We cruise down Adderley towards the station, past the Grand Parade, and the blaring logos and adboards squatting on the façade of the old library like parasites. And what really grinds me is that it was supposed to be ours for Streets Back. We’d rounded up a bunch of kids from the Castle Street shelter with this plan to do graffiti murals. It was a way of letting them make a mark on the city that usually filters them out like spam. It was all legit. We had the permits and everything, with a small development grant Ash set up, from an Italian org complete with our own Italian liaisons. It all got fucked up, though. The Italians came out to make a documentary of the whole spiel, and then got all pissy when it wasn’t happening. Like it’s my fault we ran out of money.
First up we had to pay for chatter flyers, because how else are you going to reach illiterate kids who can’t read a poster? So the audio chips were crazy expensive, then the freebies we got from the paint company were all reject stock, broken nozzles, dried-out paint, two years past their expiry date. By the time we’d bought our own paint and masks and overalls and food for all the kids who showed up instead of just the ones who worked on the murals, our budget was gone. I tried to tell those Italian amigos that these kids had been let down so often, the one thing that would have a real positive impact on their lives would be an established routine and adults who stick by their promises. They were all, like, terribly sorry to hear about our troubles, very understanding, but we have to understand there are so many other projects just as worthy, all desperate for cash, and they have to support the ones that can show sustainability.
I sent the hombres a real nasty email afterwards, telling them exactly what neo-colonial cocks they were, coming in here, raping our resources and fucking off again. I thought Ash would appreciate it, but he got in a real mood about him being the money guy, the business manager, and I should stick to being the passionate poster boy, and besides, ‘hombres’ is Spanish. Whatever. And if he could have handled it, then he should have fucking done it. Pricks. I hate it when people fake being on the level, all global village-ing when they’re the ones raking in fat salaries, and we’re the ones living hand-to-mouth with a soccer club and Emmie’s baby on the way.
Now Ash has this big plan all laid out with some corporate sell-out buddy, who says he can get the project into his company’s CSI program, no problem. Like getting some big dick to sponsor the whole thing isn’t a total violation of everything we do.
We have no choice but to head up to the taxi rank, cos the minibuses aren’t as regulated as the trains. You don’t get the corporates taking taxis, putting up with shoving in among twenty-four people packed into a space officially licensed for sixteen, or dealing with the strikes or the gun fights when the taxi wars get too heated. And some of the gamchees are willing to look the other way for a small fee, purely administrative. The trick is to do it out in the open, as if it’s a normal transaction. My wallet is locked out along with all the other functions on my phone, so Ashraf transfers five times the going rate to the gamchee manning the taxi at the head of the Khayelitsha line.
We cram in next to a mama with a week’s worth of groceries and a two year-old spilling out of her lap and a guy who is too beat down to be gangster – probably just some poor asshole riding the job-hunt bus to nowhere. Not likely he’s going to get anything with what’s clearly a knife scar striped through his hair above his ear, which pegs him as loxion. Could be worse though, he could be disconnect. He could be living Rural or in Zim, that other suburb of China.
‘Yey! Diskonneksie. Geen moeilikheid nie, ne?’ The gamchee waggles a finger at me. At five times the fare, he knows full well I’m not gonna be any trouble at all.
I feel like shit. I’m still not breathing 100% and the muscle in my eyelid keeps spasming. It’s driving me crazy, although Ash says he can’t see it.
‘That’s one of the things I’m talking about. The shit we can’t see. The tech was only approved, what, eighteen months ago? How do they know what the long-term effects are going to be? And here they are dishing out defusings like it’s a party game. It’s like shock therapy, you know, dampening down excitable behaviour, frying our brains, flattening us out, so we’re all unquestioning, unresisting obedient model fucking zombie puppydog citizens.’
The mama rearranges the child on her lap uncomfortably, and Ash beckons for me to lower it a decibel. He always gets embarrassed when I talk too loud in public. It’s not like anyone can hear me above the driver’s bhangra rock blaring from the speakers or our greedy gamchee friend hoping to pick up a couple more fares, screeching ‘Kaaaaai-ee-leetsha!’ out the window in case there’s any uncertainty about our route.
‘Ten. If it was about brainwashing, they’d just dose the water supply. Don’t you think? Chill out, baby.’
I lower my voice slightly.
‘I’m not talking brainwashing. I’m saying it’s electroshock lobotomy. Government endorsed. And the whole water supply thing? Please. Too easy to test for. The international enviro agencies would pick that up in a second. Unless they paid them off. I mean, anything’s possible. They’re all corrupt, all of them.’
Ash is wearing that humouring-me smirk.
‘Okay, okay, fine. You’re right. Conjecture hurts the cause. Enough with the conspiracy talk. But you know it’s true.’
The taxi rockets around Hospital Bend, which used to feature an actual hospital, home to the world’s first heart transplant, before it got turned into luxury apartments, past the nice middle-class burbs, Obs and Rosebank and Pinelands and Langa, and into the loxion sprawl proper. Don’t be fooled by the cosy apartment blocks lining the highway, it’s all Potemkin for the tourists. You just need to go a couple of blocks in to find the real deal, the tin shacks and the old miners’ hostels and the converted containers now that the shipping industry has died together with the economy. All the same shit they’ve been promising to fix since the 1955 Freedom Charter or whatever it was. And despite the border patrols, the sprawl just keeps on spreading. You can’t keep all of the Rurals out all of the time.
The taxi pulls over to let us out at the circle at the entrance to Berlin, named like so many of the districts, Kosovo and Barcelona and Joe Slovo and Mandela Tribute Park, for the headline news. We get out by the massive and so very conspicuous SAPS station, and walk the rest of the way back to the club, past the tourist zone, where the rubbernecks come to get their taste of poverty and their photographs with the kiddies, maybe some love muti from the sangoma, or a taste of mqombothi beer shared around in a can between men who are only there to lend the scene authenticity, to earn a little cash to buy a Zamalek, real beer in a real bottle, because no one cares about tradition anymore. The tourists don’t venture too deep into the heart of it, which means they’re missing out on the drop toilets and spiderwebs of illegal electricity connections in the newest parts of the sprawl, where council hasn’t got to yet.
Ash would point out the good stuff they’re missing too, the stuff he tried to show our hombre friends, the barbershop strip in Chinatown and jazz at the shebeen and the soccer club and the boxing society and the entrepreneurs hawking minutes on their cell phones (illegally with the new SIM ID laws in place) and the sense of community and how transformation has been real and important. Like it’s not a total wank, where people are just as economically fucked as they were before, only now they’re sick as well, or, worse, trying to escape being sick and bringing it in with them from the Rural. And that leads to spates of outbreaks all over and crackdowns, just as bad as those bad old days when the police came storming in to quarantine and deport whole neighbourhoods.