Are We There Yet? (4 page)

So prevalent is this crime that central-locking mechanisms only release the driver's door, thus preventing hijackers from leaping into the back seat the moment they hear the alarm being deactivated.

And it's not just the vehicles that are targeted. Many a motorist has felt the cold steel of a gun barrel against their temple along with the demand for a mobile phone, sunglasses or sex.

Some areas, such as highway on- and off-ramps near townships, are worse than others. Another no-go zone is the central business district. I used to spend a week of every winter school holidays working at my father's company, which was located in the city centre over three sawdust-scented floors of a warehouse on Commissioner Street. The CBD was a thriving centre of commercial activity where crowds of workers bustled between glittering flagship department stores, lunch counters and office buildings. There was a single lock on the premises' door, the frontage was washed each day and the pavement was swept every few hours. Casual good-morning nods had in some cases developed into acquaintanceships and my father knew a number of the merchants whose premises bordered his. It was a community of sorts.

I was advised that going back here on my own would be akin to playing a dyslexic version of Russian roulette in which every chamber bar one contained a bullet. So I secured the services of a guide named Oupa (grandfather) who picked me up in his shiny red Nissan Pulsar. A slight man in his early fifties, with tufts of grey around his temples and eyes which twinkled behind bifocals, Oupa was an avuncular mix of encyclopaedia and softly spoken entertainer. Along with giving out nuggets of information, he took mischievous delight in exposing my naivety and ignorance.

He and I set out towards a CBD that had long been deserted by companies like my father's in favour of safer suburbs that were once either exclusively residential or semirural. Even the stock exchange had shifted north and now sits alongside plush hotels and multinational head offices in an enclave where the faces may no longer be white-only but the collars certainly are.

Approaching the CBD from the north, a series of leafy parks slide down rocky ridges and rim the edges of small streams that are probably best viewed and certainly best smelt from a distance. Known as the Braamfontein Spruit Trail, it meanders fifteen kilometres through a handful of the six hundred green spaces which are under the city's administration by day and witness destitution, degradation and death when darkness falls.

In a city where life is cheap, its value has been slashed even further in Hillbrow. When I was a child, this was the entertainment epicentre of the city. On Saturday afternoons my friends and I would catch a (whites-only) bus or even thumb a ride to one of the cinemas in the area. This was followed by waffles that swam in syrup between ice-cream icebergs at one of the nearby eateries with names like the Milky Way and Bimbos Burgers. At night, my older brother and sister would descend on the whites-only area with their mates to
jol
– the local equivalent of raging – at a relatively new form of entertainment called discotheques. The suburb's main thoroughfare, Twist Street, was lined with buzzing restaurants, atmospheric oak-panelled pubs and old-fashioned establishments which referred to themselves at “Nitespots” and signalled their presence through a neon martini glass that flashed with the promise of alcohol-fuelled romance.

Hillbrow had always hosted its fair share of bloody-knuckled bar brawls but this was tempered by its raffish charms and bohemian sprinkling of galleries and theatres. Neither remain. The suburb has become a clutter of concrete apartment blocks that were hideous to begin with but now have the added aesthetic detriments of decay and filth. Poles festooned with laundry protrude from windowless frames, leaking pipes bleed rust for twenty storeys, and hotel lobby doors have either been smashed or hang limply from their buckled hinges. What is left of paint or plaster has peeled and blistered.

This was once Nana-land, full of residential hotels where elderly folk slipped quietly into elegant decrepitude between hands of bridge and Devonshire teas. My own grandmother had lived nearby in one called the Courtleigh and I vividly recall the typed menus, capacious dining room and bingo evenings in the lounge.

According to the Hillbrow Community Partnership, a local group trying to resurrect the area's fortunes, the bachelor flat my Granny Anne called home is now likely to be inhabited by between seven and twelve people. And thanks to a 1946 decision by the Johannesburg City Council to remove all height restrictions in the area, many of these blocks soar between thirty and forty storeys. With the capacity to accommodate that many people in that many rooms in that many storeys in that many buildings, it's hardly surprising that this area has seen its population explode as the original residents fled in fear or were slaughtered for petty cash on the way to the corner shop.

According to the census, 30,000 people called Hillbrow home in 1996. Five years later that figure topped the 100,000 mark, thanks mainly to an unprecedented influx of illegal immigrants. The highrise apartment blocks and hotels are what Oupa termed “a refuge for the scum of Africa”. He pointed out that criminals on the run from authorities in countries as far away as Nigeria and Ghana can disappear for months in Hillbrow until the heat dies down at home.

It's the kind of place where you can lie low because there will always be someone else attracting the attention of the overburdened police – known as the Flying Squad, apparently for the speed with which they respond to calls for help – who see more carnage on a weekend than many of their colleagues witness in months.

The day before Oupa and I drove through Hillbrow, a toddler was shot dead on the balcony of her cramped unit. She was home alone at the time. The callousness is incomprehensible. As is the fact that on New Year's Eve shootings and stabbings are as traditional as Auld Lang Syne was for the whites that once lived in these blocks, and numerous residents toss bottles and bricks from their balconies as an entertaining diversion.

“Even the cops are scared to come here at night,” said Oupa. “The problem is drugs. It's mainly the guys who come in from Nigeria illegally and deal in cocaine, heroin and mandrax. They are fearless, cashed up and give corrupt cops freebies or kickbacks to turn a blind eye.”

Those shopfronts that weren't bricked up were swamped by what are known as “informal traders” selling everything from fruit that flies were refusing to touch and telephone calls from lines that disappeared into unseen exchanges to hands-free mobile phone sets and packs of plastic hangers.

And these were the guys just trying to make an honest buck. Glue-sniffers who had barely reached double figures and were unlikely to live through their teens watched our car through jaundiced eyes and made half-hearted hand-to-mouth gestures to indicate they were hungry and wanted money.

“Don't even think about it,” Oupa warned. “Most of these guys wouldn't think twice about slicing away a chunk of your hand if it meant you might drop your wallet.”

The next three blocks were filled with a sad succession of mostly black, but some white, women in sweat-stained lycra who sold their bodies for hits. They had the haunted, skittish look of those who know what it feels like to be belted as they sleep. Hovering in the background, steel-eyed pimps in Beemers played Jah Rule and made silent threats.

Above this scene on a rocky ridge, Oupa pointed out what is now known as Constitution Hill. Originally the site of a fort that Afrikaner President Paul Kruger constructed between 1892 and 1898 to repel the British, it later became a jail and is now South Africa's new Constitutional Court. Oupa loved the idea. “This place accommodated Ghandi and Mandela because they dared to oppose the South African government's racist policies,” he said. “Now instead of symbolising a regime that maintained order through surveillance, intimidation and incarceration, it's going to be the home of what I believe is the most socially progressive government charter in the world.”

He had a point and one which is effectively illustrated in the arena of gay and lesbian rights. In the South Africa of my childhood, such relationships – or more specifically, the physical expression thereof – were punishable by laws created specifically with backdoor action in mind. In other words, if you were caught being sodomised by someone you cared for or simply fancied, you would be put in jail where it was likely you would be a far less willing participant in the very same act. Today, men and women can request asylum in South Africa because of their sexual orientation, gays and lesbians can serve in the armed forces, and same-sex partners qualify for immigration rights and their unions are legally recognised.

We rounded a bend in the road and drove alongside a park, Pullinger Kop, where I used to walk with my grandmother. The magnificent trees planted in Johannesburg's earliest days had lost none of their impact, but the ornate paling fence now had washing hanging from every post, the toilet had been turned into a squatter's shack, and the man-made brook that had once provided the park with a burbling bisection had been turned off because it was being used as a toilet.

The CBD was marginally less malevolent than Hillbrow. “Since the installation of closed-circuit TV cameras, crime in this area has dropped by 48 per cent,” said Oupa, trying to sound both objective and optimistic. It was a statistic I was having trouble computing. Mainly due to the fact that we had pulled up to a traffic light beside which a scrawny shirtless white guy in acid-wash jeans and a Jason Donovan circa ‘87 mullet was guarding a retail premises with a sawn-off shotgun in one hand and a beer in the other.

The volume of pavement traders quadrupled as we ventured deeper into the CBD. Out the front of my dad's old business premises – now filthy and barricaded behind metal security grates – faded clothes were laid out in makeshift displays on blankets, metal garbage bins served as roadside barbecues, and dozens of barbers sharpened up the appearance of the punters who sat before them on plastic milk crates. Litter choked the gutters and in some cases leapt over them as cars rushed by. There were times when it was difficult to tell where the refuse ended and the goods for sale began.

When I was growing up the best view of the city was always to be had from the Carlton Centre, a fifty-floor statement in architectural mediocrity that stood in the centre of the CBD. Beside it was the Carlton Hotel. This establishment represented the nadir of elegance and luxury in a society where opulence was the norm. It had top-hatted doormen, subdued lighting, a fountain in the lobby and an oh-so-swish restaurant called the Koffiehuis where guests were presented with a chocolate clog in a white gift box as a souvenir of their devils on horseback and chicken à l'orange.

It was now a concrete shell. “Guests were too scared to stay there,” said Oupa. “They were mugged every time they went into the shopping mall downstairs. The hotel even arranged for individual security guards to accompany them, but by then it was too late.”

And the viewing platform? That was gone too. It was still up there, of course, but only the rats and squatters enjoyed the panorama. The owner couldn't give the place away.

Still, the streets thrummed with vendors, business types and gangstas in low riders looking to easy marks for fast money. This streetscape was set against the aloof Georgian facades of buildings such as the Supreme Court, City Library and Town Hall. Despite obvious neglect, they managed to retain a defiant magnificence and I like to think that each of their columns gave the Third World mise en scène around them a daily Ionic finger.

Most of these grand old dames had been encroached on by rusting shacks and prefab ugliness, but none was more striking than the city's main synagogue in Wolmarans Street. Under its commanding domed roof I had listened to in numerable sermons and copied my father as he slowly beat a clenched fist against his chest on the Day of Atonement. Divided into a downstairs men's section and balcony for women, according to Jewish orthodox custom, it also featured a choir chamber set high above the pulpit from which voices would erupt in earnest harmony to proclaim: “Hear O Israel. The Lord is God. The Lord is One.” It was here that Chief Rabbi Casper – affectionately known as the Holy Ghost – tore the OBE from his chest and hurled it to the ground when it came to light that Britain had refused safe harbour to a group of Jews fleeing the Nazis. Now there was a Chicken Licken out the back and the inside had been gutted to be installed in an exact replica of the building which had been erected in a safer suburb.

I was crestfallen. Sensing my disappointment, Oupa offered to end our day with a walk through “one of Johannesburg's oldest alternative medical centres”. At the southern end of the CBD was a street my trusty guide referred to as “witchdoctor alley”.

The place was a ramshackle strip of peeling single-storey shops with the odd remnant of a deco flourish; each establishment had a sloping tin awning from which hung a sign proclaiming the proprietor's skills. Some were
sangomas
(those who divined directly by reading bones and channels), others were
inyangas (sangomas
who were also traditional healers dispensing minerals, animal products and herbs) and an intriguing few were multigenerational practitioners who called themselves Doctor.

One of the latter worked in conjunction with his grandmother and promised not only to relieve one of money and relationship problems – in that order – but to extend a customer's genitals to more satisfactory proportions. (“Hey Nan, how does the uncircumcised girth chant start again?”) And all within fourteen days.

The competition next-door raised the stakes even higher. Dr Macsuid and his Rock of Gibraltar Herbs could naturally enhance the night tool's dimension as well as clearing up impotence, premature ejaculation, stroke, epilepsy, arthritis, diabetes, all STDs and a mysterious ailment known as sexual weakness. He could also supply winning Lotto numbers and exorcise demons.