Are We There Yet? (3 page)

A Texan, a South African and a Sydneysider were standing on the deck of a cruise ship chatting under a blazing sun …

Chapter 2

The Walled-Off Astoria

The first notice you encounter when arriving at Jan Smuts Airport in Johannesburg is located above the wooden booths manned by customs officials. There's always plenty of time to take it in as the staff in question are usually embroiled in a heated competition to see who can make a line of jet-lagged visitors stand still longest. The board reads: “Should you have any complaints about the service offered by the Department of Immigration, please enquire about the register in which such complaints can be registered”. Not a good sign, given that your grievances are already being anticipated this early in the visit.

There's a lot to bitch about in South Africa, and Johannesburg has it worse than most. It's a city where there are counsellors who specialise in carjack trauma, the police instruct you to proceed with caution through red lights if travelling alone at night, and for a fee you can equip your vehicle with an undercarriage flame-thrower that will render any would-be assailants medium rare at the touch of a button.

With that in mind, it was probably best that I got the robbery out of the way on day one. I had gone to Sandton City, a muzak-drenched mall on Johannesburg's affluent northern fringes, to withdraw some local currency from an ATM.

The place was bristling with guards in bulletproof vests, clutching pump-action shotguns to their hearts like NRA faithful about to recite the pledge of allegiance.

The security presence was warranted. For months preceding the trip, colleagues, friends and family had warned me of the dangers of travelling through a country where the official murder rate is 58.5 per 100,000 (almost ten times that of the United States).

As John Travolta pointed out to Samuel Jackson by way of a “royale with cheese”, it's the little differences between your country and the one you are visiting that are most striking. For example, the South African laxative industry had dispensed with the soothing quasi-medical branding found in Australia in favour of names like “Surge!”. The ice-cream trucks blared “Camptown Ladies” instead of “Greensleeves”, and a marking on the floor some four metres back from the ATM machines indicated the polite distance that should be maintained by the next in line.

When the elderly gent in front of me had finally figured out which account he wanted to withdraw funds from, I strode confidently towards the ATM, slipped my card into the slot and hesitated for a moment to take in the subtle yet marked differences between this machine and the ones I was used to.

Well, I might as well have shouted, “Hello everyone, I'm a naive tourist!” in all of South Africa's eleven official languages. A deep and friendly voice at my shoulder drew my attention with a polite, “Excuse me”. Being one of those phrases one automatically steps aside on hearing, I turned around and a beaming black man in his early twenties and an imported suit brushed past me. With lightning fingers and a quicksilver dexterity born of years of scamming, he hit the cancel button while instructing me to hold down a key on the opposite side of the machine. He then bade me adieu with a dashing smile and responded to my hearty “Thank you” with an equally magnanimous “My pleasure”.

I then stared at the screen bearing the instruction “Please insert card” as my brain struggled to make sense of the message my eyes were sending it. My heart raced and my body temperature soared to the point where streams of sweat sprinted down my neck as I realised that I'd been well and truly had. The techno-Fagin vanished quicker than my delusions of being streetwise, and as I searched for the nearest phone so I could call my bank and cancel the card, my eyes came to rest on a poster not half a metre from the cash machine. It bore a depiction of a hulking assailant holding a knife to the throat of a woman at an ATM. It turned out to be a public service announcement bearing the warning, “Don't accept help from anyone”.

After sympathetic staff at a nearby bank helped me take the necessary action to ensure Mr Two-Piece wasn't going to take his girlfriend on a coke-fuelled Mauritian getaway thanks to my generosity, I called my sister who lived nearby to tell her what had happened. Her reaction? “Welcome to South Africa.”

From its very birth Johannesburg has been a city of scammers, shammers, vagabonds and opportunists looking to make a fast buck. And it was an Australian who started it all.

George Harrison was an itinerant stonemason and prospector who found some casual building work for a widow on a farm called Langlaagte. It was located about seventy kilometres south of Pretoria, the capital of the independent Zuid Afrikaanse Republiek which had been founded by the Boers after they left the Cape to escape British rule. The year was 1886 and I like to think that George was taking a smoko and casting a lazy gaze around him when a glint on the ground caught his eye. What he correctly identified as gold was in fact the tip of a mother lode over 500 kilometres long. A monumentally important discovery was followed by a monumentally moronic decision. Having received a free discoverer's claim, Harrison sold it a few months later for £10. With that he walked away from a reef so lavish that within eleven years it was supplying 22.5 per cent of the world's gold.

Only three years after Harrison disappeared over the horizon in the direction of a no-horse town called Barberton, Johannesburg was the biggest settlement in South Africa.

The burgeoning mining town was flooded with diggers from around the world. Most had big dreams and few morals. Working with picks, shovels, hammers and pans, many made fortunes in months and lost them in weeks or days. The predictable coterie of hookers, pimps, moonshine bandits and standover men were also drawn to the goldfields like collagen to a fading starlet. By the time the new century rolled around, Johannesburg's miners could see it in at one of ninety-seven brothels in the city – each offering around a dozen ladies at £1 “a time” or £5 for all night.

So debauched was daily life on the reef that an Australian journalist who visited the area in 1910 was compelled to note, “Ancient Nineveh and Babylon have been revived. Johannesburg is their twentieth century prototype. It is a city of unbridled squander and unfathomable squalor.”

The loose ways of the new city did not sit well with the staunchly Calvinistic government just over the horizon to the north. However, geology soon put paid to their fears of a Sodom next door.

Although the reef delivered consistently spectacular amounts of ore, it was of a particularly low grade and extended ever more deeply underground. This meant that the continued exploitation of the gold seam would require four crucial components: massive investment, vast quantities of cheap labour, technical ability and administrative experience in running an enterprise of this magnitude. Enter the monolithic mining companies that had emerged from the scramble for diamonds begun in the Kimberley area to the west in 1873. Just as they had done in the diamond fields, these Titans flexed their considerable muscle and muscled out the individual diggers.

This suited the government rather nicely – as it would, considering the fact that these Boers were bankrupt. It also corresponded with the recommendations of the chief of the Mines Department, one CJ Joubert, a farmer who by all accounts didn't know his ore from his elbow. After holding numerous meetings with diggers and mining magnates, he set out a plan which was as eerily prophetic as it was far-reaching: “We do not recommend that the fields should be thrown open to individuals as the need for costly machinery calls for a large amount of capital. There is a danger that men who have staked off good claims will be unable to work them, but be forced to leave and, through necessity, take to lawless ways.”

And so it remains in the City of Gold. One of the few major world cities located on neither a river nor a coastline, it was founded and sustained by avarice. Sitting at 1500 metres above sea level on a wind-blown plateau, it bakes like a Christmas turkey in summer and is coated with frost most mornings in winter. The only reason people came here and continue to do so is to worship at the altar of cash in the holy house of conspicuous consumption.

Want the money for that BMW (which in the townships stands for Break My Window), luxury apartment or diamond to melt your girl's heart? You have two choices: learn to earn or shoot to loot. In a country where unemployment hovers around the 40 per cent mark and the social welfare system has imploded, fists, blades and bullets are for many the only means of rectifying economic disparity.

In 1998 surveys indicated that 83 per cent of the total South African population believed the police had “zero control of crime”. When it came to simply feeling safe, 56 per cent of whites said, “Not me”, while 43 per cent of the black population felt the same way. And who could blame them? Between 1994 and 1998 the attempted murder rate climbed by 7.8 per cent, rape increased by 16 per cent (topping the world rankings), assault – and if that's not enough, how do you like this for a qualification – with intent to produce grievous bodily harm shot up by 11 per cent and residential housebreaking soared by 17 per cent. To put this in perspective, for the 3.5 Australians murdered per 100,000 in 1996, 61 South Africans suffered the same fate.

With the staggering amount of relative wealth concentrated in Johannesburg's ritzy northern suburbs, it's hardly surprising that many residents live in a perpetual state of anxiety brought on by the lifestyle they – or, as is often the case, their parents – worked so hard to attain. Homes have become citadels in which every window has bars, each door is double-bolted and the family's bedrooms are sealed off from the rest of the house by an internal gate. On the perimeter, enormous concrete barriers masquerading as fences are topped with razor wire and spikes designed to penetrate bone. High-voltage cabling is another popular deterrent. These houses resemble that middle portion of a mozzie zapper, complete with intermittent blue sparks and a low hum.

Many homes have panic buttons in every room and the cutting-edge electronic surveillance systems normally reserved for embassies. One alarm is all it takes for a private SWAT team bristling with high-calibre hardware to be on your doorstep within seconds. Visit one of these palatial abodes for a traditional Sunday braai (barbecue) by the pool and the topic of immigration will inevitably arise. At which point someone will counter, “But where else in the world could we live like this?” Unable to penetrate the domestic fortification, Johannesburg's bandits lie in wait outside and attack as residents leave or return.

Sentry boxes now stand at the top and bottom of streets I once tore along on my bike. What makes this all the more poxy is that, for all its faults and sins, Johannesburg has some of the world's most beautiful suburban streetscapes and is regarded as a globally significant noncommercial forest. In some places you can't see the security for the trees.

Thanks to the deep pockets and aesthetic whims of the city's founding fathers, the area north of the CBD is one of the most extensively wooded urban areas on the planet. I grew up in the suburbs of Parkwood and Saxonwold on streets that ran beneath a lilac canopy of jacaranda boughs and were lined with verges of soft buffalo grass. As far as vestiges of privilege go, they were bewitchingly beautiful.

Curious to see whether this was still the case, I left Sandton City – one credit card lighter – and returned to my childhood street, Rutland Road. I asked a security guard manning the boom gate if I would be able to wander through for old times' sake. He struck me as the type who had a nickname for his gun – along the lines of Hot Lead Mama or Princess Recoil.

After explaining that I was on a journey of rediscovery which would eventually form a book, and acknowledging that I technically didn't have any business on the street, he picked up his two-way radio to confer with a colleague. An animated conversation in Sotho punctuated by broad smiles and laughter followed.

Having ascertained that the risk of my carjacking a resident was roughly equal to that of Yasser Arafat converting to Judaism, he said he'd let me proceed for R50 ($10).

It was worth every cent. One of the things no one tells you about migration is how many memories stay behind. The big ones – weddings, bar mitzvahs and anything else that demands a buffet – travel with you, but ones like the smells, sounds and even the way the light dripped through the trees on the street where you lived can only be accessed by going back. Of course, as much had changed as remained the same. When I lived there – not in a double or single storey, but split level, thank you very much – it was whites only. Even if a black, coloured or Indian had the means to buy a property here, they would be barred from doing so by the Group Areas Act which forbade such intermingling.

Now the cash bought you the flash, and a broad ethnic mix of residents viewed me with mild concern as I shuffled along the block with the glazed grin that can only be brought on by deep nostalgia or misreading Prozac dosage.

The mores of urban survival are surprisingly easy to acquire and I have felt the suspicion of strangers slipping around my shoulders like a familiar cloak whenever I have returned to Johannesburg.

My on-edge vigilance was aided by the fact that I had been besieged with warnings at home and on arrival. One of the most memorable came from a colleague who instructed me to jump as high as possible on hearing any loud bangs. “That way,” she said cheerily, “the bullets will hit you in the legs.”

The two most chilling caveats came from separate cousins. The first instructed me: “Never give a taxi driver the bird – they will shoot you for less”. The second advised: “If you do have to stop at a robot [a traffic light to you and me], don't pull up right to the white line. I always stop about twenty metres away. It lets me see anyone hiding near the intersection plus gives me room to pick up speed if I have to knock someone over to make my escape.”

To the Australian psyche this may sound like paranoia taken to debilitating extremes, but for the thousands of South Africans who have lost not only their sense of security but family and friends as the result of carjackings, it's simply a matter of making it home alive. This form of crime has become a growth sector in Johannesburg as the result of increasingly sophisticated electronic alarms and disabling systems. To steal a car, someone has to be in it.