#9

Cardboard City (1993)

The land grew thirsty on the eve of liberation. That experiment – the ruralisation of African people – was failing. The land refused to bear them any longer. What the apartheid project inherited from colonialism and had formalised, was giving way to the forces of 20^th Century society. The “quiet encroachment of the ordinary”, as it is now termed, had begun its work of undoing a reality that had established and maintained itself for decades in the post-war South African Apartheid-era world. The city had become a site of struggle once again, and those who had been removed from sight for over 40 years began to creep into the city.

Yet it still wasn’t a daytime struggle. It was hidden in the darkness of night, shrouded by long grass in the open fields of traffic islands, and the recesses afforded by shop doorways and alleys across the city. It was a “quiet encroachment” indeed, but there was nothing ‘ordinary’ about it. It was a shadow that fell upon the city, a shadow hidden in the moonlight of the night. It cast a new face upon the city, and even though it would be gone in the morning, each night it appeared as though some errant artist had sketched over the previously overlooked parts of the city that hosted the unrecognised potential for settlement – albeit temporary – that had now become exploited to its hilt. These sketches had popped up into three dimensions, and its outlines were that of jagged cardboard edges; the bricks and mortar of this makeshift city. 

I witnessed it first-hand.

Each Friday and Saturday night I worked a shift at Fun Land. Each night I got on the microphone,

“Everybody’s a winner at the Camel Derby!”

Ten per cent of the takings is what it took for me to give myself to such dubious employment. “The city where the fun never sets” blared the advertisements as I enticed minors into the transient excitement of consumption, one that was disguised as play by the blinking lights and honking hooters of the Camel Derby.

The walk home was a long midnight one, from Point road to Overport, one that took me through the full swathe of the city proper. I saw many huddled up bodies, eyes closed, yet foreheads crinkling as if to ward off the dull glow of the sodium lights that lined the streets. A cardboard box the only shelter from the night air, thick and humid, rendering this shelter unnecessary, except as a demarcation of territory, however transient, however small. A reminder that each claims a space in the world, and must defend it, whether actively or passively, to remain in it.

I claimed my pay each night and walked home through the shapeshifting city intent to defend it come what may. Yet I never encountered any harm. I never encountered anything to fear. I encountered nothing more than the stillness of night, and I feared the walk through the white neighbourhoods far more than I feared the cardboard city.

The city’s established residents began to arm themselves more than they had before. The fear of crime and violence merged with the fear of the shadow that the informal, shifting and discontinuous refugee camp – one that had seeded and cultivated rapidly within the city – had cast upon their everyday expectations; of maintaining an abnormal arrangement undisturbed. And refugees they were, from centuries of ignominy, deception and greed. People who had lost everything; whose new beginnings had been skewed to meet the ends of their oppressors. Yet they were met with suspicion, beatings and bullets, as was historical tradition.

Humanity failed itself, as it would do so over and over again in the city of my birth, and elsewhere. That impulse, that automatic reaction, too often rising before compassion, before empathy, before insight. That notion of possession, would negate society’s evolution, its potential to go beyond the normal scuppered by the average of us. And so the average of us is what we reaped in the transition of the city. 

***Note: To view the previous chapter of Fragments click here.

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