Trifter

I was sitting in a street café in Johannesburg once with a crowd; it was a township shebeen themed place – lots of things made of recycled cans and labels and an overall look of what one book a while back called “shack chic.”  So one of the crowd, who happened to be a foreign tourist, leaned across and asked, “is this African or is it for the tourists?”  Aha, I thought, this is one of those people who don’t think they’ve found a city’s heart till they know where the locals hang out.  Anyway, I was in a tourist-baiting mischievous mood and so I thought I’d have a little fun.  I widened incredulous eyes and said, “Well, we’re in Africa, it must be African!”  I kept up the ingenuity till her eyes bulged a bit, and then I said, “Oh!  Are you asking me if this place is a tourist rip-off?”  She admitted she was and I joyfully said, “Yes, it’s an African tourist rip-off!  We want your deutschmarks.”

If you have any dollars stashed away, now’s a fantastic time to visit – the exchange rate is very much in your favour.  Big hotels are never really a bargain here, even on dollars, but the coolest places are the smaller guesthouses and B&B’s anyway.  (I hope you noticed, I typed this paragraph in an infomercial kind of a style).

I’ve often recognized fellow South Africans overseas by the fact that they’re instinctively security conscious.  Here we tend to hang on to stuff while we’re out, holding firmly on to possessions and when we have lunch, there’s often a hook provided under the table for you to hang your bag safely on, or else we put the chair leg through the handle or something.  Little precautions like that will deter many muggers.  There are places here that might remind you of Fort Knox, there are others where people don’t bother to lock their doors.  General precautions apply anyway – don’t flaunt wealth and expensive things when you’re in areas where you’re likely to be carrying more in your pockets than they will ever hold. 

One thing I’ve seen lots of foreign tourists do, is photograph little black kids.  They don’t do it to little white kids, but the moment they see a black one it seems to turbo charge their shutter fingers.  When I was living in the UK I noticed high walls round schools and was told it was to prevent prowlers and that photographing kids was frowned on to the point where if you did so, you might possibly find a Bobby’s hand on your shoulder.  You probably wouldn’t want strangers taking photos of your kids, so rather don’t do it.

You’ll meet plenty of beggars – whether you give them money and how much is entirely up to you; whatever you do is highly unlikely to solve the problem or make it worse.  If you take note of what basic things cost in shops here, you’ll soon work out whether you’re giving them loads of money.  Johannesburg is well-known for its blind beggars – at traffic lights (robots) especially in the more affluent northern suburbs, your car will be approached by a blind person led by a sighted person.  One of them will be collecting money in a paper cup.  Apparently they’re not all blind and apart from obvious cataracts, I’ve no idea how you tell who’s genuine.  I suspect that even the fake ones are doing it out of necessity not desire.

This is a country that’ll challenge your moral system in interesting ways.  You see a very young girl on the roadside in Seapoint and there’s a good chance she’s a prostitute.  Do you give her money or adhere to the local street kids charity guidelines, which say please don’t give them money, they’ll spend it on glue and drugs, rather give us the money, we feed them.  Little kids could be gangsters, scary looking big men might be doctors – it’s very hard to tell.  If you look harder you’ll see that the beggars aren’t all one colour either – mostly they’re black, yes, but then, they’re the majority population group.  This country contains truly dire poverty and poverty doesn’t see colour any more than love’s supposed to.

The post-1994 melting pot of this alleged rainbow nation is as mixed up and schizophrenic as anywhere.  You could look at some parts of it and see racial integration – other parts would lead you to believe that apartheid still exists.  Foreigners are, understandably, quick to judge it all.  The outsider view’s valid too, it’s not just the whole picture any more than anybody’s opinion ever is.  I’ve been here for most of my life and nothing I ever write about it would be more or less than my own crass generalization.

The other day I walked my dog down a dirt road and we had to stop and back up to let a puff adder pass.  We don’t have poisonous snakes like Australia does, but we have some that can do damage and the puff adder’s the fastest striker in Africa.  I love saying things like that to foreigners; it makes me feel so butch.

Back in the very early nineties when I was in my very early twenties, I went for a job interview in Edinburgh (Scotland) to wash dishes in the canteen of an insurance company.  I got the job right away, because the guy said you South Africans are such hard workers.  In those chicken-run days of the death throes of apartheid when the white population was all seemingly “packing for Perth,” it seemed like an odd comment.  White South Africans, hard workers?  After generations of hot and cold running servants?  And it took years for an explanation to permeate my slow brain.  The guy was talking about people like me he’d employed – scared white South Africans feeling lost and homeless after our forefathers wrecked the country or profited from it or fought for it or just struggled to survive.  Of course we worked hard; my generation grew up with a collective guilt complex and ongoing fear.  People like me still say things like, “They don’t want us here and who can blame them?”  And we try to live in other countries and then our hearts break.

In Nieu Bethesda in the Karoo here I gave a bunch of old people 20 ZAR to buy themselves a can of wine in a dying village.  In Prague I gave a junkie a handful of cigarettes.  Sometimes you just have to empathise with nihilism.

One time in the Drakensberg Mountains I was working with a Zulu colleague when a British couple walked in.  The guy was white, she was black.  My colleague looked horrified and whispered, “Eeuw how could she …” I said, “Hey wow isn’t that, like, a little racist?” and she laughed hard at me.  Then the black woman proceeded to walk up to my black colleague and ask her where she could see some “tribal people.”  Turns out she was asking a Zulu where she could go see Zulus dressed in traditional gear dancing for tourists.  We laughed about that for a week. 

There’s an acronym on this continent – AWA and depending who you hear it from, you’ll be told it means Africa wins again or Africa wins always.  And it always does – again and again.  This is a mostly untamed continent – and remember that current theory says we’re all African, that mankind began here.  If you come here you’re coming home and homecomings are never easy.

We have eleven official languages – and way more tribes living within those languages … how could there possibly ever be just one truth?