Hillbrow Blues OSCAR HEMER

It goes fast. Pretoria Street is shorter than he remembered it; he’s looking for the hotel on the right side whose name he has repressed, no, simply forgotten, but he doesn’t see any signs at all, nor any traces of bookshops, cafés or lunch restaurants.

Lots of people in the street, mostly young men, no suits or ties, a few older women, no commerce, shutters closed, the entire Carlton Hotel shut down like a ghost tower, the garage doors locked with chains, but no roadblocks or burning oil drums… The

Nigerians and the Zimbabweans have ruined the place, says the taxi driver with a matter- of-fact distaste that reminds him of his first taxi ride in Joburg fifteen years ago, that time with a white driver venting his contempt over the black hordes that had invaded the formerly secluded city. He stayed in the hotel whose name he doesn’t remember, with a view to the street, noisy, without air conditioning, cockroaches in the bathroom but otherwise neat and tidy. Apartheid was already history, like

Communism in Eastern Europe, TV showed Hill Street Blues dubbed to seSotho (he believes), interspersed with commercials for Ohlsson’s lager, the beer for the New

South Africa in the making. Double-deckers ran like shuttles along Hillbrow’s busy artery, studded with shops, cinemas, bars and restaurants where you could have breakfast at any time of the day; a block or two further down were open-24-hours cafés and bookshops, some of them amalgamated into book cafés. At Café Zurich, he had met Ivan Vladislavić, then in his early thirties, editor at the semi-clandestine

Ravan Press and the author of a well-received collection of short stories. He retained the memory of Ivan’s smile, leaning on the red PVC-coated sofa in the spacious venue. Café Zurich was to merge with near-by Café de Paris into the imaginary Café

Europa, the centre around which Hillbrow’s and South Africa’s transition evolves in the eyes and mind of retired proof-reader Aubrey Tearle, the main protagonist of The

Restless Supermarket (2001), a regular at the café and, in his own words, an incorrigible European, although he has never set foot outside South Africa. Tearle finds himself utterly disturbed by the rapidly declining standards of the emerging new order whose semiotics he is unwilling or unable to understand. In all his rigid conservatism and unreflecting racism, he evokes sympathy as he helplessly witnesses the crumbling of the world, as he has known it. Café Europa is eventually trashed, just like its real life models. On his last visit, Tearle literally wades through the debris of paper cups, toilet paper, bottles, crunched cheese snacks and scattered newspapers with their pages curling from the wooden spines, like moths that had flown too close to the chandeliers. But there is a certain ambiguity in the loathing; he is in the company of a young coloured woman who takes him out in the streets, out into the luring, frightening, violent, beautiful banality of Hillbrow.

Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to our Hilbrow, published almost simultaneously with Vladislavić’s novel, is set in the period immediately after, when the formerly orderly district, mostly inhabited by Eastern European emigrés, has already transmuted into the diverse, disorderly transit station for today’s new immigration from the rest of Africa. Mpe’s novel tells a dark and melodramatic story of a young man who arrives as a stranger to a Hillbrow reigned by violence, aids and xenophobia, where elemental humanity and civility have constantly to be negotiated.

To be welcomed to Mpe’s Hillbrow is to be embraced by vulnerability, compassion’s and hospitality’s weakened immune defence against the real politics of hatred and prejudice that the taxi driver so confidently conveys. But now the car is already out of the turmoil of Pretoria Street, tension is starting to wane as they turn towards

Observatory. There, towering over the border to Berea, is Ponte City, once South

Africa’s and the entire continent’s grandest residential building, a self-sufficient city within a city, fifty-four storeys upon seven levels of parking; now a ghost tower, the

Carlton’s twin, abandoned but not empty, taken over by the detested makwerekwere.

A drug den, snorts the driver, and the mere sight of the rows of black windows is sufficient to assure anyone that it is a place you would not want to live or even visit; he wonders how it is possible at all to inhabit the top floors, without an elevator – although one of the elevators is rumoured to function occasionally; his associations run to the hidden shantytown of Buenos Aires, Ciudad Oculta, where squatters occupied the skeleton of an uncompleted twelve-storey construction, an authentic ruin from the recent Argentinean melt-down; but this is different, this is unfathomable, as if Malmö’s Turning Torso within a few years were to be seized by asylum seekers pouring in from the Eurasian mainland, while the former tenants sought refuge behind triple security systems in the garden suburbs nearby… Is that a proof of prosperity, to simply abandon your tallest buildings and move onward when the imminent arrival of the barbarians is announced? Of a certain mentality, at least, to accept that existence is purely provisional and that the moment will inevitably come, sooner rather than later, when it is time for the tribe to move on…

Hence, Ponte City turns into an ambiguous symbol of the transformation that has indisputably taken place since he was here the first time; yes, exactly, taken place, because it is a transformation inscribed in the physical and imaginary shape of the city, as in the contemporary literature, which to a large extent is writing the city; mapping the territory, crossing the still visible demarcation lines, connecting and inhabiting the nightmarish no-go-zones and in-between-places.

He meets Ivan Vladislavić again at De Boekhuis in Melville, a smaller and more exclusive book-café in a much more suburban setting, far from Hillbrow, but perhaps the closest current correspondent to what Hillbrow was at the time as well; the entertainment district of the intellectual middle-class. Ivan has recently published

Portrait with Keys : Joburg & what-what, a mixture of journal, reportage, memoir, prose poem and collage on life in present-day Johannesburg, with all its absurdities and ambiguities. He looks astonishingly the same as fifteen years ago; it is almost as if they picked up an interrupted conversation, although none of them remembers what they were actually talking about. Now they talk about the mythical aura that has come to surround the Hillbrow of the late eighties, not unlike the one framing the

Sophiatown of the fifties, the Southern off-shoot of the Harlem Renaissance that was levelled to the ground to give room for white trash Triomf, the literal emblem of apartheid’s pyrrhic victory over urban modernity. If it were not for Drum’s defiant predecessors of new journalism, even the name Sophiatown might have vanished.

Now the myth lives as strongly as ever, also in its inversion as Triomf, for which

Marlene van Niekerk has secured a haven in the new national imaginary. But the myth of Hillbrow is another one; it is not the myth of a quashed modernity-to-be, the cradle of a contra-factual non-apartheid South Africa. Hillbrow is the metaphor for the real transformation, for the emerging Afropolis … The first night in the home of his hostess, Nomsa from Harare, he was to his surprise offered dagga after dinner. It happens very seldom, he can’t even recall the previous time, but in the sharpened perception and illusory clarity of inebriation, standing on the terrace, overlooking the veritable urban jungle below, when Nomsa’s husband David told him about the series of burglaries that had stripped them of all valuables, the last time at gun-point and in the conviction that the last thing the burglars would take before leaving would be their lives, he could almost physically sense the fear, the quiet menace from the glimmering slums, little more than a stone’s throw away … The novel of the new metropolis is soberly prosaic. Affirmative, at most, but without lyrical overtones. Yet writing the city is re-inhabiting it, crossing the barriers, connecting the forbidden zones; reclaiming the effectively shattered public space.

Alone, he is a sorry victim. But in Nomsa’s company, he returns to Hillbrow, contained by her calm; walking down Pretoria Street, attentive, perceptive, possessed with a peculiar resigned assurance.