There’s no hood like your own

I don’t like Johannesburg very much, but only because I’m not from there. From the bus rank in Gaborone, I took a minibus taxi to Johannesburg. It was a 6 hour ride and I held everyone up when we stopped in Zeerust. I got stuck in a long line in the grocery store trying to buy a SIM card during month end when the grocery stores and shops are busy like real African marketplaces but with no haggling and witty branding. I slept most of the way to Johannesburg after that. Jo’burg is a real city with restaurants and coffee shops, streetlights and smoothly paved sidewalks, architecture and landscaping. There are skyscrapers in Johannesburg. Right before Johannesburg, we passed through suburbs made of new track homes in militarily uniform lines and rows. There were big clean malls, chain stores, tidy lawns, and white people in cars and on the sidewalks with black people selling newspapers and hammocks in between cars at stoplights. The suburbs are squat and one story letting the sun shine through to every clean nook and cranny. Sharp and unforgiving African sunlight pierces the corners where old dark European trees weren’t planted for shade. The suburbs were overall nice-looking, but the city was beautifully dark; sunshine was blotted out by skyscrapers and smog. The blue sky was muddled with mauve. There’s modern minimalist architecture set against intricate long-standing structural design in Johannesburg. Old edifices with carved marble veneers stand tall. Others stoop and crack with old age. Elephants stand like gargoyles on the top tiers of old banks but next door, a building may have fallen from grace, its original use long forgotten by its architects and original owners. I guess they packed up and left after colonialism. Maybe they moved to the burbs. I don’t know, but I do know that what was once a beauty is now a dilapidated shrewish building converted into a tenement. Orange balconies and laundry blew in air that smelled sweet from pollution. Some of the balconies were missing. There were buildings made of glass and metal, hip and minimalist. Hippie graffiti done by artists, not gangs decorated the underbelly of the freeway overpass. In Jo’burg there are gangs, crime, and pounding poverty that grinds people into shadows of human beings. There’s historical oppression and high prevalence of car jackings. There were ads for newspaper headlines and colorful advertisements for cable Bollywood movie channels. There are drug problems. Addictions. Recreation that’s good and bad. Jazz clubs. Salsa lessons. Hair salons and antique furniture shops. Soweto isn’t far from the city. Nor are the suburbs that are insulated and full of white people not wanting anything to do with the grime. Understandable, I guess, but I have always loved cities with all of their complexities. When LA spontaneously combusted in 1992, I still loved her deep in my heart.
Johannesburg is the heart of South Africa. A pulsing, beating city that vibrates with the buzz of 11 languages: Zulu, Setswana, Xhosa, Sotho, English, Afrikaans and they all hover in their own little enclaves of Black, Indian, White, and Coloured. They zip by in their cars because Johannesburg is a car city. Everyone is in their vehicle bubbles. White people drive with white people. Black people drive with black people. Indian People drive with Indian people. Coloureds with coloureds. I didn’t see many whites or Indians on Koombis. The same applied on the sidewalks. All this was observed from my minibus taxi window seat, as we drove into the city and dropped people off at destinations before the bus rank. There’s not much mixing in the rainbow nation. That’s understandable because Apartheid was just yesterday. This was America in my grandmother’s lifetime. The tension in the pot is thick; it’s like stirring a pot of phaleche. Just like stirring a pot of Phaleche—second nature to anyone who cooks Phaleche everyday but like stirring cement to me because I’m American and prefer jasmine rice. Americans have given up on the melting pot and settled for a salad bowl—different yet mixed in together and united by a tangy American dressing called the English language. God bless America.
There’s no hood like your own hood and so for me, Johannesburg was a little dangerous. It felt good to be back in the city although Jo’burg has got its parts. The bus rank is the bad part. There are also problems with taxi drivers not letting women out of taxis and sexual harassment is common. I read it in a magazine article. This makes me an expert, right? I wasn’t taking any chances. I was escorted and admired by an Ethiopian Rasta who helped me find a taxi when I wandered away from the bus rank. I was giving bad directions in a thick American accent. Taxi drivers were confused.
“16th street?” they’d ask.
“No. 60th street”
“I don’t know 16th street”
“No. 60th Street. Six, zero. 60”
We resorted to a lot of spelling. My Rasta admirer helped sort out the directions to my hostel and vehemently asked for my number. She was dressed as a man, a convincing man might I add. I suspect she thought I didn’t notice. Truth is, I just didn’t care. Only in the city can you find that broad spectrum of people. Gender is bent. Sex is god given equipment. The wheels of the taxi pressed smooth pavement. My taxi drivers are old men and they speak Zulu. On paper Zulu is flat just like any other language, but when you hear it spoken it’s jolted to life by frequent clicks. It sounds like a linguistic beat box. You’ll know Zulu when you hear it. I tell them I know how to greet in Zulu. I only know this because of a Ludacris music video. One is Venda. I also have a Venda dress. “It’s nice” I say, “I like Venda print the best. I call it my Muvhango dress.” Muhvango is a South African soap opera called a “soapie.” The old men find me amusing. The driver anticipates every light and rolls forward a quarter of a second before they turn green. They drop me at the door which is a large house that has been converted into a hostel. I buzz in.
The hostel is run by a young hip Afrikaaner couple. They expected an…American, although they didn’t explicitly say as much. They were pretty nice. Their dog however, was not. The hostel had a pet dog. A big, black longhaired housedog that frequently stared at me pensively, suspiciously and whispered airy, muffled mini barks. The lady who ran the hostel said he never did this, and he’d never hurt a fly. When she wasn’t looking he snapped violently at flies as they buzzed past his snout. Never in my life has there been a dog that didn’t like me, until him. He didn’t warm up with baby talk. “C’mere puppy. I’ve got a sausage in my pocket” one of the other PCV’s said in baby talk. He kept his eyes fixed on me and looked at her warily. I was meeting some fellow Peace Corps volunteers there that night. They were stopping in Jo’burg on their way to Mozambique so we decided to stay at the same hostel. They also sensed some of the other hostel stayers were assholes. We weren’t particularly crazy about the Australians, but for one. The Brazilian was a nice guy. A travel writer. There was also a British girl--English. Together, everyone drank ciders and ate braaied meat on the patio. This is when the dog began to like me. At the braii where I dropped bones and fat for him to scrounge. I was the only black person there. We were the loud brash Americans. The British girl didn’t like the hip-hop I played on my IPOD which I’d connected to the speaker system. None of us liked the British girl very much. In the background, shadows of black Africans passed by. They were the housekeeping staff and Adryan, Julie and I wandered off to find out what they were doing tonight. As a Peace Corps volunteer, it just felt bizarre to be in Africa yet surrounded wholly by white people but the guy who’s door we knocked on looked taken aback. It’s not every day that two white girls and a coloured (that would be me) knock on his door and ask where all the black people are. He had family in Mafikeng, not far from my village. Without a doubt, he found us amusing.
After we drank the bar dry, Bar Man Willy, as we named him, drove us to a pool hall where we could drink even more gratuitously. Julie and I fizzled and sat on the patio, and as she chain smoked, and I talked about how strange it felt to be back in a real city. There were palm trees lining the streets. Meanwhile, our fellow PCV’s worked the room. In the morning, I would go to the airport and pick up Craig—early—but that night a full moon mounted the city sky and hung low over high buildings. Slinking silver light traced the skyline and my fellow Americans were my validation among white people under an African sky.