A Room of One's Own

Who would have thought that one day I'd have a a place of my own in a big bad city like Johannesburg. Putting down some roots here is not a homecoming, but rather an aspiration of sorts. An aspiration of belonging. My search was long and thorough, and friends shake their heads in disbelief when they hear my property-viewing statistics. The building dates to the early 1970s and the second-floor corridor grants a view across the green blanket of the north-central suburbs towards Northcliff. The flat itself overlooks a horseshoe garden with trees, tall ones, scantily clad in winter attire, but promising impenetrable leaves in the rains. And there are birds: urban-escapee parrots, grey louries with chicks, tinker barbets and, some mornings, even guinea fowl.

The space is big enough for my spirit, yet small enough to belong. It gives me a sense of delight. There is light enough to inspire and capture the best of southern Africa’s sun, distilled for the highveld of the mining pioneers, the gold magnates and the wretched of the earth. The blinds on the tall windows hold and transform and shift and ebb and flow the light, so that it can be everything and nothing.

As for the residents, there hasn’t been much time for analysis yet -- a handful of younger owners and artsy tenants among a collection of Jewish sixty-pluses, with widely-varying degrees of friendliness. Other wildlife sightings include a plump white rabbit hopping along my road late one night, no doubt also returning from a social event. Another escapee? Might I stumble into its rabbit hole one day. There are yoga studios (my version of watering holes), no less than four, all close by, as well as all the other amenities that one might need.

I’ve been here nearly two years already. The anger, opportunism and inequality of Johannesburg has started to feel normal. The pages of violent crime relegated to the latter sections of the newspapers, or simply omitted. The ongoing labour strikes with demands for pay increases at double the rate of inflation. The way that white South Africans talk about ‘going to Africa’, as if it’s a different continent. The vigilante justice meted out to a petty thief that I witnessed the other night in Hillbrow whilst with some charity workers who do weekly rounds distributing food to the multiplicity of homeless. Despite the mixed reviews of The Bang Bang Club, which I saw on its opening night last week, it was an eye-opener about the nature of the horrific violence that presided during the last four years of apartheid, and a reminder of just how damaged this nation’s psyche must be.

So this is the unspoken backdrop against which a more mundane life of urban exploration unfolds: more visits to the farm stall in Kyalami; more south Indian dosas and uttapam at the Bryanston market; Gujurati delicacies in Mayfair; photography exhibits at the Goethe, Stevenson and Market Photo Workshop; the bourgeois taste of soya hot chocolate, still rare to South Africa; and the hamster wheel of career. All of it sewn together and mulled over here in this room of one’s own - indeed now attainable for the second sex, some eighty years after Woolf addressed the women of Newnham and Girton.