# 10

Euphoria (1995)

 With the advent of the new came many wonders and delights. The great potentials of natality afforded us by transition ushered in a wave of new creations and experiences. We all rode the wave, giddy with the euphoria of newly discovered freedoms. We rose and crashed together upon the new shores, which held so much promise and discovery. New treasures they were, and we gobbled them up greedily, without noting their transience; that they too were ghosts in the night.

And yet there was so much that was new, so much that we celebrated; that the gaping wounds of the city became set without us noticing it. And what the city’s photographer had dubbed it, “Imperial Ghetto”, accelerated into its next phase; the dissolution of the city’s whiteness.

The first to go were the boutique shops; they moved out to the suburban malls that had sprung up in the wake of the first signs of our new freedom; the freedom of the cardboard city.

To the businessmen and owners of property, freedom meant re-joining the world, and having access to all it had to offer. The end of sanctions also held the promise of prosperity. Yet prosperity depended on having a good threshold of clientele; if they were uncomfortable frequenting your location, then it was best to move to somewhere they felt safer, protected, comfortably separated from the milieu that had descended upon the spaces that they had once exclusively enjoyed.

So they broke from the city, and wrenched out its artificial heart, a heart that had beaten for decades, maintaining a synthetic life, a masquerade of it. Yet even though that heart was false, its removal took much with it. White faces became rarer, they retreated to the suburbs to the north, where they were comfortably hidden, protected from the ‘invasion’; that quiet encroachment that had descended upon the city proper.

Yet we, the youth, were oblivious to the hollowing out of the city that was to become the re-segregation of it. We were caught in the midst of an explosion of music, art and celebration; exuberance characterised our existence and we couldn’t wait to see what happened next. The norms, we thought, were being broken. We were convinced that the new was emerging, and we rushed in to witness it, to be with it, and part of it. We saw the sun set and rise, and we joined hands to salute its departure, and usher in its arrival; sand between our toes, the ocean before us, our journey just beginning.

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