Home Away from Home

« Return to South Africa

Bradley and Staci flew off to Cape Town leaving me with the car to drive back to Joburg. I decided to visit Grahamstown, the Eastern Cape student town where I lived for three years. I arrived on a Saturday afternoon, and it the town was literally dead. Shops were closed, and the only people on the streets were dozens of street kids, somehow nastier than I remember them. Grahamstown has had an 80% unemployment rate since before I arrived in 1993. Scantily dressed, scarred street kids are persistently everywhere. The city council urges people not to give them money, for it merely channels into a structure of glue, drugs and street gangs. I did buy the kid watching my car a burger and coke, because he seemed sweet and would have trouble inhaling it. The campus of Rhodes University was unchanged. I walked through old departments, noticing that many of my old lecturers and professors were still around. Several generations of students have already come and gone, flowing like water through an ancient pipe. Young drama students sat on the steps outside the theatre, basking in their artiness. They saw through me, and I truly felt like the Ghost of Students Past. All the old bars that saw me drink my youth had been shut down or converted into hotels. The old cafe with the cheap arcade games was now a bland pizza chain. It would have been best to leave the town in my memory. I crashed early in a nicotine-stained hotel room and left before sunrise.

The drive back was uneventful. The road from Joburg to Grahamstown is notoriously dangerous, claiming the life of one of my cousins and sending a girl I knew to her wheelchair. I took my time, watching my iPod battery deplete and enjoying the vast space around me. Ten hours later, I was back in Johannesburg, and looking for somewhere to go with a new friend. Such is the state of the city, or at least our perception of it, that walking around after dark is strongly discouraged. A midnight stroll in a Johannesburg’s park can be compared to dressing up like Osama Bin Ladin and doing a tour of the White House. It was a warm night, so we decided on the gardens of the Hyatt Hotel. Driving into the parkade, mirrors searched underneath the car. Entering the hotel, we walked through metal detectors. I though this was a bit much, even for Johannesburg, until I realized that the next day was the presidential inauguration. A policeman told me there were several heads of state in the hotel that evening. Police presence had been stepped up considerably throughout the city for the occasion. We were without doubt in the safest place in Johannesburg.

Thabo Mbeki was inaugurated as South African president for a second five-year term, and the country, and most of Africa, celebrated its tenth year as a democratic state. The news showed celebrations in Botswana, Zimbabwe (or Mugabwe is you like) and Mozambique. April 27 was the 4th public holiday since we had arrived on the 11th. The ruling ANC received 70% of the vote, placing them in a position to change the country’s constitution, which ranks amongst the most liberal in the world. This seemed the latest concern for Whites looking for something to worry about. “The second they touch the constitution, I’m out of here,” said one friend at the wedding. The possibility is certainly real of South Africa following Zimbabwe’s footsteps, which has become yet another African dictatorship, a democrazy. Somehow I feel South Africa will be different, and its politicians will know better. In the meantime, with a positive economy and nationwide determination to improve things for the better, the future appears to be as colourful as its flag.

We had driven up to Linksfield Ridge to show Staci a view of Johannesburg, and also visit the spot where as teenagers we would take drinks and girls, but mostly drinks. At the top, the Ridge was fenced off, but someone who must have lived nearby arrived with a key. We spoke briefly, and I told him I now lived in Canada. “That’s very brave of you,” he said. The stopped me. Surely it would have been braver to stay, and help build the country. Yet clinging to the obvious comforts of South Africa pales compared to starting a new life in a different world with different rules. After living in Vancouver the past five years, I can truly say that Johannesburg is no longer my home or a place I want to live. Still, I cannot shake the niggle that I have left one of the few places on the planet that is carving out its own culture, and its own future.

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