The lights woke Thulo. She said, ‘I just had a dream that I would marry someone from the Philippines. I think I probably will.’
But she had a boyfriend. He was in Zimbabwe. ‘He wants to be a personal trainer.’ She had a seven-year-old daughter. ‘She’s living with my mother.’
I dozed, I woke. Lights blazed beside the motorway.
‘Pretoria,’ Thulo said. ‘They say Indians never sleep. They just stay awake, doing business night and day. That’s why they are rich.’
When I dozed and woke again, Thulo said, ‘It’s nice. But I want to leave the Third World.’
She said it as though it was a trip she would be taking in a rocket ship to another planet.
Around four-thirty in the morning of this night of blazing imagery and strange dreams, like a psychedelic journey fuelled by acid or ayahuasca, we entered the outskirts of Johannesburg. The road was glittering black and our vehicle was alone on the broad empty motorway, as though making a grand entrance into a nightmare city, the packed Zimbabwean bus speeding under the dazzling lights, and the driver on the loudspeaker again thanking God for delivering us safely.
‘Jo’burg is so dangerous,’ Thulo said.
We entered a tunnel, a car park, a covered garage, a lighted empty station. Everyone on the bus looked alarmed, piling out with gray worried faces and claiming bags and shuffling in the cold of the station platform. They did not linger, and even before I could say goodbye Thulo was gone. There was light in the station, darkness outside and no taxis. After almost twenty hours sitting upright on the bus, I felt sick with fatigue. Thinking it better to take my chances in daylight in this city of low repute, I sat down, holding my bag between my knees and drowsed until the sun came up.
At dawn, to kill a little more time in Park Station, I bought a Johannesburg Star, one of the daily newspapers. This was unwise, probably the worst thing I could have done as a stranger to the city, certainly the most unsettling. The front page was filled with sordid political stories, and a lengthy feature was devoted to Johannesburg prostitution, one of the growth areas in the country’s shaky economy. The story was surprisingly upbeat, the women speaking in a positive way about their jobs as hookers. ‘With this job I will never be retrenched [laid off]’ and ‘No need for a CV or a formal education’ and ‘You can drink on the job’ and ‘You can work your own chosen hours.’
As though in support of this career choice, half a page of classifieds in the Star was explicit ads for prostitutes, escorts, brothels, promises of threesomes, Greek, bondage, punishment, pleasure, gays, black, Malay, Indians, Chinese, ‘Zulu,’ white, ‘European,’ and whole columns headed, ‘Horny College Girls’ and ‘Bored Housewives.’ I supposed it to be a mark of successful urbanization, if not civilization, that so many diverse sexual tastes were catered for. And by the way, these steamy classifieds also seemed to represent the epitome of multiracialism.
But the inside pages — and much more worrying for their being inside — were all crime stories. In the worst one four tied up and blindfolded people, two men and two women, were found ‘shot execution-style’ in a van outside Johannesburg. No clues, no identities, no leads. ‘The motive is thought to be robbery.’ In a second story, ‘another witness’ in an upcoming murder trial was found dead — eight witnesses altogether had been killed, leaving no one to testify. And there were assorted instances of racial vendettas, road rage, car hijackings, farm invasions, poisonings and deliberately scalded tots. An astonishing number were muggings, maimings, and robberies with gratuitous violence. In the quaintest story a man had been assaulted, had one eye poked out, his throat slashed and his penis chopped off. ‘Police suspect that his genitals — which are still missing — will be used for muti [medicine] by an inganga [witch-doctor].’
The morning newspaper, especially that report of forcible organ donation, made me cautious about leaving Park Station. What I read seemed to support the startling statistics most visitors find out soon after they arrive in the country: there are 20,000 murders a year in South Africa and 52,000 reported rapes, almost a quarter of the rapes against small children and even infants. The most grotesque explanation for the child rapes was the vicious folklore that having sex with a virgin was a cure for AIDS. Even the people who praised South Africa as the richest and most successful country on the continent said it was also a jungle.
Still I paced, and procrastinated, and sat restlessly on a molded plastic chair. I was not emboldened to leave the station until the sun was shining on everyone equally. Only then did I feel I was entering South Africa.
19. The Hominids of Johannesburg
‘These people!’ the taxi driver screamed as I got into his car, around seven-thirty, having hurried from the entrance of Park Station in Johannesburg. The station had an imposing carved frieze on its façade — granite elephants and lions and native trees and iconic African scenes. This was an appropriate backdrop, for I felt smaller and more disoriented here in this huge city than I had in the Elephant Marsh of the Lower River in southern Malawi, athwart a dugout canoe and slapping my paddle at the water hyacinths. The city was gray and the only humans I saw were sleeping rough all over the sidewalk and the grass outside the station in the manner of critters in the bush.
The driver’s name was Norman. He looked to be a Khoisan — light brown, small head, tiny chin, daintily slant-eyed. The Khoisan were better known as Hottentots, a rude name bestowed on them by Afrikaners who, hearing the clicks in their subtle language, nailed them as stammerers.
Norman was still cursing ‘those people,’ the ones in the tents, lean-tos, plastic huts, ingenious humpies, sheds of scrap lumber; the people lying jumbled croc-like in the grass, others lying singly, or with their backs against the light poles, the vagrants, the drunks, the desperate, the sinister, the bewildered, the uncaring, the lost, cluttering the station entrance.
‘They smell, they make messes, they make shit, they fight, they won’t go away. And the government does nothing, so it will get worse. I hate it!’
He said he was from Soweto, he was indignant and angry.
‘People like you will stay away! Our business will suffer!’
‘Who are they?’ I asked.
‘Other people,’ he said, meaning not South Africans. ‘In Yeoville and Hillbrow there are too many tsotsis’ — rascals. ‘Congolese and Nigerians. Why they do come to Janiceburg? They just only make trouble.’
But he became cheery as he drove on. I asked him why.
‘The end of the world is coming. Another end of the world. The Waist is finished.’
‘You think.’
‘I know.’
He was of course a Jehovah’s Witness. He claimed the large amount of crime and violence was a sign. He saw explicit indications of Doomsday all over South Africa.
‘You might well be right, Norman,’ I said.
It so happened that at a stop light there was a gaunt greasy-haired beggar standing in the middle of the road holding a sign saying, No home — No work — No food — Please help. The people sleeping rough at the station had not been actively begging, and so the first South African beggar I saw was an able-bodied white man.
My hotel in Braamfontein was not far from Park Station, walking distance in fact, in a neighborhood reputed to be dangerous. But what did ‘dangerous’ mean in a city where people were mugged and their cars swiped by hijackers in the driveways of their own gated communities? The exchange rate made everything a bargain. I had a bath, ate breakfast, and went for a walk, feeling happy.