I enjoy Joburg. In fact, I love this city. It has to be one of the most exciting places on the planet. A big, loud, unruly, multicoloured sprawl as if Picasso painted a herd of zebra stampeding into a nest of macaws.
There. I finally said it. I've come out of the closet.
Sink holes open up and flooding rivers try to swallow bits of this town out of pure shame, but not even Mother Nature behaving like Mommy Dearest can stomach Hillbrow. Next door, there are suburbs built for the kind of upstanding citizen who considers the city centre to be a squat of depravity and thinks he's safer from crime when his family skulks in the shadow of the new stock exchange.
In the 1980's,the Roodepoort Righteous were already trekking a couple of hundred metres down the road to breathe free, but still be close to Northgate shopping mall. Now these stout pioneers have mostly moved on to New Zealand (rapidly making it the Land of the Wrong White Crowd), but the street names are still there as a cautionary metaphor. You can follow "Hendrik Verwoerd" till you get to "Republic", just as our forefathers did.
Driving home, it's a secret pleasure to slip into "Jim Fouche". He invites you to. He's that kind of road. Then I hang a left into Without Street (MY Street). Locals, of course, recognise "Without" as being the Afrikaans name for the indigenous Cape Holly tree, don't you? It's actually pronounced Wit-Hout (White Wood), but for some reason, written Afrikaans mistrusts spaces between words, regarding them with the same suspicion as men who make a braai using store-bought fire lighters and using them only very sparingly. Maybe it had something to do with Calvinism or economic sanctions. Whatever the reason, "Without" is spoken Wit-Hout.
BUT not by everybody. I recently received a phone call from some telesales swine bunch asking me to supply them with a physical address. They wanted to send me my free gift, but it seems I am "without" a street? So I gave them an address. I even gave them my full name. I hope Leon Shuster likes his gift subscription to Reader's Digest...
Viva, eleven official languages! Viva!
Punch drunk on its own contradictions, desperate to be renaissanced by a crack team of tame gay designers, Joburg, Jozi, mutant-whoremonger-abomination. Nobody even knows what to call this place, but I've realised I love it. I know that's an admission to shock rational people, but I defy them. Today I notice that in the middle of Without Street, in a typical Johannesburg pothole, a pair of plovers has built a nest. They spend the day dive bombing cars to protect it. Goddamn stupid stubborn futile birds!
We should make them our official emblem.
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