Fordsburg, Mayfair and a Taste of India

It was Freedom Day yesterday, commemorating the first-ever non-racial democratic elections in South Africa in 1994. So it was fitting that I finally made it to the Apartheid Museum, which was excellent and definitely deserves a second visit. I went via Melville and Observatory first to pick up friends, and after the museum we went to a fabulous and buzzing Gujurati restaurant in Mayfair. So I drove many new streets today, which I’m rather proud of.

The museum helps me to make sense of the many bits of jigsaw that I am collating about South Africa, including a recent visit to the ‘Indian quarter’ of Fordsburg. We were a curious group two Saturdays ago: a Senegalese author; a Botswanan of British-Philipino descent, an Indian South African, an Ethiopian-American, and a white Zimbabwean.

We started on 14th Street, where the ‘oriental’ Fietas market used to be (before it was forcibly closed and moved under the apartheid government Group Areas Act) and where our friend-and-guide used to stand on the corner selling combs as a boy. He showed us where his family’s house once stood, before it was knocked down – although the homes of certain professionals such as lawyers were left alone, as well as religious buildings such as mosques. The stand remains vacant, with only a small plaque recalling what passed there in the 1950s.

Growing up, N. attended to no less than 9 different schools because his family were forcibly relocated so many times. And during the times when they lived in ‘grey’ areas (areas that were being made white, or which were being protected from non-white settlement), he used to wait in the school library until it got dark, because otherwise he would be beaten up on the way home.

From 14th Street we went to Akhalwaya’s Fish and Chips, on the corner of Mint Road, where N. has been a customer for about 20 years. Akhalwaya’s specialises in a unique type of toasted-curry-and-fries sandwich. Strange sounding, yes, but original, suitably fattening, utterly delicious, and enough of a meal to last you most of the day. We then sauntered into at least two Indian sweet shops: they always make me a little weak at the knees until I actually eat the sweets and am reminded of how utterly overpoweringly sweet they really are.

The ‘new’ Oriental Plaza is one of Joburg’s most racially mixed shopping malls, offering a huge array of food and wares ranging from a samosa bar with a permanently long queue and stainless steel kitchenware stalls, to West African print fabrics, Chinese shoes and wedding shops.

Wandering along Main Road and its tributaries, we drank fresh coconut juice on the sidewalk, perused Bollywood DVDs, made banter with the stall owners, stared jealously into restaurant windows where masala dosas were being dished out, and I bought some spices and paneer for a Pakistani dish that I’ve been wanting to make for months.

We then swung by Wemmer Pan for some reason only known to S., where there’s a bizarre children’s park with miniature replicas of Johannesburg’s best-known buildings. At the entrance there’s an enormous statue of someone who looks like Jan van Riebeeck and inside…wait for it…there’s a truly enormous statue of Michael Jackson. Yes, in a children’s park. Oh the irony. And oh, the photo opportunities.

Leaving Mayfair yesterday with a very full stomach, I went into a store opposite Shayona’s to buy basmati rice. The Asian managers may have been a bit surprised by our racially mixed trio, but sold their basmati with sincerity and gusto. On hearing that I was a Zimbabwean, they pointed to the black assistants at the back of the shop, saying ‘Ah yes, they ran away from Zimbabwe too…’. At which all of us - assistants included - dissolved into the kind of genuine and binding laughter that only stems from incongruous interactions in unexpected places, mixed in with a measure of southern African humour and an undertone of sadness. One of my favourite kinds...

Harare, Tinotenda

For the first time in years I feel a stillness in me about this tumultuous place. I drive out past Ngomo Kurira with my brother and his friends to another smaller gomo [hill]. Out through the increasingly rural settlements, where things are dusty and poor and organic and potholed and haphazard, where people walk long distances, and the Apostolics are enrobed in white for Easter. The grass is still tall from the rains. The path up the gomo starts at a woman's two-roomed homestead. She wears a shabby Zanu-PF tshirt. My brother speaks politely to her in Shona to ask that we may pass through, and to check where the path begins; she is fine with it. Most of the others in our group walk through with barely a glance, as if they don't notice that anyone lives there.

We push our way up through foliage onto the sprawling orange-earth boulder beyond, and then it is just us and the cascading rock and the sky. I fork away from the group. Dropping below are endless valleys of greens and blues and greys, the tinkle of Mashona cattle bells, and whispers of late-rain streams: this beloved and stunningly beautiful country.


I pass a broken clay pot in one of the clearings. Maybe something from the Apostolics. It is perfectly shaped, smooth, enticing to touch. It nestles the imprint of a cross at its base. (Tutu says: 'When the colonisers arrived, we had the land and they had the Bible. We closed our eyes to pray, and when we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible'). My first impulse is to take a piece of this exotica, and then I stop myself and ask why. Why do we want to take pieces of things that have nothing to do with us? And so I photograph the broken pot and leave it be. There between the earth and the sky, wind on its back, as it was on mine.

Water is a scarce resource. Our neighbours had their borehole pump stolen, so now my parents feed their hosepipe through a crumbling section of the dividing wall to help them out, despite the fact that for years we've suspected them of running a brothel. My parents laugh about it, and about the firewood business that their gardener has been running ever since they chopped down some huge Jacaranda trees that were threatening to fall on the house.

I see Mugabe’s siren-less motorcade driving down Borrowdale Road in the late afternoon. South Africa's young and highly controversial Julius Malema has been visiting, and the state newspaper says: "Malema Hails Zim's Empowerment Drive". Meanwhile, Gallery Delta has been raided by police for exhibiting photographs of human rights abuses during 2008, and a Bulawayo artist has been arrested for 'inciting violence' with his critical paintings. Veterinarian friends come over for drinks, during which one of them is called away to attend to a poisoned dog.

On Easter Sunday I go for an early morning run. The roads of Highlands are quiet and neglected. The weather is pristine. I savour the silence, so different from Johannesburg. An impeccably shiny, red Morris Minor passes me, carrying a full load of white-robed Apostolics to meet with God: men in the front, women in the back. I smile. At home I lay a competitive Easter egg hunt for my family and some friends.

Afterwards dad and I drive our domestic worker back to Mabvuku township, past Chikurubi maximum human-rights-abuse Prison and the cement factory. We visit the cemetery so that I can pay respects to Mishek, who died just before I returned to southern Africa - there was no chance to say goodbye. He is buried in a poor man's grave, thirty one rows down and seven across, marked by a small painted piece of aluminium, already overgrown by a flurry of weeds. The graves are many. We proceed to his wife’s house and greet her all-women family in their two-roomed structure on a tiny plot an the edge of the township. Her seventeen-year old daughter has just given birth to a boy, Tinotenda ('we thank'). Gratefulness and thanks even in these times of hardship. Nine months ago was before Mishek died. I wonder if he knew he was due to be a grandfather. We return home and I resume reading Antjie Krog's Country of my Skull, about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. It’s hard to stomach but I grit my teeth and push on. I'm lying next to a swimming pool, after all.

I buy fifteen kilos of beautiful stone sculpture the next morning on the way to the airport, for next to nothing, and somehow manage to fit it into my hand luggage... along with an avocado, and sprigs of lemongrass and rosemary from the garden. Zim lives on. All the contradictions rest more easily nowadays, for some reason. It’s been a good visit.

The Tap that Waters a Thousand

There's been lots going on. About two weeks ago I went on a Soweto ‘tour’. I thought I had opted for the touristic minibus version, but it turned out to be a bit more personalized, and in a Mercedes no less. Our guide was an hour and a half late collecting me, thanks to major roadworks that he hadn’t anticipated. After we got over the hurdle of his stress and my irritation, all was well. We eventually negotiated our way through the worst of the traffic to pick up the two Germans who were visiting my office.

We started in Kliptown at the Walter Sisulu Square, the site where the freedom charter was adopted in 1955 as a guiding document for the ANC. The Freedom Charter Monument, a tad reminiscent of Great Zimbabwe's architecture, is frequented by a man with a penny whistle playing Nkosi Sikelel'i. I quite like the monument but I'm not the biggest fan of the penny whistle guy.


A guide from the Kliptown Youth Foundation walked us around the dusty informal settlement adjacent to the square which is home to over 45000 people. He works at a soup kitchen and hostel for local children. There is no running water or sanitation here -- instead, a tap that waters a thousand, and the occasional porter-loo that each service a dozen families, if not more. The Germans were quite taken aback at this point. It reminds me of parts of West Caprivi, only on a grand and much more urbanised scale. I bought onions and avocado to take back to Wisteria Lane.



We visited the Regina Mundi church, the largest Catholic church in Soweto, by a smooth-talking guide with an acutely dry sense of humour. The church was a key site in the Soweto student uprisings of 1976. It still bears bullet holes in the ceiling, and the permanent photography exhibition upstairs is quite moving. Time was not really on our side (a 'Soweto tour' would surely be incomplete without some participants having to catch a plane), but we spun by Orlando West, including the houses of Tutu, Mandela and Winnie, before driving back past the freshly finished calabash-inspired Soccer City Stadium. It's looking good.


The next weekend was busy and explorative too. My Ethiopian-American former-war-correspondent friend took me to the Ethiopian quarter of the bustling CBD in downtown Jo’burg...in his car that was stolen and miraculously recovered a year later, with a bullet hole in the back. There are some fifty thousand Ethiopians in this city, apparently. We idled in a few stores before heading into the unnamed restaurant on the third floor of what used to be a key medical practitioners’ building in the city. There at a plastic table in a cosy, clean, wood-panelled room probably once used by an expensive medical consultant, we indulged in fabulous Ethiopian food for the princely sum of R25.

I bought Ethiopian coffee on the way out, and then we tussled with the traffic and the taxis before heading to Sandton for the annual Joburg Art Fair. What a juxtaposition it was after Little Ethiopia: I could have been in London. The young, the artsy and the metrosexuals were all out and about, and the quality of the art was high. I bought a hot chocolate halfway for the same price as my entire Ethiopian lunch, and people-watched from the comfort of a large black sofa, as if I were at Tate Modern...