Jan 05, 2006 12:51 PM
3158 Views
(Updated Jan 05, 2006 12:51 PM)
Ok before people get ideas, this is NOT a review that will tell you not to go to SA or to Jo'berg. Its a review that would want to bring out the beauty & strife that for me embody the spiriti of that city. The hunger & the plenty living together, in obvious discomfort. The morbid & the beautiful, coexisting in anything but harmony.
I was in JB attending a trade fair. Midrand was the place where it was happening. A pretty suburb where life is almost as beautiful as are the blue skies & the crimsom horizon. Sandton is another suburb that is very pretty & plentiful. Being at these places there is noway that one can compare these with anything less than the best of the best cities of any western developed country. Life is blissful, crime free & flourishing, for many.
A closer look at these places tells you that all houses here, and lovely ones at that, have barbed wire fences going around the compound, with electricity passing through them 24x7. These are also often in excess of 7 feet high from the ground. Ok, not just houses, but playing parks for children, schools, office complexes, restaurant complexes, car parks ..... hotel compounds, malls coumpounds ........& every other place where people exist, cohabit, roam, re-create, work, play and do anything else.
And thereby lies the tale of misery.
Who are these structures supposed to protect ? People. From whom ? Fellow people. And thats because the differences in these 2 sets of 'people' are so severe, that one is spell-bounded in disgust. Now every country does have disparities - its a way of life in almost every society. But the differences being so HUGE, is almost unthinkable.
A quick shift to downtown JB tells you why. Colored people(and pls I dont want to sound racist, just go along with the flow of the meaning of the piece) live here in plenty. They are poor, starved & most critically important, they are with NO hope. They mugg for a loaf of bread. They sell things that are not legal only to earn enough to afford a meal for 6 in their family. They wear shoddy clothes, they live in what could be called houses that their fello suburban countrymen will not even have in their backyard to store coal. That is the stark, hard hitting underbelly of JB.
Its no wonder that the non-colored want to protect everywhere they are with fences. The sorry part is that these fences are even deep rooted in their minds. Officially there is a non-racist, democratic govt that rules the day in SA; even the sporting teams have 'colored representation', but, the plight of the 'many' remains more sorry than a mind of he who has not visisted that place, could remotely imagine.
People say sollutions are being found, to 'homogenise the society' & rid it of the disparities. I couldn't see it happening. But perhaps thats ok as I am just a common ordinary man who is a trifle more romantic in my aspirations. I am not Them who can perhaps see longer & better than I can, into the future.
'Dogs not allowed' in parks is still atleast an open admission. Fellow countrymen, humans, people, brotherhood not allowed in OUR space; the unsaid sentiment.
