanging tobacco smoke.
People kissed free and glued together. The irritated need of a hobo, his carbuncle bloodshot eyes, his grudging ingratitude, tripped me. Soliciting deliberations from a bone-pale prostitute hassled me. The sign I saw ten years ago of Dr Movango, "the herbalist from Zimbabwe soon to go back," was still there. I guessed the soon was in African time. The smell from burning traditional medicines, impepha, hypnotised and tossed me. Like the walking man, I walked on with Patrician adoration.
What I had always suspected found a clear vocabulary in my heart: Babylon is peopled not by devils but by fallen angels. The eloquence of the decadent city charms me. It releases my frustrations with its interplay of compassion and anger. The profoundly mundane teasing of the city is like a rehearsal of eternity's varieties to my mind.
My friend chose a restaurant in Sandton in which to dine before we could enter the city nightlife. It felt soothing to leave the pneumatic drills ofthe city streets for the perfumed corridors of the mall. The shops' decorations were a cunning triumph of African pretensions; like Barbi dolls cloned into Pelisa dolls on display.The restaurant had a fake antiquity, cloying African synthesis and staged politesse inside. The food was strange and lacked heartiness. The mogul attitude of the arriviste black couple next to us, with their sitcom fawning behaviour of insincere gaiety, was polyneuritic; portentous, flip and assertively intolerant of the waiter's peccadilloes. I detested their conversation's dumb articulacy of catchwords.
When my friend asked, "So what do you fancy doing this Friday evening?" I saw my chance.
"Perhaps we could go Down-town. I'm told Jozi's city centre is reinventing and rediscovering its soul."
Thus we went to the Market Theatre after dinner. My friend was by then convinced that I was still hung up on the Jozi of yesteryear. To his credit, he decided to put on a host's attitude of practised resignation.
Downtown, the vibrant mood brought me to a much better fettle. At the African Jazz Club they were featuring an Afro-jazz maestro, Judith Sephuma. After Kenny G's syrupy music in my friend's car, I felt the need to be Afro-jazzed-up. I was now glad to have escaped the gurgling murmur of air conditioners in the mall. We sat at gingham tables, close to the street pavement, drinking cheap foaming beer from polystyrene containers. The bar's inattention to the exotic sublimated my mood, giving reprieve from the forest of steel and smoked glass of the mall. The newly-constructed Nelson Mandela Bridge loomed from a respectable distance in bewildering majesty. I was thankful that university students now need no longer have to pass scary Park Station on their way to campus from their nightlife in the city.
"Hey, mfondini (man,) who do you think is going to win the American elections?" my friend asked, trying to strike conversation perhaps, since I knew politics were not his forte.
"I don't know," I said. When I discovered he was still waiting for me to go further, I continued. "I mean, I'd personally like Kerry to win but Bush seems to be the one offering the majority of Americans what they want."
"How do you mean?"
"I mean, we all know by now, from the debates and all, that the US elections are not going to be about either values or policies." I was trying to formulate my thoughts under the haze of alcohol.
"What will they be about?" my friend asked and continued, "I've to tell you, I sat up late once trying to watch the first debate between Bush and Kerry and all I gained was nausea and boredom."
"But there's something profound about the dumbed down and degraded kind of American politics, don't you think?" I interrupted.
"Perhaps to suckers like you. For me, if have to be told an election is historic, it clearly isn't. For the most part, elections are not even meant to be historic; they're of a routine purpose that's driven by rational reasons. What drives American politics is what I don't get."
"Whoever taps into the American fear of the Other successfully will probably win the elections. As it is, Bush is succeeding at that."
"So you agree with me that the whole thing is fucked up. In any case, how can elections that costs so much be called "free and fair"? Fair to whom? Does it mean from now onwards only millionaires and sons of billionaires will stand even a remote chance of being elected American presidents?"
"Perhaps. But my point was that Bush has more of what the American journalist, Daniel Goleman, almost a decade ago, called EQ (Emotional Intelligence). Kerry might be intelligent in the conventional manner we know but Bush is tapping into a deep American vein of distrust of all things intellectual. The world of warm feeling occupies a higher realm than that of cold facts in the US. When you watch their political speech you see that Americans like to be excited into an aggressive response. Gut rationality counts more than intellectual rationality and Bush is better at that. He is folksy, casual, lip-biting, clumsy and emotional. That's how he gets away with murder, as one of 'our own'."
"Oh let them shove it all."
I pushed on, excited by my own ideas: "There's a political crisis at the heart of the US establishment, which 9/11 and subsequent events accelerated but did not invent. It serves no purpose seeing Bush II as a personification of all that is wrong with America today, the crisis goes deeper than that."
"A chap I work with who spent seven years in NYC says American politics are partisan. Republicans are becoming more entrenched in their support for Republicans, and Democrats more entrenched in their support for Democrats with the undecided votes falling more towards the conservative determination of Bush's administration.
"He says these partisan divisions do not correspond to politics but to different lifestyles. Republican voters are more firmly church-going and gun-owning. Democrats are more concentrated among single people and urban dwellers. Today being a Democrat or a Republican is a cultural or even an emotional matter, rather than a political decision. As a Democrat, you are identifying yourself as more urbane, thoughtful, international and sophisticated than your perceived Republican opponents. On the other hand, being a Republican means identifying yourself as strong, self-reliant, capable, not a 'girlie man'. To think we wasted all that time marching against Bush wars only to be slapped on the face like this!" my friend said.
"Me tell you," I insisted, "the problem is not Bush; he's just the highest representation of it. The problem is the sophisticated ignorance of the majority of American people. They just don't understand the consequences of things. The dangerous part is that they don't wish to understand, so long as their wallets are getting fatter. Voting, for them, has become a personal act with little connection to the sense of real change. American politics have become part of the consumer culture. This is what is making the process of their voting into a positive spin for their society's identity crisis. The rhetoric used by American politicians is just a glorification of the vacuum state they are in. Even the new anti-capitalist, anti-globalisation and anti-war movements are the diffusion of a lack of clear American principles and character."
"You cannot expect political engagement from a consumerist society. The best you'll find are short-circuits like specious protests, like choosing Qibla Cola instead of Coca Cola, going for hybrid cars like Toyota Prius, the cult of Ernesto Che Guevara, and so forth. Not the hard work of fostering ways for long-lasting progressive changes."
"I actually like it when grassroots activity is used to convey our democratic credentials. My problem is when these new social movements are used to relinquish responsibility by submitting to the unreflective immediacy of their spontaneity and think it ends there. High-on-gesture low-on-content politics that caricature slogans, when used only to pursue the radical in exclusion of all authority, are empty and useless. What's the point of selling yourself with the clamour of individual liberty while making choices that coexist and promote creeping conformism of consumerism? Like the cult of Guevara you mentioned."
"I was reading only the other day a book by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can't Be Jammed, and it reminded me of you," my friend countered. " I quote: 'Counterculture has almost completely replaced socialism as the basis of radical political thought'
"So if counterculture is a myth, then it is one that has misled an enormous number of people, with untold political consequences. The hipster, cooling his heels in a jazz club, comes to be seen as a more profound critic of modern society than the civil-rights activist -- or the feminist politician campaigning for a constitutional amendment. You can't change the course of inevitable things Mpush, no matter how hard you try."
"Perhaps so," I responded to my friend, " but I don't have to identify myself with things I don't agree with. In any case, the lure of the rebel has always been an appealing form of self-deception for the Western mind. It is an easy way out of the moral callousness of fast-paced, cut-throat capitalism and a fun way of asserting and positing one's individuality in the midst of the creative chaos of capitalism. It's more fun spending the afternoon doing a little shopping (and maybe lunch) with the altered mind of moral masturbation because you're driving a Toyota Prius.
"This is just the gentrification of social issues, like travelling to remote lands, enjoying eco-tourism and roughing it up with the poor in exotic cultures or wearing Che Guevara's t-shirt that screams: 'I'm the rebel in the system I support.'
"That way everyone can see you do your part by being an informed hip shopper and a rebel. It is much more serious to organize a movements for reform. I choose serious."
My friend said: "You'll be happy if we all chose your ser iousness and simplicity. What you don't realise is that, for our age, the political has itself become the aesthetic, class-based life choice and symbol of identity. I admit this does not promote real reforms. Instead us, the suburban backyard pretend-rebels, energize the system we're suppose to [be in] protest against, which depends on the notion of counterculture to peddle new styles to the many who seek a veneer of cool as they go about their quotidian lives. But we're almost hapless; things have gone too far to the other direction. Only the destructive conclusion can turn the tide, not political organisation anymore. This is not an era of revolutionaries, but of invention and enterprise."
"I totally agree, since the ineffective rebellious trends against aesthetic and sartorial norms end up themselves being subversive. For instance, Che Guevara must be turning in his grave when he sees the trafficking that has made his name into a capitalist brand. What does Che Guevara's beliefs have in common with pretend rebels squatting in posh buildings wearing expensive sneakers, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, waiting to be arrested? When their philosophy of hedonism and experiential wisdom fits well into the system they're pretending to attack?"
"My point is, it is possible -- writes Heath and Potter -- to be a normal, well-adjusted adult simply by following the rules that promote the general interest while conscientiously objecting to those that are unjust."
"Ja (Yes), but to be that normal -- in our era -- means finding yourself constantly at loggerheads with the system that is grievously making our lives into a passive and paralysing entertainment matrix of sophisticated ignorance and its banality of clumsy jingles.
"I've no problem with consumers becoming soldiers in the war of their own choice (the war on terror, the war in Iraq, the clash of civilisations, the intifada, the battle against American imperialism) from the safety of the shopping aisle or the comfortable college campus. But commitment beyond consumerism must follow the gesture. That's all I'm saying."
"In any case, as much as I miss these talks we use to have,"my friend said, "I'm bored here. I want us to change venues. Let us go to a club called 'Therapy', in Braamfontein.
"It's time for some splendid culture from this century." He was emphasizing how anachronistic he felt Downtown. "The catch," he continued, " is we'd have to pretend to be a gay couple to feel more comfortable there." With that we left for the destination.
The night was handsome, people friendly, too friendly perhaps, and the music loud with that orgiastic Afro-centrism at the club. After doses of gay sexual stimulating video projections, my friend became orgulous, and a little too touchey. I had to constantly gently rebuff him.
Others took that as a sign that I was more interested in them. It felt strange when so many men were offering to buy me drinks. I'm not use to that kind of attention. I laughed my pants wet when eventually I realised what was going on.. Funny how we fail to see things when they're in too much proximity to us. I just never thought about it. All of a sudden many things made sense, like how even in our varsity days I never saw him with a woman. A certain protective fondness for him overwhelmed me. I tried to make him more at ease about his homosexuality by joking.
"Don't tell me, in the city now, one has to assume other people's eccentricities to gain public esteem."
"Whatever do you mean?" he asked, feigning surprise.
"Seemingly, being gay is now a statement of avant-gardism."
"Most people here are not pretending," was all he was prepared to say for that moment.
From that I realised, despite his preening, he was still not fully a city boy. City folks take pride in their eccentricities.
At some stage, close to dawn, I became tired of the transparently bogus, practised bons mots and the earnest rubbish of drippy aubade. I went to the loo in preparation to leave. I came back, finished my beer. That's the last thing I remember about the night. My friend tells me that, had he not been there, I'd have woken up with a sore rectum.
"Gays rape each other?" I asked with a rush of indignation.
"All the time," my friend answered, pretending flippancy. "You must never leave your glass unattended, otherwise they'll lace it with a mild drug that sends you to sleep, then they take you somewhere and have their way with you."
"That's disgusting. To think I always thought they were more sensitive, than boorish, men."
Living in the city demands an accommodation with decadence, with harsh robustness that makes for the atmosphere of paralysis to those who feel unconnected to its pursuit of compulsions. Big cities have limited attitudes they respect: militancy (fundamentalism), cynical sophistication or anxiety. They force you to choose between these if you're to earn their respect or survive, else you'll know perpetual strangeness. Jozi, in that sense, scarred my spirit.
I've meditated among the calling gulls of Port Elizabeth; been irritated by the class discrimination of elitist Cape Town; felt peripheral in the clammy haberdashery of brassy Durban and; I know the vague exclusion of hissing Bloemfontein maize fields. Soggy Jozi, in my mind, has an unfair advantage over all these cities because it met me when I was young and green, with few formed habits or settled views of my own. Hence it became the city of my awakenings; the homeland of my youthful heart; a lingering rebuke to my inabilities and a mark of my weaknesses. I do not particularly like Jozi but I'd not be who I am without Jozi. This is where my deeds were wiped out and my favourite fortunes fell never to rise again ...
Everyman is an architect of his own destiny. I've been so of mine though not always with necessary prudence. But I did what I could. (Don Quixote)
© 2004, GENERATOR 21.
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