# 18

The Signal

A fragmented existence,

In combination with,

Fragmented histories,

In the era of the product,

Produces Lazarus of Lazaraen ontology,

Bewildered, un-rooted, unhinged ...

Part this,

Part that,

All simultaneously unfolding,

Amidst the noise,

And confusion,

Its depths and width,

Seemingly infinite.

To be alive in it,

And with it,

Wholly present,

In the awareness of the multiple,

To be wholly in what we are of,

The angels and demons,

The bliss and the pain,

The loss and the gain,

The sane and the insane.

To sit with it all,

Until the knots relax,

And slip/slip,

Oh what struggle for clarity amidst the noise,

When you are deafened, enveloped,

By the endless crackling,

Creeping in through every crevice,

Penetrating every crack,

Filtering through every seam,

Infiltrating to the core,

Colouring all within and without.

The signal only emerges from this awareness,

An uncompromisingly inviting one,

One that does not seek to block or delete,

But releases what it grasps,

That lets it slip through one’s fingers,

Light, gentle,

Like a whisper, a soft breeze.

If it settles,

Let it be only a momentary settling,

Breath on a window pane,

That cannot hold its place.

When you act, act completely,

And when you pause, let it be the same,

For action and non-action are actions all the same,

Each to be employed with care, with devotion,

Lest the demons rise up through the cracks in our awareness,

And take over,

Leading us to who knows where,

And to who knows what.

The fight always moves both inward and outward,

It is never unidirectional,

That awareness,

Is the mark of true action,

That seeks real change,

Action that unlocks the cycles from their loci,

That breaks with the past,

That births the new,

And restores life to the living,

Raising Lazarus from the dead,

Breathing life into the necropolis.

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# 17

The Trials

So when the trials and tests are presented, we have but one choice if we are to move beyond mere survival. We must reach into the shadows and pull out the monsters, bring them into the light. We can hope that they will change, transform, but we must never again falter in our vigilance. We must always hold them to account. And we must always test them against principle.

Whether the monsters are ours, or that of our conquerors, we must level them against principle. We must measure and bind them with principle. For principles are not relative. They can be agreed upon, and so guide us beyond into the new that we desire. Principles must be the sentinels that guard the path to the future if we are to overcome that which has bound us in the past, and that which binds us today. A new world is not possible without it.

The breaking of cycles,

The birth of the new,

The emerging Proteus rises up out of the sea only when it can overcome the thick binding sameness of it – its constancy, its viscosity – and elevate above it. Birth is never easy, it requires rupture, and pain, the anxiety and anticipation of it churning and wrenching in the belly.

We must enter into the shadows with principle as our talisman, our guard against the monsters that lurk within the depths. We must root them out, like demons, and force them into a great purging, so that we may clean them out of our souls, and that of our conquerors. We must not relent, we must not give in. We must go into it with courage. We must never surrender.

We can retreat, we can change tack. We can adapt with the flow of events. But we must never back down from monsters, lest they rule over us forever and render us slaves to their will.

New worlds are born out of the violent death of the old. It must be severed from it, yet it must suckle it. Herein the contradiction that is central to it, that the new emerges in intimate embrace with the past.

It rises up from the sea, breaking with it, but always in and of it. And so, we must never cease to take our hunt into the darknesses and the recesses that monsters make their beds in; where they fester and work their wicked magic. We must rudely awaken them from their slumbers. We must shake them out of their comforts and draw them out from the shadows. For only in the cold light of day can they be slain, laid to rest, rendered bare and naked before us.

Our monsters, and theirs, must all be brought out into the open, so that we can make sense of them, before dismantling them. Yes, we must yet still sever their heads, and hold them up in victory. We must still sound our battle cries out loud. But we must return from the sacrificial altar without our monsters; and we must not acquire new ones in the process of freeing ourselves from the old. We must break free of them at every turn; remain vigilant to the shape-shifters amongst them. Oh what perseverance freedom requires; what a marathon freedom is ...

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# 16

Shadows

And so, as it begins with every philosophical quest, I began with the shadows; shadows ever resident, that accompany all that is present, dependent only on the illumination of the sun during daytime. Growing and receding as it approaches and surpasses its zenith, at its height hiding all shadows, but only for a moment. For momentary reprieves are all we can hope for. To be alive is to be resident with all histories, to live with time as multiplicity.

What fraught existence is this? To be forever arrested by shadows, that dip beneath the waves only to disperse, collect and re-emerge again? Where what hell we make on earth can never be outlived. The higher we construct our myths the longer their shadows.

Oh what torture for the would-be architects of the mind, and the soul. Oh what purgatory is everyday existence? Where emotions lurking in the shadows become windows on the fabric of our inheritance.

For is it not true that it is the poverty of our souls, that emptiness within us where our treasure should lie, that prevented us, time and time again, from rising up? That if we eventually freed ourselves we could have done it all along? It is that absence that becomes visible in the shadows.

Is it not true that this is not healing that we speak of, but restoring? And that in order to restore we must first search for what has been lost?

There are objects that have been lost, and they lie in plain view, but can the re-acquisition of them restore us? Or must we look to the shadows if we are to un-yoke? If we are to become whole again, un-break ourselves, free ourselves from the ever-resident spectre of the whip? If we are to out-stride the fear of the noose? If we are to love again, to feel again, and seek comfort in the glow of our fullness, that like the sun, brightens the landscape so that shadows are made visible, reach-able, tangible.

What is this restoration, that requires us to carry wounds and fears forward with us?

It is what the realm of the possible offers us, a breaking of cycles, an end to systems that can only be actualised through full awareness; through carrying but not monopolising that pain of being reduced, erased, rendered invisible to our conquerors as much as ourselves.

When there is no romance in the overt, there is often poetry in the covert. Where there is no freedom in the explicit there can be freedom in the implicit. The external cannot restore the internal. Making true strength is not a matter of the procedures of success, or of ownership. It is a matter of going within, and finding relation to what lies without.

This is not metaphysical, but psychological. It is what has been re-rooted within us over and again by centuries of abuse. And to address the psychology we are compelled to embrace philosophy. For it is only philosophy that can provide an entry point to the unresolvable, the unimaginable.

For as it is only within the fullness of the sun that shadows become visible, it is only with philosophy that the deeper movements of the mind and soul become discernible. Philosophy is the vessel with which we travel within so that we can understand what we chart without. Legality cannot free anyone, neither can repossession; freedom is the product of understanding, and understanding is the work of philosophy.

That is, philosophy is the light that reaches into the darkness of ourselves and into history; the present and the future. It both illuminates and facilitates navigation of the shadows, and affords us the opportunity to venture into them, so what we may wrest our freedom from within the heart of the darkness that lies within. So that we may turn its gravity outward. For the shadows are where past and present coalesce, and the potentials for change arise.



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#15

Robben Island (2005)

I can see the island from here. White sunlight beams through the open window, accompanying the cool Atlantic sea air in a complement of warmth and cold to choose from. Warmth and cold dapple through and onto me like the colours of a spotted dog. The mix self-regulates, and renders itself pleasurable.

On some mornings the island is barely visible.  The air thickens around it forming a laced veil which deceives the mind into recognizing it as some distant section of the peninsula.  Could this be why it fades from memory so easily?  Because it is always elusive; sometimes there, sometimes not. It blends with the background, seemingly indistinct from the sea.

In the mind there is a conscious distinction between past and present but subconsciously and unconsciously we brush up against our personal past with every experience we have.  Every experience teases out our experiences of the past and we live out the past in the present in this way.  On a personal level we are indivisible from the past and manifest this past in present experience as a means of confronting the demons which the self must conquer in order to actualise itself.

 

Similarly, as a society, we are indivisible from our past, from generations of experiences, so we play out ancient dramas in the present.  While conceptually we imagine a past from which we neatly divide ourselves, the emotional state of a society or individual brings the past into the present as if time were irrelevant.  Tempers run hot over centuries, long trends and the scars of yesterday remain with us, supported and reinforced by emotional transfer from one generation to the next.

Scientifically, we love the idea of chronology, placing one event next to the other, creating discreteness between events in time so that we may reason the distance between us and the past.  Emotionally though, we are bound to our most significant experiences and events, the ones which had more impact, and can draw up into our experience of the present in a single breath.

What if then, in the emotional world, time is not absolute and neither is space?  What if all history is constantly superimposed in the present; through cycles which both individuals and mankind are bound to? A constant recycling of the past with every moment, where nothing is discrete and separate but everything continues; sometimes contiguous, sometimes non-linear, jumbled up, collapsing time and space?

 

What if every moment in the past were as relevant as if it occurred only yesterday?  Would that not explain the world we see today?  How can something as significant as the island so easily disappear from memory?  When Leopold’s ghost still haunts the Congo today, how can we forget our past in just fifteen years?

Is it more that we have become distracted, that consciously our avoidance and obsession with material gain, power and entry into the ‘new world’ of commerce and democracy has blinded us to the fact that we still rub up against our not too distant past with every new step we take into this ‘new’ future; where the poor are still hungry and the rich still greedy?"

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# 14

That meeting point ...

That meeting point, between literature and philosophy, began to occupy my every waking moment. Soon, it had arrested me entirely, and I could no longer stop myself from writing. I felt I had to write myself in to that interface, that meeting point.

There are rhythms that emerge when writing. Words, ideas, senses and emotions combine, dissolve, disperse and recombine. Meaning is transmitted in the interplay. The quest of writing is finding the words that unlock meaning. Writing is modelling and remodelling how words come together; about finding the combination that unlocks meaning, and gives expression to, or transmits sense and emotion the most aptly or accurately.

The interface is a place of discovery, a place of surprise, emergence. There is a chemistry between words and ideas that hosts the potential to yield unpredictable outcomes when philosophy meets literature. And as I wrote and rewrote with devotion, that chemistry became the sea in which life began to swim in me again.

At the interface I could dance. I could sketch and feint my way around the edges, dip into the abyss and return. The writing – or rather, the process of it – acted as a lifeline. I could plunge into the depths and be ensured of return.

I had already answered the question of what would ensue if I became lost in the deep, but I came to find it irresistible. For madness does not exist alone; it exists in combination, and the cocktail was a mix of the terrifying, the exciting, the mundane, the banal, and the enduring. To be at the edge of chaos, and to be able to pass into and out of it, made me feel powerful again.

My fears and anxieties retreated when I enacted the dance, and life flowed palpably within me during the moments of engagement. But perhaps the greatest awareness that grew within me, was the reality of infinity; that it was not just abstraction, but real, and that everything depended upon it. That without it there could be no existence; no finite, no real. These things possessed each other, and co-evolved to make things as they were. From this there was, and could be no escape.

The asymptotic was undeniably palpable. It resided in every judgement, every observation, every measurement – and yes – every emotion. Everything that we experienced was approximation. It is all we are capable of. We are always at the edges, always caught in cycles. It is in this sense that our existence embraces the infinite.

Nothing as absence – in its absolute sense – cannot exist without the infinite. They are a complex duality. There is noise in silence as much as there is silence in noise.

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#13

The Noise (2005)

I will be the first to admit that when my anger finally arrived, in its totality, it raised my vanities with it. I lost myself to superfluity to cope with it. I buried myself in the superficial, rather than burn in the fire of rage. I pivoted and whirled, threw myself into the reckless oblivion of the night, and awoke many times devoid of any coherent memory of it. But as I sobered the memories would return, and I would throw myself back into it all again. On and on it went, many faces and naked bodies, many empty glasses and dusty panels, yet precious few moments of truth.

Indeed, my vanity became a crutch, but it could not hold against the inevitability of emotion. It could not hold in the spaces where I found myself alone. I ceased to look into mirrors, as I could barely stand to see what I saw. For what does vanity bring but itself? It is not an offering, neither is it a gift. A false commodity is what it is; fragile, wicked and untrue. But as is its nature, it went deeper and deeper, infecting the host down to its roots.

That original interruption – that estrangement – set in motion a series of twists and turns that led me to lose my way. In hindsight, it was but a small push, a slight that contained hidden meanings that I would have done best not to dwell on, but it sat within me like a surgeon’s scalpel that had been sown up within me, forgotten deep within the folds of tissue that had now healed over it, and around it.

But its incisive edge seemed to respond to my movements, splitting me from within, dividing me inch by inch. I entered into the process of becoming two just to cope with the agony of it. It so assailed me that I created another half to hide from it.

I could feel it doing its work, but I couldn’t fathom why it mattered so much. It was as though it was merely a product of something else that I could no longer reach, no longer touch, something left behind in the passage between being and becoming. I became determined to find it, determined to track down the origins of this pain, the roots of it, the ultimate causes of it.

And so I began my descent into the fractal geometry of memory, and my mind bore the burden of multiplicity like it had never done before. The deeper I searched, the more it appeared that there would always be more, that there was a chain of infinite causes, and I could never reach the end of it. They blurred, sometimes appearing as one, sometimes as infinite.

Eventually, I lost sight of the origins. I unhinged from the present and spiralled into chaos. Memory, sense and emotion combined. I lost myself to the noise, and joined the all-pervasive tremble of the origins of the universe, of everything.

I broke, became untethered, and floated into the unreal; where truths and falsehoods became one, where distinction ceased. I was no more, neither was the mind. Only the body remained, haunted by an uncertain spirit.

Yes … I broke. And in breaking, the vanities that had once sustained me, became the very demons that I had sought to avoid by inflating myself. They circled in on me and took possession of my mind, as though a wizard had wrought a spell upon me. I bumbled through each day, my only thought of sleep, of escape from this breaking, this brokenness that laid me bare before the world.

The spirits of the necropolis embraced me. I felt them encircling my chest, restricting my breath, drawing me inward. Fear accompanied the stifling weight of it. It was ever so slight, yet it still wrought a tension within me, so that it felt more like a contraction; a confinement that grew tighter as the yoke was wrestled.

A strangling ensued, but it was not of the quick type; it lingered for a long time and did not conclude. Even when it had released, it still held on. It released and reset, encircling me more with each reprieve, contracting thereafter again. I needed a way out but the compression, and the agony of that scalpel within, combined to fix me into a state of dull oblivion. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t move. What way out of this insanity?

So what began my descent - that spiral - into the fractal geometry of memory, ceased to matter anymore. What mattered was the dance I enacted to avoid the descent into chaos. The dance that gave meaning to it all; even if objectively there was none to speak of.

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# 12

Augna 25980 (1884)

Slavery didn’t end when it did. Ask Bhagoo’s son. Ask him what the good decent Mr Meikle and his wife did to him. Ask him – if you can find him – what the lash of a riding crop feels like, his feet trussed up to the rafters, his body hanging powerless, face to the floor, unable to escape, wishing that the ropes would break and he would crush his head in the fall. But they let him hang there for over an hour instead, so that his ankles distended and the blood pooled in his head till it was ready to burst. Bhagoo’s son, upside-down, dying of thirst, writhing in agony with each lash. Ask Bhagoo’s son what all of that feels like, at ten years of age, and then pray do tell me, please offer me your version of history, of that neatly cauterised historical date that speaks of your beneficence, your civilisation; of how slavery ended across the empire through the virtue of good church-goers who said no to sugar in their tea.

Ask Bhagoo, how his heart disintegrated, when his child disappeared forever, never to be seen again. That child that he had nursed through fevers, fed with paltry rations, and hoped against hope, would move an inch beyond the existence that his father endured on this strange, new continent so that he could give him a better life. Ask Bhagoo where his appeals for release from his master went, ask him what it means to be powerless, no longer a father, no longer a man, no longer able to endure the tragedies that his existence thrust upon him. Forcing him, beating him into a servility and acquiescence that belied his slow burning rage. Ask Bhagoo what it means to be unable to protect your child when your master and his wife take possession of his young body and determine that he should be punished.

It’s time to reveal a family secret. My great grandfather killed a white man with a half-brick while working on the railroad. We never talk about it. It didn’t sit well with our residency in the Christian middle classes, and with our upward mobility from the railway barracks. Apparently, that white man was filled with hate. He vilified and disparaged men who worked far harder than he did because he felt it was his place to do so. It was as though it was his birth-right to violate them, as though their bodies didn’t break, as though their pores didn’t open under the burden of the great heat and dust of the railways, as though they were beasts of burden, to be whipped until they dropped, until they surrendered to their ends.

So my great grandfather opened up his skull with a half-brick as the rest of them looked on. Yet none of them ever uttered a word of it. They unionised, and organised, and made men of themselves with what little they could.

So my great grandfather was a murderer, yet he is my hero, as he was to my father. He was a hard man with hardened hands, but a great teacher of the strength of the spirit, of the courage it takes to refuse oppression, to claim your humanity through brute force, through direct confrontation. Gandhi defeated the British Empire without firing a single bullet you say, but you know little of how tyrants are defeated. You are merely repeating what you’ve heard said, it does not come from the reality of struggle; from the fire that persecution casts you into, that fire that transforms you, remakes  you, for better or for worse.

And we were remade worse in many ways. There was no limit to the remaking of suffering, to the extent to which man’s cruelty can be continued. As Bhagoo’s son Augna learned, his body was not his, it was not even his fathers. It belonged to a white man and a white woman, and they could do with it what they liked, when they liked. Yet trauma is a strange thing, it makes more of itself. And as a ten year old boy, I found myself threatened with a phrase repeated so often that it had become a casual trope. That phrase so often reiterated as threats to mere  children,

“I’ll hang you up from the rafters and whip you!”

So it came to be that some parents hung up their children up from the rafters and whipped them in service of a discipline that was meted out to slaves. That our parents became our slave-masters before we encountered them in the world. That they came to believe that they were preparing us for the world. That they remade us in the image of slaves, so fearful were they that we would dream of another existence. “Spare the rod and spoil the child!” they regurgitated, echoing a history that they could by then scarcely remember. It is indeed true that history repeats itself, but it is little appreciated what myriad avenues that repetition recurs along.

And as the waters part, after many centuries, this is a moment that we must seize for ourselves, and our own. A moment that necessitates moving inward as much as outward. That it is time to confront ourselves about our complicity with that oppression we claim to want to leave behind. That we trace it through every channel that it manifests, that we call it – and ourselves – to order.

That it is time to challenge our teachers and their teachings, for too long borrowed without reflection for the world they make and remake, and in whose image they make it. That it is time to police the police and remake our prisons. That it is time, above all, to ask our parents why they do our oppressor’s work for them. So that we can break with the chains of history, and remake love within us, and pass that on instead to the children we will bear as we make the world anew. That it is time to reach for a new heaven and a new earth.

So the time has come. The time is now. There is no other time to leave it to. It is time to rise up with the millions of voices and bodies that are mounting as a giant wave across the planet. And yet, I still have to ask you,

“Do you know that it is time?"

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# 11

For when all was said and done …

And yet what was this liberation? For when all was said and done, those who had lurked in the shadows and in the background of affairs, came forward to claim their share.

They had not cast their bodies against barbed wire, they had not faced bricks and bullets at the barricades. They had never seen the inside of a prison or missed a day of school.

They quietly went on, making ordinary of the abnormal, servicing the system that oppressed those around them. They got on with the business of their own progress, while the others broke their backs, lay in pools of blood, and were lain in shallow graves; their lives – and those they loved – shattered under the terror and the jackboot of the system they resisted.

Spare a thought, they would say, for those of us who “don’t want any trouble”. We are simple people, we just want to get on with our lives. Spare at thought, for those of us who have much to lose, for whom the immediacy of things cannot be broken, not for others, not for the future, not even for the present. You are asking us to interrupt our lives, and for what? What will all this achieve, anyway? Things stay the same, they do not change!

But when freedom was won they celebrated with us, invited us in to eat with them, and poured praise upon us. “Heroes”, they called us.

Over time, they revised their histories, laid claim to suffering, and to struggle, and made heroes of themselves, as though they had been the ones on the streets, facing the bullets. More and more they claimed our suffering and made it theirs. They confused their oppression, their brokenness, with struggle.

They became heroes to themselves. They convinced themselves of their own suffering and sacrifice, and quickly made currency of it in the new. After all, their uninterrupted lives – of studies completed, the acquisition of wealth, security and assets their ever-present priority – enabled them to exploit freedom better than those who had languished in the camps and prisons, or had fought on the streets.

And when the spoils of victory were to be awarded, they jostled and wrangled to the front of the queue. Every memory became filled with themselves, and soon; every path, every avenue, was quickly jammed by them. So in the end, there was nothing left for the others, namely those who had suffered the most.

Yet they claimed more, and consolidated, and re-consolidated, until the new became a vessel for re-birthing and reproducing the old. They colonised the corridors of power, like those who came before them, held on tightly to their gains, and defended them dutifully.

There was no measure, for how restrictive they became about maintaining the status quo, which was to retain the inherited abnormal; a charade, a performance. The language of duplicity replaced the language of hate; ‘cosmetic change’ it was dubbed. The cosmetics were superfluous, but they spread like a mould in wet climes nonetheless, covering everything in its path, sucking up nutrients, growing into a dense forest that could not be penetrated.

They became the infection that we had once feared, yet their claims were tendered as noble; their virtue beyond reproach. Comfortably ensconced in their neat living rooms, they preached volumes of their own good.

Those who had faded into the background when the struggles were at its height now moved to the front and centre of things. They occupied the centres of power, and strengthened themselves and their own through it, all the while, preening their new hair, proudly announcing their new cars and large houses for all to see; evidence they claimed, of success, of change. The new bourgeoisie, the nouveau riche, and the elite, became fishers of men and wealth, and they set in their hooks gleefully.

And those who had once suffered were robbed once again, but this time by those who understood the creeping passage of time, by those who effected the “slow effacement” of the breath on the mirror when freedom was won; the promise of a new future. How fragile our dreams of the new proved to be amidst the secure among us, among those who wanted no trouble. What was lost, was not to be regained, and they were the ones who made sure of it.

So when you ask me to spare a thought for those, who have no thought for others, I will spare a thought, but it will be just one. For a single thought is more than they deserve.

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# 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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#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. 

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