This reader impression was written and sent to LitNet on the writer's own initiative.
Freedom Street: A photo memoir set in ’80s Long Street … and connections
By Rob Meintjes
RG Media
2024
Serene, I fold my hands and wait,
Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea;
I rave no more ’gainst time or fate,
For Lo! My own shall come to me.
– John Burroughs
This book is a charming and extremely moving new arrival on the local literary scene, a captivating “photo memoir” written by Rob Meintjes, who lived and loved on Long Street in Cape Town throughout the decade of the 1980s. It might more accurately have been entitled A love letter to Long Street, as Meintjes leads us onto a road magically still retaining all the vigorous life, loves and music that once characterised nearby District Six, the last houses of which were even then being bulldozed by the apartheid government. By some miracle, Long Street, a microcosm of District Six, escaped the levelling scythe and has remained a multiracial haven ever since.
Meintjes was then a young South African in his late twenties, who had travelled in his formative years to Paris (where he learned French) and then to Stellenbosch University, where he studied philosophy under Rick Turner and Johan Degenaar. He worked in Sweden afterwards, and as an autodidact photographer he was heavily influenced by the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson and local South African photographer Billy Monk, who unforgettably captured dock nights at the Navigator’s Den in black and white prints. Meintjes now illumines a state of mind, and a time to remember, for all those of us who experienced Long Street in its bohemian heyday.
Meintjes, it soon becomes clear when perusing his photo memoir, clearly qualifies as one of those “studious and curious persons” who provided the original justification and clientele for the High Victorian Library in the British Museum. Freedom Street is a Flaubertian flâneur’s compendium of stories of love and loss, achievements, characters, things undone; it is a Roman mosaic, fragments gathered together, with the decade culminating in Mandela’s release. All this is beautifully photographed, along with the technical data of cameras and lenses used, and accompanied by very readable, vivid prose. Meintjes wears his learning lightly, but he lards his account with some lovely literary allusions.
Above all, it is peopled with an enormously entertaining, if motley, crew of characters, shops and bars which all have their own flavour. Meintjes devotedly nurses his grape and malt, the pool table and his favourite bars, while around him the grand spectacle of life unfolds, and the stoicism of Long Street is revealed on a nightly basis. At 11:00 pm, a customer smashes a beer bottle and stabs hotel manager Jock Murphy in the neck, chest and arm, because Jock has made him feel unwelcome. Jock lands a punch and chases his assailant down the street. He drives himself to hospital to be stitched up, then returns to cash up. He can’t remember how many stitches they gave him at casualty, but he is full of them. The story is typical.
Meintjes returns to his Long Street flat, his typewriter never still, as he writes into the early hours. He has often thought of quitting the street:
[A]nd this bewitched house up the stairs behind the green door – only to be seduced by early light playing on wrought-iron facades, someone singing along the sidewalk.
He writes, quoting a friend: “Threading beads, that’s Long Street. You never get the full story.”
Meintjes has uncovered numerous beads, a veritable treasure trove of stories in a single street. Many will resonate with readers. Here is a good example: some years ago, I visited a small Italian town in the mountains, Sansepolcro, to see Aldous Huxley’s choice of the greatest painting in the world, Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection. In 1944, Anthony Clarke, owner of Clarke’s Bookshop in Long Street, was an officer in the Royal Horse Artillery, and was ordered to shell Sansepolcro to clear out German occupiers. He recalled Huxley’s description of the painting and the town, and when a small boy told him the Germans had left, he disobeyed orders to open fire immediately. Reconnoitring proved the boy’s story, there was no need to shell the town, and the painting was saved. Meintjes discovered an 18th century print of Sansepolcro hanging in Clarke’s Bookshop, presented as a thank you gift by the citizens of the town. What a fantastic tale and what a connection with the street.
By the end of the eighties, Long Street was changing. As Meintjes notes, Long Street residents clung to its upper end like the doomed on a ship sinking into a sea of offices, automats, parking lots and deserted, lamplit streets. How long could they hold out?
Long Street was a threatened mode of urban living. The Great White lurked in its shadows. It was the … vortex, street fights and spinning wheels, second hand shops, books, beads and boerewors. The Palm Tree Mosque rubbed shoulders with a bottle store and kids on tricycles really go it along the sidewalk.
I warmly recommend this excellent memoir as a good read. Readers in search of a copy can contact the author directly at robmeintjes@gmail.com.
