Learning to love failure

I love the poem 'Learning to Love Failure' by Gabeba Baderoon:

"Two swallows tumble
like crumpled paper
after each other.
The camera fails again
and again to find the place
where life will fly through its aperture.
In the meanwhile, the swallows fall
like two crescent moons from the sky.
Fleeting tails in a corner of emptiness
just leaving the frame,
the photographer filming the swallows
has to learn to love failure,
how the almost having of the thing
is true in itself."

The notion of "almost having the thing" being "true in itself"  makes me think of South Africa - our hopes of the new democracy and our daily disappointments. Of course the "almost having of the thing" is blatant at a global level too. And it is true of living in Bez Valley. There is a truth in the valley, though it is not the mountain top. The biblical character Moses was shown the "promised land' but he never actually got there. We want completion and finality but how often do we get it?  It is hard to accept that what we have right now, right here, has a truth of its own. 

Plumbing in Bez Valley

Before sunrise I am awoken by dripping water on the bathroom ceiling. At seven, I call Mr Khoza, a self-employed plumber who lives in a backroom in 8^th Avenue. 

He rings the bell at the gate persistently. When I arrive at the front door, he is holding a copy of the 'Joburg East Express' in front of his face. He keeps it there for a few minutes. I wait.  Finally, with intense irritation and impatience, he enters the house.

In the bathroom we perform our usual song and dance routine which involves placing my small ladder on top of my small kitchen table so that once he reaches the highest rung, Mr Khoza can take one foot off the ladder and place it precariously on top of the door in order to hoist himself up into the bathroom ceiling and inspect my archaic geyeser’s latest affliction.

He disappears into the black hole. I wait nervously for his response. His diagnosis is always aggressive, incoherent, and turbulent. This is partly because he was apprenticed to a temperamental Portuguese plumber with a very limited English vocabulary for many years and partly because Mr Khoza - with good reason - is cautious not to commit himself.

The expletives stream out of his mouth, like an overflowing pot of food on the boil. He shakes his head. "It's fucked," he says. I have to establish whether the problem is redeemable or terminal so I try and get him to elaborate. "Fucked ! Fucked!" he says forcefully several times, spluttering with intensity, apparently believing that the weight of emotion behind the words should be sufficient to make a simple-minded person like me comprehend. "Little fucked or big fucked?" I probe. "Fucked! Fucked! Fucked!" He shouts, beads of sweat breaking out on his frustrated face.

After several phone calls to Mr Karam who owns the plumbing supply shop down the road, I give Mr Khoza the money to buy the parts.

I am still handing him lit candles hours later (I can't find my torch and Mr Khoza doesn’t have conventional plumbing tools to see in the dark).

Finally, the dripping sound gurgles and gasps and dies. Mr Khoza descends from the heavens, wreathed with an aura of satisfaction and achievement.

I am dizzy and so exhausted that I feel that my limbs have been dislocated from their sockets by the time I see him off the property. We stand at the gate like an old married couple, depleted by a domestic row that has been raging like a mountain fire for many years, leaving miles upon miles of scorched earth in its wake.

I observe that Mr. Khoza looks even older and more shriveled than he did when he arrived, his hair standing on end like a sucked mango, his shoulders stooped from the stress of his trade and the tyranny of his emotions.

With relief I wave him on his way, marveling that despite the fact that I feel like a victim of post-traumatic stress, the roots of our association go so deep into our individual and national pasts that our future is inevitably intertwined, like a creeper that has been growing along the walls of an ancient building for so long that it has become embedded in the structure.

Poverty in Bez Valley

On an average Friday, the day that the Pikitup truck collects, the sound of hawkers and vendors pushing their carts or stolen supermarket trolleys full of bits and pieces to the local dump for whatever few cents they can get for waste starts in the early hours of the  morning.

There are different sounds depending on the vehicles used; which supermarket the trolleys originate from perhaps; or the nature of the goods: The clunk-clunk-clunk of metal waste; the high-pitched clinking sound of glass bottles; and the thud of a mixed bag of goods. The visuals of the trolleys, and their owners, demand their own, separate exploration.

I am not attuned to the nuances of these sounds. I am trying to listen to them in a new way. I am inclined to lump them together under the umbrella of poverty and desolation.

The noises made by the trolleys or carts or makeshift conveyors of goods are usually - almost always - accompanied by the sound of coughing and spitting. I don’t actually hear the phlegm splattering onto the pavement but I imagine it. I have become over-sensitive to spitting after I saw some bloodstained phlegm on the pavement.

It lay in a strange shape like the Tarot card for sorrow in some packs, or a child's sticker of a broken heart, or the shattered skull of a misguided bird that has flown into glass thinking it is sky.

Prophets and healers

Pamphlets promoting ‘prophets’ and ‘healers’ are distributed throughout Johannesburg. I collect several on the drive from Bruma to Joubert Park.

Opposite Joubert Park in Wolmarans Street, a block away from what was once the Presbyterian Church, an entire wall is devoted to advertisements for cheap abortions, penis enlargement and healings and redemption from a wide variety of physical, spiritual and material disease.

Dr. Ismail, specialist astrologist, herbalist and healer from Zanzibar brings back a lost lover even if lost for a long time; offers supernatural luck to win the lotto, casino, dice, horse races and black jack; shows who your enemies are using a mirror and water; and recovers stolen property.

Prof. Wakho, hailed as the herbalist of the year in East Africa, can get you married to that lover of your life in a short time and seal the marriage with eternal love and happiness; remove bad spells from home and business; and enlarge a penis in both length and girth permanently.

Prophet Eli’s herbs offer power to a weak penis; help a woman discover the secret to managing her husband or boyfriend forever; give a constant feeling for sex; kill parasites that cause drug addiction; stop abnormal sweating; and attract customers to any business.

"...the Mountaintop of our desires..."

When Carlos from 190 had his Pikitup bin stolen, I painted mine orange and stuck multi-coloured stars and feathers and horseshoes and bells and moons and smiley faces around a large, glitzy sticker of the madonna and child. The madonna had sparks exploding into a night sky from her halo and she looked quite scary.

I hoped to ward off superstitious thieves or at least give the police something to go on. I could call the flying squad and tell them an orange bin, liberally adorned with children’s stickers and religious paraphernalia, was being wheeled somewhere in the vicinity.

It worked for a while but perhaps because of the buildup of tensions – and trash - in the weeks of the strike, on the first day Pikitup workers were back on the streets, somebody ripped the madonna from the front of the bin, apparently with some force, because the paint went too, leaving a black hole.

Contemplating the hole made me think of life lived in the Valley.  Valleys are generally considered to be places from which one looks up at the mountain in the hope of arriving there some day.  Biblical imagery is vivid. Nelson Mandela used it: “There is no easy walk to freedom… many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires….”

 So here I am in Bez Valley, still aspiring.

Eighth Avenue stretches from Queens High in Kensington to the Ellis Park Stadium, which was apparently once a vast lake. Lakes and places of worship are part of the terrain. I am surrounded by the AFM Impact Church, the New Apostolic Church, the Reformed Seventh Day Adventist Church and the towering Kensington Fellowship Church. From time to time a duck taking time out from Rhodes Park or Bruma lake, settles on its steeple.

On the Bertrams side of Eighth Avenue is the imposing Masjid-E-Muqeemus Salaat and close by, the ‘Brotherhood of the Cross and Star’ and a deconsecrated synagogue, now the home of Jungian psychologist, Marianne Nielsen.

Religion ushers in each new day when my neighbour, Ahmed, leaves for the mosque before sunrise. In all seasons, I am awoken by the revving of his car engine between 5.30 and 6.00 a.m., followed by the call to prayer. Religious sounds, symbols and celebrations are integral to my life in Bez Valley.  The Adhaan, choirs rehearsing at the crack of dawn on a Sunday, children chanting verses from the Qur’an on weekday afternoons, church bells, Christmas, Easter, Ramadan, Eid.

Buying and selling

A car guard from the Democratic Republic of the Congo waves me into a parking place.  ‘Madame!’ he says with a French accent, bowing graciously.

Entering the shopping centre from the underground parking area I  notice that the shops where ‘African Foods’ and ‘Saucy Chips’ used to be are now empty. 

I walk past the bottle store, up the escalator, florist on the right, biscuit shop on the left,  pass the second hand cell phone shop and the dry cleaners, and into Pick ‘n Pay.  Looking across the to the opposite side of the escalators and down to ground level, I see one, two, three, four, more empty shops with ‘To Let’ signs on the windows. According to The caretaker there are 17 empty shops at Darras Centre.  “People haven't got money to pay rent... management is bad, and there is too much corruption”, he tells me.

Meanwhile, informal traders and small general stores and hairdressing salons are mushrooming in Bez Valley.  Traders are generally not South Africans though some are from other provinces - Limpopo and Mpumalanga. They tell me they are from Rwanda, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, DRC, Nigeria, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

A short distance away at Oriental City in Bruma and Chinatown in Cyrildene, there are no empty shops and new shops and restaurants open almost every day. 

Apostolic Faith Mission Church

Before the Apostolic Faith Mission became the Apostolic Faith Mission Impact Church, the caretaker of the property was a man called Elias, a Zimbabwean with a dark complexion and a dark demeanor. His wife, Dorothy, appeared at my gate one day. She said she was a “good Christian woman” looking for domestic work. I took her on. 

Her Christian fervor spilled over into her work. She would pray in tongues over the ironing, sometimes weeping copiously.

Over time she began to speak to me about the difficulties of being a Zimbabwean in South Africa. She had several sons who were constantly making their way over the border and then being deported, only to return again a few weeks later. 

Her marriage to Elias was an ongoing trial.   The couple slept in the sacristy of the church (the small room leading off the main place of worship in a Christian church in which sacred objects such as vessels and vestments are kept) and often in the middle of the night, Dorothy would be banished to the cold dark pews of the church for the night. The light switch was in the sacristy and Elias would guard it and refuse to switch it on, forcing the poor woman to fumble around in the dark in the church.

He was particularly violent and abusive when Dorothy prayed in tongues during the night, or when she was menstruating. 

After a night of sleeping on a wooden pew in the church (especially in winter), Dorothy would arrive for work with swollen eyes and a body heavy with grief and lack of sleep.

But as with so many abusive relationships, when she and Elias were getting on well, Dorothy’s face would glow with joy and fulfillment. All the ups in her marriage to Elias were attributed to Jesus and all the downs to Satan and although she would mutter her contempt for her husband from time to time, she did not want anyone to side with her and say anything bad about the wretched man.

One Saturday afternoon I went looking for Dorothy at the church. I had mislaid something I needed and thought she might know where it was. I found her in the kitchen leading off the church hall, preparing a huge meal for family members visiting from Zimbabwe.  She was evidently not pleased to see me and with a grim expression made a clutching and wrenching gesture towards her neck and the sides of her head. It took me a few minutes to realize that she was wearing the only valuable necklace and earrings I possessed.

After a distressing weekend thinking how I would deal with the issue of the missing jewelry, I waited for Dorothy to arrive for work on Monday, imagining that she would explain why she had borrowed the necklace and earrings and return them, and everything would return to normal. But she never came back to work.

Elias said she had gone back to Zimbabwe but I see her in the streets of Bez Valley or at Darras Centre from time to time.  Once, she waved.

*Not their real names.

Stallion Security

The robbers tried to force their way through the front door but were  unsuccessful so they kicked open the metal gate on the side of the house and hacked through the back door. They stole my laptop but were forced to abandon other equipment and a bag full of clothes in the back garden when the police arrived. They escaped over the roof of the outbuildings, apparently over my neighbour Mind Tshabangu’s roof and onto the roof of the Nigerian man who has bought the house next door to Mind and rents out rooms to a constantly shifting migrant population.    

Finally I succumb to pressure and take out a contract with Stallion Security. I remember Sheena Duncan telling me once that she contracted an armed response company on condition that they responded without arms. I try to ask for this but my request is evidently completely inexplicable to the agent.

My first encounter with the armed response squad is when the technicians accidentally set off the alarm while the system is being installed. A burly chap with muscles and tight pants stretched over his genitals jumps the fence and appears abruptly at the front door, his hand on a  gun in his belt. After so many years of being a committed pacifist, I experience this progression (or rather, regression) as a sense of personal failure, a violation of principle, almost a loss of soul.