South of the equator. Sunday 1/6 and Monday 1/7–Mahwah, NYC, Atlanta, Johannesburg/Egoli
Dad and I wake somewhat early for him to take me to the airport. I pack up my toiletries and mom puts together some snacks and a PB&J sandwich, heavy on the PB. Joe Berman navigates the complex exits and overpasses across Manhattan and the Bronx before dropping me off at LaGuardia in Queens. I make sure to thank the TSA workers who are still working without pay, now two weeks into the shutdown since I flew back from Jordan, and I take a 2 hour flight to my layover in Atlanta. They say that if you die in the South, your soul has to go through Hartsfield-Jackson Airport before it moves on to heaven or hell. The place is indeed huge, with underground trains and tunnels connecting all the terminals. There’s also a nice little art exhibit of Zimbabwean sculpture in between the terminals. One 15 hour flight later, I’m at Oliver Tambo Airport in Johannesburg. After getting through security and reuniting with my backpack I go to the Gautrain, the main rail system for the Johannesburg & Pretoria area. I take it to the suburb of Rosebank, home of my Couchsurfing host for that night, Samad. Even though I’ve just jumped from northeastern US winter to South Africa’s summer, the weather is pretty mild. What stands out most is the walls around the suburban houses, with big gates for cars, and electric fences and even security guards stationed in booths at some of them. It’s not too hard to tell from my first few minutes walking around that the wealthier, still mostly white people live in almost militarized neighborhoods.
I get to Samad’s place, and he offers me a refreshing beer after my trek across Rosebank. Samad is of Indian descent, originally from Durban, but has lived in Joburg most of his life. Although the British were oppressive colonialists (as colonialists tend to be) in initially uprooting people from India to work in South Africa, he says he’s grateful for the opportunity he’s had in South Africa, or else he might’ve just grown up as a beggar on the streets of Calcutta. Samad’s had various jobs over the years, some all over the continent, including Katanga in the Congo. He’s currently working with an organization that does research on human rights and environmental policy in the country. He gives me a bit of a primer on my arrival to the country, saying that most of the rampant crime in the country is economic, due to poverty, though plenty of black Africans from all backgrounds still resent the whites after apartheid. We don’t have much time together, as it’s getting late and he has to leave early tomorrow morning for a trip to Argentina; Samad plans to soon move out of South Africa altogether, and he’s checking out other countries he might want to move to.
Mo, Larry, and Curly. Tuesday 1/8, Joburg/Egoli
Early next morning, Samad’s friend Richard (white, and Afrikaner from his accent) picks him up to take him to the airport. They both warn me to stay safe, which is appreciated, but Richard says some weird stuff too, which I feel is relevant to record. He feels that much of the crime, especially the farm attacks (which I’ll get into more next entry), is based on race, not just poverty, and Samad does push back against this a bit. It’s also interesting because Richard works at the same organization as Samad. I imagine plenty of white South Africans say stuff like this, it’s probably not all that weird sadly, but the really odd thing he then warns me about is the promiscuity of black African women, that I should be careful because they dress more scantily and a lot of them have AIDS. I want to say that I’ve seen plenty of risque white women in my day too (cue Jerry Seinfeld “not that there’s anything wrong with that,” people get to choose how they dress), but with Samad being my host and all and me having just met both of them, I kinda just silently listen to Richard and feign interest. I don’t recall Samad saying much either. Richard does make it clear that he by no means supports apartheid, but as we know all too well in the US and elsewhere, you can still be racist without fully supporting legal segregation.
Samad and I wish each other well on our respective trips, and I’m a bit relieved to set off with my backpack as they drive away. I grab breakfast on my way to the main mall in Rosebank, where I have a rough couple hours trying to sort out phone stuff. I’m able to get a SIM card, but have issues getting it to activate with my phone. Eventually I decide to deal with it later, and use Wifi to download a map of where I plan to go in Joburg for the day, not knowing what I’m in for. I take the Gautrain again a little past noon and walk about a half hour down towards the Carlton Centre, the tallest building in South Africa, where I’ll be able to get a good view of the city and surrounding area. On the way it’s impossible to not notice how impoverished the place is. Most people are just going about their daily business, but there are a lot of men living on the street and begging, and trash strewn everywhere, especially the side streets. As a couple of them call out to me, the man walking next to me (also black African—I’m the only white guy around for blocks) tells me not to stop for them, that they’ll steal from me. I take his word for it, though he also says that many of them are foreigners from other parts of Africa. I don’t catch his name, but he’s on his way to a job interview, something to do with advertising for a shop. At one point we come across an abandoned jacket on the ground, and he picks it up, examines it, and deciding it’s in good enough condition takes it with him. He wishes me luck as he turns the corner a few blocks later after walking together.
After getting directions from a couple other people, I reach the Carlton and take the elevator to the top. The building was once a hotel, though for the past 20 years the giant lobby has served a mall. I take the elevator to the top and take in the sprawling view of the city and beyond—it was worth it. Soweto is to the southwest, and I can see some of the ridges in the distance where the original gold mines were over a hundred years ago, though most of the land is flat. Most notable is that there is no major body of water around, like in most major cities around the world—Joburg started and grew from here because of a huge colonial gold rush over a hundred years ago. I can also see some of the iconic buildings of Joburg’s skyline, like the round Vodacom tower. Some posters on the wall talk about how the building was built with the labor of black African workers in the 1960s, who were then denied entry as guests once it was complete, but other than that the place isn’t too well maintained. I head back down to the mall and walk back up one of the main streets, Rissik Street, to get back to the train for some more historic parts of the city.
I’m a couple blocks away from the station when one guy taps me on the shoulder. I look around trying to shrug him off, and before I know it I’m surrounded by two more, one of them with a knife out pointing at my gut. It’s 2 o’clock in the afternoon. Ah, the wonders of living in the twenty-first century—one day you’re 30,000 feet in the air above the Atlantic Ocean, having a drink and watching The Incredibles 2; the next you’re getting mugged at knifepoint in Johannesburg. Mo (the one with the knife) tells me to give them my phone and money. I of course do the smart thing and start to get them out, but am a bit slow on the draw, and Mo starts rushing me as he looks around quickly, urging me to “come on, come on,” and makes to search my back pocket as I manage to pull the phone out. Mo and Larry immediately run off back down the street with the phone, not waiting around for the wallet. They all clearly didn’t coordinate much of a plan with each other. Curly stays behind for my wallet. As I start fishing it out, my cowboy hat falls from my hand. The guy then bends down and picks it up, and I think “shit, he’s gonna steal my hat too,” but he then nonchalantly hands the hat back to me as I present him with the wallet, and Curly runs back down after his friends. I thought later that I could have booted him in the face while he was bending down, but it really wouldn’t have been worth the risk.
Ah, so that’s what all those gates and electric fences I saw around the houses in Rosebank are for. I had heard about the country’s crime ahead of time, and Samad had warned me a bit, but with my inexperience I figured I’d be fine if it was during the day. Being mugged while abroad is pretty much like being mugged back home, except you need to find a phone that will make an international call to sort everything out. Very luckily for me, Mo Larry and Curly must have figured my backpack was too heavy to carry away quickly, and probably didn’t have valuables in it. I also still have my passport, and a backup credit and debit card in my money belt under by shirt. And most of my cash is in my shoes, as well as my pockets. I hadn’t been a total idiot. The phone with all my unsaved photos from November into December on it is really the biggest loss. Now what I need to do is get to a phone I can make a call to the US with to cancel the old credit card so they can’t take any money off it–I don’t expect the police to retrieve my phone with all the other stuff they’re probably dealing with. I walk up towards the mall outside the train station and just start asking a couple shopkeepers to use their phones, but realize they probably won’t be able to make international calls.
I figure a police station’s phones might be able to, and a security guard points me to the one around the corner. It’s in an older stone building, and when I first enter I think I have the wrong building; all the lights are off, and there’s a large puddle of water on the floor. An officer then steps out from a dark doorway with a couple other people, telling us that the power is out and we’ll have to go to a different station. She points me in the direction down Rissik Street where I just got mugged. No thank you. I start looking around the road outside the mall for a taxi to safely take me to another station, to no avail. Another guard asks me where I’m looking to go, and I tell him, only half paying attention as I keep trying to find a taxi. He walks away and comes up to me again a minute later, telling me that these two friends of his with a car will be able to take me if I pay them a bit, and they’ll be cheaper than a taxi. I don’t really know the context of this guy’s friends happening to be available; maybe they had just been chatting with him while he was on duty, or maybe he just said “friends” informally referring to them and had only just spoken with them telling them about my situation.
I get into the back and throw them some of my cash, and they introduce themselves—Ahmed and Ishmael. Their English is pretty good, and one of them tells me that he also got mugged when he first came to Joburg last year (they both came from Zimbabwe, though Ishmael’s originally from Malawi), and that makes me feel a bit better. They left for South Africa, as so many Zimbabweans have, due to the crumbling economy at home over the past decade, and hope that things will be better soon enough for them to go back. They also tell me that for all of Zimbabwe’s problems, they don’t have this kind of endemic crime back at home. I would hear this several times over the next couple months, that most other countries across Africa—while many (not all) struggle with common postcolonial cycles of poverty, civil wars, and corruption—don’t have the same issue with crime (Nigeria was an exception, I heard, among a couple others). For whatever reasons, historical and current factors here have led to the crime being bad particularly in South Africa.
Ahmed and Ishmael drive me about 10 minutes over to another police station, in Hillbrow. Ishmael actually gets out of the car and escorts me across the street into the station, not wanting me to get attacked by anyone else again. There are just a couple overworked officers (black) dealing with a long queue of people waiting on benches. A naive tourist with a stolen phone and wallet are the last things for them to be worrying about, but Ishmael tells one of the officers that all I need is to use a phone to make a call to the US to cancel my card–I don’t plan on filing any report or getting my stuff back. I go behind the counter to a side room and dial my home phone number, not knowing my bank’s number. It doesn’t go through. I then ask Ishmael to look up the US Embassy, thinking one of their phones could make an international call. The call isn’t strong, and they redirect me back and forth between a couple different extensions before it cuts, but all I need to know is that they’re open—we can just go to the embassy and I’ll speak to them in person.
We get back into the car with Ahmed and head over. They start asking around where it is when we get close, as we can’t spot it (I believe they were speaking Shona or Ndebele, which as a Bantu language has enough in common with South Africa’s main languages, they tell me—think Romance languages in Europe). No one seems to know where it is, so we call the embassy again asking them where in hell they are. Turns out they moved their offices several years ago to Sandton, a suburb outside the city; the address on Google wasn’t updated. I start laughing. I’ve come to find some entertainment in these kinds of situations—getting to the Nassers’ farm from Bethlehem, crossing the Jordanian border, the failed hitchhiking attempt to Petra with Gottfried. A sick kind of masochistic humor. Except this time my checking account is at stake. Ahmed and Ishmael then drive me back to Park Station, where I’ll take the Gautrain out to Sandton. I give them the last of my cash, thanking them again and again, and they wish me luck. This time Ahmed is my bodyguard as I walk into the station.
I jump back on the train, and soon see that Sandton has become the new business district for the Joburg area, as the main city became more neglected after apartheid ended in the ‘90s. I get to the entrance of the embassy. I’ve never been this relieved in my life to see the stars and stripes unfurling. I fill in the South African folks (all of them black) at the desk in on what happened. They tell me they can’t let me use their office phones to make a personal call, even though they genuinely express their sympathy and want to help me, but they have a man guide me to another part of the embassy where they’ll help me out. “The country is getting more dangerous,” he tells me on our walk. “Even around here it’s not safe anymore.” Whether that’s true or not, as I’ve seen competing stats on the crime each year, he definitely feels it. I wait for an American staffer to come out and help me, and it starts to rain. I’m so preoccupied by the whole ordeal that I don’t even think to make a mental Toto reference to being able to “bless the rains down in Africa” for the first time.
The American, Andrew, comes out. Again I can’t use his office phone, but he lets me use his personal phone to send any messages I need to over the internet. I pretty much came all this way just to use the internet on someone’s smartphone. I email Joe Berman back at ground control, giving him the info to get onto my account and cancel the credit card. Not sure how soon my dad will see it, I Facebook message a couple friends with my parents’ home number to call and tell him to check his email. I also log in to the Couchsurfing website and get the number for my host for the night, Vinicius, and call him to get his address again. Andrew tells me that even around Sandton he drives his car or takes a taxi if he’s alone, especially at night. He tells me I can get some cash at an ATM nearby, get back on the train to Park Station, and grab a cab to Vin’s place. I thank him again, and do just that. At the station I run out into the rain and show a driver the address, and he takes me to Melville, a safer neighborhood some 15 minutes’ drive away. He’s not too talkative, but he lets me use his phone to message Vinicius. I graciously accept some of a Brazilian stew Vin just made and a cup of tea as I tell him the full story, and we talk for a bit longer getting to know each other before going to sleep.
Steve the weaver. Wednesday 1/9, Joburg/Egoli
The next morning Vin lets me out so I can go get a new phone. He tells me that though walking around Melville is much safer, especially during the day, I should just keep my wits about me and I’ll be fine. I put my backup credit and debit cards into my shoes along with most of my cash, a habit I get into for the rest of the trip. As I walk into Melville I can now see in the daylight that all these houses have walls and electric fences too—not as many security guards as the wealthier first neighborhood I walked through to get to Samad, but still mini-fortresses. I get to the mall’s phone kiosk, and look through their catalog of phones. Looks like one of my cheaper options is Huawei—Chinese companies really are making their dent in Africa. As I browse I tell the women working there (black) the story from yesterday, and they welcome me and insist that there’s more to South Africa than that. One of them says that she just drives everywhere whenever possible. There’s a Zimbabwean student there too who tells me that it’s a type of initiation for anyone newcomer into the country. He only just came last week to start school, and has yet to undergo this rite of passage himself.
I start the process of buying the phone, though it takes a while because you need not only an ID but also proof of residence for buying one, but they help me out and make an exception because of my situation. There’s also a guy from Ghana in his forties buying something for his phone too, Steve Appiah, who overhears my story. He shows me the documentation he has with him, and also gives me his business card, eager to prove that he’s legit and trustworthy, and says that later in the afternoon he can show me around. He goes off on more errands. I go through another half hour of buying the phone, slowed due to me having a foreign credit card but one of the women helps me work around that too. She also has me download Taxify, a rideshare app cheaper than Uber that many South Africans use, and she suggests I use it whenever I need to get around cities alone, especially at night.
I call up Steve Appiah, and he comes back and starts showing me around Melville, and just like that this guy becomes my tour guide for the next couple days. We walk back to his place, not too far from Vin’s. On the way we meet his two kids, Blessed, 4, and Abigail, 9, a very bright fourth grader, on their way back from school. Steve came from Ghana 12 years ago for more opportunity, and has worked as a teacher in schools as well as odd jobs on the side, like repairing shoes. Most of all though he has been a weaver of kente, traditional Ashante Ghanaian clothing, which he learned from his father. Next he takes me to “Uncle” Paul’s Tavern. Paul came to South Africa in the early 90s, also from Ghana. When Steve tells him what happened to me yesterday, Paul tells me how when he first came to the country he had a chicken he was bringing home to cook for dinner grabbed right out of his hands on the street. Since then, Paul seems to have done pretty well for himself with his bar. Most of the patrons are black, though there’s a tall older white man who surprisingly has military medals on his jacket from when he was in the airforce during the days of apartheid. Steve knows him, gets up on a chair to hug him. A lot of the people here are immigrants too, some from Malawi and others as far away as Nigeria. There’s also one older toothless guy in sunglasses bouncing around the place screwing with people, who just laugh and push him away, whipping out the occasional kung fu move on them. That’s Mahopeh—Steve explains that he’s an anti-apartheid veteran, and has him show me his ID card for his pension. Now Mahopeh spends his victorious retirement just good-naturedly trolling patrons here. Steve tells me that most of the buildings around here, as in most of the country, are still owned by white people, including the people Paul rents the space for his tavern from. He and many others don’t have animosity for all the whites, but it shows even further how a lot hasn’t changed all that much since the 90s.
As night falls, Steve and I stop by the store so he can pick up some supplies for Abigail, and I get some cake to share with Vin. He then takes me by his friend Sonny’s guesthouse. There’s a blackout as we approach, and Sonny calls out “Who the hell is that?” through the dark before realizing it’s Steve, and we hang out for an hour or so, talking more about life in South Africa, and the rest of Africa as a whole. Sonny and the few Africans I’ve spoken with so far all seem to agree that if they’re ever to overcome the problems they face, the many peoples across the region have to unite—even after many years of defeat, pan-Africanism definitely still has its appeal. While many westerners and people outside the continent are told not to lump all Africans and African countries together despite wide ethnic diversity, many Africans do speak of themselves as being part of a common experience for the past century and a half, of European colonialism, independence, and now continued exploitation by foreign interests, corrupt leaders, and ethnic division. It plays out differently in different countries, and in different places within those countries, but no conversation about what’s wrong in South Africa in particular seems to go long before it’s tied to what’s wrong in Africa in general, especially since, as I’ve seen, so many people in South Africa are immigrants from other African countries. There also is a lot of admiration for China, being a non-western country that’s grown very quickly. We say goodnight to Sonny, and Steve insists on walking me back to Vin’s place, a few blocks away. Steve says he’ll be my guide to the rest of Joburg tomorrow.
A less sharp, but still shiny welcome. Thursday 1/10 and Friday 1/11, Joburg/Egoli
I whip up some eggs I got for breakfast the day before and head back to Steve’s. We hang out for a bit as he takes care of some stuff around his house, blasting reggae like Burning Spear and Bob Marley. Steve also gives me a kente shirt and hat he’s handwoven, and gets a kick out of taking pictures of me in it. He tells me that I’ll be safer walking with him, a local, but still suggests I just get some cash now so I don’t have to take out my card again, and I split my cash between my shoes and pockets. I also leave my phone this time, just taking my small camera with me, which Steve holds onto most of the time. Even so, I walk with Steve around downtown Joburg for almost six hours each of the next two days, and am completely fine—no one else tries to rob me, most of the people Steve and I pass are just going about their own business. Steve does tell me though to not speak too much whenever we run into people he knows on most streets, as my American accent would confirm that I’m a foreigner, not a white South African, potentially making me more of a target to any would-be muggers (of which Steve says there definitely are some around). And he makes sure to not take me through some of the more dangerous parts, like Hillbrow, and many of the townships.
Steve has us pray together for safety before we journey into the city. He drops off some shoes he’s repaired for a man at a church, then shows me his weaving studio (still in Melville). He’s built about a dozen looms with spare wood he gathers from all over. Steve has been able to teach the craft to some at-risk local youth, the same stock, he says, which the guys who mugged me come from. The building also has a bunch of rooms in which some of his protégés have sometimes stayed. Steve hasn’t been able to reach as many students since the original organization he was partnered with closed down a couple years ago, but he’s still found fulfillment in teaching some. He says that here, like everywhere else, crime comes from desperation and poverty, and helping people develop a craft gives them purpose and resources to support themselves.
We catch one of the cheap minibus taxis at a nearby corner into the city. These ones aren’t unlike the ones in Palestine and Jordan, where you pass up your money to a guy next to the driver who then passes your change back. I make sure to pay for Steve’s fare and any food we have throughout the day, as he’s taken so much time to show a stranger around. He also takes care of the transactions, and knows all the minibus routes. Sometimes you get out of a minibus in the middle of the street at one stop and run out through the sliding door into another waiting in the middle of traffic just one lane over, and there are different hand signals you put up while you’re waiting at a corner letting a driver know your destination. When it looks like there’s no room on one Steve still pulls me in and has me pinned between a woman and a door, and in a minute my leg falls asleep. Later in the day as it’s starting to rain a man with a wrapped TV screen in one arm and his toddler in the other squeezes in next to me by the door. The drivers are an absolute menace to other cars and each other, cutting each other off without mercy and not slowing down for pedestrians, who are fully expected to run across the street to the rhythm of the minibuses. Traffic lights (“robots” as they’re called down here) are more of a suggestion than a rule on these roads. It’s like the Knight Bus in Harry Potter, except things don’t magically jump out of the way for them. While it’s fun and new for me to experience the endearing South African minibus, and to write about it, there is definitely a darker side to it. I learn later that drivers from rival companies sometimes get into physical fights with each other over routes (this escalated to the point of an actual “taxi wars” back in the 80s), and it’s clear that much of it is from the pressure to profit.
Radios in vehicles and in shops blast songs in English, Zulu, Xhosa, a little Afrikaans (the Dutch tongue), and other African languages I don’t know the names of yet. As Steve steers me through the streets, he points out that many of the marketplaces are run by immigrants from somewhere—Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Ghana, Malawi, Ethiopia, the Congo, Mozambique, and as far away as Pakistan and southern Asia too. Yes, it is the same Joburg I got mugged in two days ago, there is still trash on a lot of side streets, there is still the desperation of many inner cities, but walking with my new friend, a local, occasionally meeting people he knows, I see more of the life and color amidst the grit than I did when I first arrived. We go to a local Nigerian-run spot for lunch. Some of the patrons playing pool are a bit surprised and amused at seeing a white guy enter, though they really care. Steve has us partake in some alomo, a very bitter west African liquor in a little plastic pouch, which is supposed to help clear the system before eating, and he orders us some kind of stew served with pap. Pap is this hot, soft, corn-based kind of cake, almost like grits, that you use with your hands to scoop up the other food. While the main dishes vary widely across the continent, pap is a common staple you’ll find on most plates (or Styrofoam trays in this case). The main dish is something else—I’m not great at describing what new foods taste like, but I’d say it comes closest to seasoning used in Indian food. The stew is an explosive, mildly spicy mix of meat, vegetables including okra, and some type of fish. Add that with the pap and I’m completely stuffed for the rest of the day. We also meet and chat with Steve’s friend Philip, who works at a tailor’s place around the corner, who echoes some of what Sonny said the night before.
In the afternoon we head towards the Maboneng district, a more hip and artsy kind of spot with political graffiti covering doorframes and walls. Steve introduces me to his friend Gary, a guy of South Asian (probably Indian) descent in his 30s. Gary has a display of radical t-shirts he prints with faces of prominent South African figures like Oliver Tambo, Steve Biko, and of course Mandela and his first wife Winnie, as well as some international faces like Castro, Malcolm X, and the ever-present Che. Steve enlists Gary as our guide to Soweto tomorrow, as Steve knows that Gary has more friends around there. We continue down the street past a bunch of higher-end cafes, eateries, shops, art galleries, and it’s hard for me to comprehend that this is only a couple blocks away from the rougher rest of downtown. There are more white people here, mostly younger, especially bolstered by the presence of a hostel, though there are still plenty of more middle- and upper-class black Africans. In the moment of my whirlwind day with Steve, I don’t fully process it; it’s only a few days later as I’m reflecting on my notes and photos that I realize I was looking gentrification in the face. Maboneng is of course a charmingly nice spot, especially as this is probably the only area downtown where I can walk around by myself without Steve, without a repeat of the incident two days ago. But there’s no way it can be accessible to most people of Joburg, with the prices of its cups of coffee and art prints. And although gentrification over here is probably not the exact same as gentrification in cities back in the US, I imagine that sooner or later residents will start being priced out of nearby buildings as this little Williamsburg spreads its tentacles of rising property value into surrounding streets.
Steve is hoping to get in on the opportunities that seem to be arising in this area of Joburg. We go further east down a long stretch of road to Victoria Yards, another gentrifying area. It’s a sprawling old complex that used to be some sort of industrial laundromat 100 years ago, before declining and being taken over by chop shops and some other illegal entrepreneurial ventures. Now various groups and developers have started a project to turn it into a space for artists and creative businesses—again, sounds cute but most likely not accessible to most denizens of Joburg. The place is abuzz with construction and landscaping work. Steve talks to a couple of people around about getting one of the spaces to set up another studio where he could teach more people kente weaving. As the afternoon winds down, we head back to the minibuses out to Melville. We hang out for a bit longer at his place with Abigail and Blessed before I head out. I also get to know Vin a bit more in the evenings between my adventures with Steve. Vin’s a journalist in his 30s, stationed here since last summer, and I even get to watch to him do a live broadcast back to his news station in Brazil.
The next day Steve and I pray together again before taking a minibus to meet Gary, his friend from Maboneng who’s coming with us to Soweto. Soweto is simply short for “Southwest Township.” Thousands of black Africans were forcibly moved here by the apartheid government. The township is huge, practically its own city, so we switch to another minibus that just takes us to Vilakazi Street, and I pay for our fare. The area is pretty touristy now, with the same souvenirs lining the street and guys dressed in traditional tribal costumes for photo ops, but it has some of the main attractions from the anti-apartheid movement, especially Mandela’s house. He lived here in the 1950s, before he was imprisoned; you can still see the bullet marks and the burned bricks from when the police tried to kill him. There is also a memorial to Hector Pieterson, the boy killed by the police during the massive student-led Soweto Uprising in 1976. Steve holds onto my camera again just like yesterday, and he insists on getting pictures of me in front of everything, so I can have proof I was there. I feel a bit weird posing in front of the memorial, but hey, Steve’s the cameraman. I’m very much up for the picture with Mandela’s house, though. Gary also gets the chance to catch up with some of his older friends he hasn’t seen in a while.
Back in downtown Joburg we say goodbye to Gary, and I talk to Steve about my plan for getting to a farm tomorrow down south in Clocolan, a small town near the Lesotho border. Vuyo, the owner of the farm, says there are some minibus taxis from Joburg that go directly through the town, but I have no idea how to find them, especially since most of the minibuses leave from downtown and it’s probably not a good idea for me to wander around there alone with my backpack trying to find the right one. But Steve Appiah is there to save the day again, and says that we can find the right one today so we know where to go tomorrow—yes, we. For the next half hour he takes us around the different parking lots filled with taxi stations, with drivers telling us to go to this or that street. Eventually we find a ticket office in a clearing in an alley, and Steve finds out from them that there is indeed a minibus every morning that goes to Lesotho through Clocolan. We head back to Melville for the evening and make a plan to take a Taxify cab straight to this alley tomorrow morning together, so Steve can make sure I’m safe and get the ticket for me.
I thank my hero once again, and go back to Vin’s, but my last day in Joburg’s not done yet—I go to a nearby synagogue for Shabbat services before meeting Vin and some of his friends for dinner later. I’ll go more into detail on South Africa’s Jewish community when I explore it more in Cape Town, as I don’t learn too much yet on this night. I get there with the Taxify app, as most people advise me I shouldn’t try taking public transportation by myself. There’s one security guard at the gate, though I don’t have to show any kind of ID. It’s pretty much an average Reform movement service (though their movement goes by the term “Progressive” here, as in some other countries), though a few of the prayers and songs have different melodies. There are a little over 50 people gathered, mostly white, though not of Dutch or British descent, but mostly eastern European; most of their ancestors came here directly fleeing the antisemitism there in the early 20th century. They’re all very welcoming to me when they hear there’s an American visiting, and there’s a dinner after t’fillah that they invite me to join.
A nice older guy named Irwin who’s actually putting a book together on South African Jewish history gives me a lift to the place where Vin is, as I don’t have data working on my phone yet to get another Taxify. Most of Vin’s friends are Indian South African, a little older than me, and they give me more advice on places to see around the country during my next two months. They also tell me a bit about Indian culture in South Africa—there’s still some of it there, with the celebration of festivals and especially food, but less so with each generation being less tied to tradition. Vin and I head back, where I pack and get some rest for my plan with Steve tomorrow morning. It’s been a pretty wild week, but I made a lot of new friends along the way, and I’m ready to get back into the earth at a farm again!
Foreign Fields 