Café society

Shebeen-style décor at Mama Tembo’s Café in trendy middle-class Johannesburg northern suburbs. On the walls, a blown-up photograph of the 156 defendants - one of them Nelson Mandela -  in the famous Treason Trial of 1956-1961. The accused included all the executive bodies of the main political movements who had adopted the Freedom Charter at the Congress of the People. (Click here for article on the Freedom Charter by David Philips in London  Grip.) Treason carried the death penalty. Fortunately all were finally acquitted.

    And at the café, the men’s lavatory: plumbed, painted and perfumed buckets presumably quoting from the minimal facilities of the prison cell.

(Audio: 2’49”.)

Ishmael M., (55), parking attendant in one of Johannesburg’s leafy suburbs,  puts on the familiar luminous orange bib and offers to watch ones car in exchange for some small change.  Such parking attendants are a feature of city life throughout the country, and in the new South Africa serve, tacitly, as a legitimate form of begging.  Very early in the new political dispensation, it was usually ragged street urchins who offered this “service”.  However in the last ten years they have mysteriously disappeared and in their stead, robust men of all ages patrol lines of parked cars.

Ishmael has high transport costs. He is referring to taxis which get him from home to his patch on this middle-class suburban street, and also to his family who live outside the city.  Ishmael’s family and his old mother, who survives on a government pension of R700 per month (of which he is appreciative on her behalf), live in Hammanskraal.  Meanwhile he rents a room “far away”  in a house in “Bram Fischer” - a  “location” newly named to honour one of the more famous white activists of the 1960s.

    Taxis are usually VW vans which operate instead of buses as one off freelance businesses throughout the country - and in other countries (click here for London Grip’s article sent from Yemen).     

    Last year Ishmael, an unqualified  plumber,  acquired Level 3 in his National Certificate in Plumbing which, when completed, will get him work, he says with undue optimism, “in a good company or with the government”.  His training was funded by a benevolent white property developer in part-exchange for a job which Ishmael did for him.

    Minding cars, he says, one can make R20 or R30 per day, or more on a busier street.  He has to settle for a quiet street. In the local group of car-watchers, acquisition of a beat is strictly hierarchical, decided according to age and strength. The more lucrative ones have to be fought for, which rules him out. “I am scared. It’s dangerous. I might get hurt.”

Ishmael’s view of the state of South Africa is that life is harder since the end of apartheid. He says that he is unhappy now, that there is much suffering, and that a main cause of this is that President Mbeki has allowed free entry into the country of foreigners from African countries to the north.

    (For London Grip audio interviews of immigrants from Zimbabwe and Democratic Republic of Congo, click here: South Africa: The Cape - Passing Shots. )

After a meal at an excellent and busy restaurant in Johannesburg’s southern suburbs, one of the customers sets off for home, handgun at the ready.     2008.

            L O N D O N   G R I P     .  .  .      Politics and Society

S O U T H   A F R I C A

OVERVIEW: The Poverty of Power

PASSING SHOTS: click:      KwaZulu-Natal       Johannesburg       The Cape

Johannesburg   2008

PASSING SHOTS

(Audio: 5’04”)

Professor Philippa Kruger   teaches at the University of the Witwatersrand, sits on the Legal Aid Board, and runs the Family and Gender unit of the (free) law clinic for the unemployed or low-paid at the University.

    Now that the honeymoon period  is over, her views of South Africa’s turmoil are both critical and sanguine. She anticipates that the still rigorous judicial system will get in the way of ANC leader Jacob Zuma inheriting Mandela’s mantle from Mbeki.    She thinks that the one leader who could help the country is Cyril Ramaphosa.

(Audio 6’35”) 

Jean Wessels (83), grandmother and widow, profoundly deaf since she was twenty, is doubtful that the country is better off than it was under the “the Nats”. 

    She has little confidence in ANC leader Jacob Zuma, but admits to personal experience of the “good in him”: he initiated the renovation of a home for AIDS babies where, until she became house-bound, she sometimes worked as a volunteer carer.

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