Litnet

Image by Willem van Deventer from Pixabay

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Graeme Addison wrote on Facebook

Joburg, Joburg, jou boos.

On a visit to the cool, green Western Cape recently I found myself missing the drab, cold Highveld. Things down in the Secessionist Republic of Quitters are all nice, comfy and reassuring, there’s nothing of the white lightning of Joburg – Sies! (Ugh!) – to smarten the spirit.

Is this too harsh? Well, yes. You’ve gotta love the Cape. It’s full of joie de vivre, the fanciful optimism of people who think all is well in the best of all possible peninsulas, far removed from the dust and depression of the golden city.

That Cape Town is among the murder capitals of the world, is less important than the money represented by foreign-owned mansions at Clifton. Buy, Baby, buy, and let property values fluff your feathers.

But frankly, I crave the meanness and bitterness of a metropolis perched on a dry ridge overlooking Africa’s greatest financial slum. These open, sinister skies that are vastly empty and full of criminal possibilities! These herds of ambitious fraudsters and do-gooders whose acquisitive impulses drive ever more greedy calculus.

Yes, I found a word for it in Afrikaans, that most expressive lingo for basic human emotions. Boos (pronounced b-oowiss) means angry, mad, or furious: it can also lay it on stronger, like “disgusting”, depending on the context. What a lekker (nice) word for my anti-utopia.

The frost of the eGoli spirit lies white upon the winterland. It’s a crass, fulfilling grind to be an inhabitant of this Highveld fantasy of unrequited lust. What we make, we lose again; what we lose we make again. Everything on the merry-go-round is negotiable in a spendthrift pursuit of epiphany. An angel passes over with a rustle of wings bespeaking some distant heaven where God counts his gains.

You’ve gotta dismiss as irrelevant all those fashionable Cape stylists of the escape from reality. Up here we are actual, down there they are mythical. If Africa has a heart – that’s  a matter of debate – its cruelties and humanity are focused on this bare patch of veld with its blowing plastic bags.

One has to admire Madame Helen Zille, the femme fatale of political opposition in South Africa, for throwing her name in the ring as a mayoral candidate for the Big Non-Smoke. What she achieved in Cape Town was to make them feel special. What she must achieve in Joeys is to make it seem normal.

I doubt it. There is too much rancour and not enough empathy. Our greatest export, one Elon Musk, who grew up near me, says empathy is the real drawback of Western civilization. So Joburg is clearly not a part of that civilisation. Yet, the denizens of this den of iniquity are striving for something, they know not what.

Maybe rootedness, a sense of belonging. Like the Zama Zamas who dig for months underground, starving, diseased, but happy to be finding gold in discarded mine dumps, we belong to the earth that harbours our search for riches.

Dust unto dreams. Gold unto dust. The jihadists of tunnel vision terrorise us with their ceaseless hope that is really a fear of what we may find.

We are the inheritors of a tribal past and the builders of a future where identity is subsumed by the quest for commonality. We are Nigerian conmen and Portuguese slavers. We are still fighting in the chaos of the great winnowing of the nations, the Mfecane of the 19th century, the war of all against all, nasty, brutish, and long lasting.

Oh Joburg, oh humanity.

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