(D)Urban Legends

It has taken a week to get to my blog. I’ve been mulling over what aspect of Durban to write about, and I remembered reading lists sent by email about things peculiar to South Africa. They made me laugh, and they rang true to the South African experience. I decided to make my own list typical of Durban but fairly ubiquitous throughout South Africa. Being in Durban means…..

•  If you’re catching a taxi to the Bluff and you hail it down by putting your index finger up, you will end up in the CBD.

• When you take a dip in the ocean (and you’re alone) you have to place your towel, shoes, keys and cell phone in a zip lock bag and tie it to your chest, ‘cause if you leave them on the beach, you’ll be without a towel to dry off on, no means of transport and no cell to call for help or money for the pay phone, and you will be walking home with burning feet!

• You can buy 4 chappies, a loaf of bread and some tik all at the same corner tearoom.

• You had to change the name of your restaurant from “Bistro on Cowey” to “Burgers on Problem Mhkize”.

• People can green up the neighbourhood by planting trees in the potholes on every street.

• Sink holes pop up even in the most affluent neighbourhoods, and people have nearly drowned in them (in their cars nogal)....not called sink holes for nothing.

• At robots, guys hand out fliers advertising the doctor who has cures for ailments that would make a warrior blush.

• Young ‘happening’ people drive their cars with the seat pushed right back, so they can lie down and steer with one arm that barely reaches the wheel, while they drink a Black Label.

• Real men marinade their steak in beer before throwing it on an open fire.

• You could get arrested for smoking within 5 metres of a restaurant but you can drive at 100 km per hour in a 60 km zone with your child standing (without a seat belt) on the front seat.

• Vuvuzelas may cause permanent hearing loss but they will only be banned if they are used as missiles at a match (this is a REAL FIFA rule, so do not throw your vuvuzela, you have been WARNED).
• Takkies dangling from an overhead power line are never just takkies dangling on an overhead power line.

• ‘Car guards’ who have never driven a vehicle get to show you how to reverse.

• The best bunnies in Durbs are not the fluffy kind.

• If you are one of three elephants made by Boetie (the international sculptor), then you can pretty much pack your trunks and waddle off penniless into the African sunset.

• “Walkie talkies” are not those little radios you lusted after as a child and “smilies” are not the little icon thingies you attach to your mail so your friends think you care. They are chicken feet and heads (walkie talkies) and are sheep heads “smilies”- you can buy them frozen or fresh on the side of the road).

• Music in said taxis rocks with the highest decibels that cause the lowest hearing in later life. Going deaf could be a greater problem that HIV.

• A “boom” used to be something you sat under for shade…now you can smoke it.

• On facebook, when you get poked it’s just silly fun, but in Durban you usually don’t live to tell the tale (Indian slang for stabbing.

• Eskom holds no power.

• You can have a “mother-in-law’s tongue” curry that will blow your socks off and singe parts of you for days on end.

• Seeing men peeing on walls is as common as seeing children under 10 begging in the traffic.

• Laughing at yourself with others is a genuine cure-all.
  

Durban is a place of contrasts, where spice and sweat and grime contrast with billowy days held together brightly by blue and white laced skies. Where people who have too much, flaunt their wealth, and those who have nothing, sleep in doorways. Where a warm ocean invites, and night streets threaten. Ja, this is my Durban, and sometimes it hurts like hell, and sometimes it’s just lukka. 

Hitting reverse gear

For those of you not familiar with car guards, they are the people who ‘look after’ our cars while they are parked outside businesses, in parking lots and at outdoor or sporting events. We need them because it was happening too often that when you thought you’d forgotten where you parked your car, it was actually on someone’s  shopping list in Mozambique and was already on its way to the border, while you stood laden with shopping, facing an empty parking spot.

Car guarding started off in an informal way, with entrepreneurs taking tips in exchange for looking after your car. It was a way for the unemployed to feed families or drinking habits. Now they have been rounded up by people who knew a money making opportunity when they saw it, and who had the education to go to shop owners and register their services and then employ people with less education to work in the lots. Each of these people now pay for their lumo vests, and a sum of money to the business owner before they can work at looking after cars. Each guard is assigned an area in the parking lot, and the newbies are assigned to the outer reaches where few people park because they don’t want to walk in the heat to get to the shops. These guards often don’t make enough money to pay for the fees to work the day.

colours of the car park

White people are really not suited to this job, because having no skin pigmentation means melanomas, and I have yet to see a guard using sunscreen, even though I always offer advice to them about it. White car guards look like people stitched into leather skins. Car guards may be locals or from other African countries. Sometimes you may be greeted by the beautiful French Congolese accent, Shona accents from Zim or Portuguese from Mozambique (hang on a moment, should we be trusting them to guard our cars when Mozambique is hauling several cars over the border as we speak?). Anyway, car guards are ubiquitous in South Africa, they are beacons on every street corner and in every parking lot, and they are part of our days and nights (if one is brave enough to park outside at night).

my local car guards... wonderful men from the DRC after a long day in the sun at ...................

 

 

I admire them and tip them (most times), and being unemployed myself, often think I may end up as one. If I did end up as one, I would know how to help people to reverse, and I would know which people to allow to reverse unaided. And in some cases, judging by the skills of some drivers, I would actually do the reversing for them. However, with all the compassion in the world, I do not want to be told how to reverse when the sweat is pouring down my face, and even though I said I was fine, the guard has just helped me pack shopping bags into the boot of my car, and the packet with the strawberries and eggs is now under the packet with 6 kgs of dog food (this only gets discovered only when I get home), I want to t get out of my car and say, ”Listen dude, I’ve been reversing for 30 years now, and although there are many things I need help with (directions, finances, making order of my life) reversing is not one of them. Move away from my car or my tyres will clamp your feet to the tarmac”.

Another thing is I don’t need help with is finding a parking when the lot is half empty. They swagger out in front of you and, as though conducting the orchestra through a Strauss waltz, show you where to park. I never park where they tell me to, it is my small rebellion. Sometimes I’ll be waiting for someone to leave a parking so I can take his spot. I wait for the car guard to show him how to get out of the spot, then, with a great sweep of his arm he shows me the parking space, as though I’d been daydreaming and he had discovered Antarctica. For fek’s sake, I have been waiting for 5 minutes while the car moved out of the spot. WHAT DID HE THINK I WAS DOING? Did he think I had stopped to watch his “how-to-reverse” skills?

back, back, back

flappy, shouting … “BACK, BACK, BACK”. Sometimes they even stand directly behind the car and start flapping you out, so the only way out is over them: it is tempting, really, really tempting.

Now, I believe most car guards need empathy and respect for doing what they do and for the reasons they do it. My heart goes out to those so far from home who cannot stay in their war torn countries. However, there are some who can turn a parking lot into a veritable circus arena. I have seen women guards having cat fights over tips or lanes (they are very territorial). I have encountered guards so drunk they see two of your car and allow one to be stolen. I have seen sober guards watch while a car is driven out the lot (and not by its owner). I have also seen two car guards show two parkers how to reverse into each other. I have had a guard see me waiting 10 minutes for someone to leave and then wave a new-comer into the spot- this has caused a form of parking lot rage that I am not altogether proud of. I know it is JUST a parking, but in Durban’s heat, when the lot is full it is not JUST A PARKING. Car guards also will not take to task those female 4x4 owners who only use their wheels for shopping or to take their children to school, or to do lunch. These vehicles are often sprayed with mud by some sharp business man advertising, “we will spray your off road vehicle, so the world thinks you’re an authentic, rugged adventurer”. The guards cannot stop these selfish painted gals from parking across two spaces so nobody bangs their cars. This makes me so mad, and I always tell the guards people shouldn’t park like that just because they are rich, and they always smile and nod and agree, but they are just humouring me. I wonder if double space parkers tip better.

Although I’d dearly love to reverse out of my parking unaided, I would miss these guards if they weren’t greeting and grabbing and waving and in my way in the parking lots. They are part of our country’s workforce, and certainly part of the Durban scene. They work in the blazing sun, or heavy rain, in parking areas all over South Africa, they add colour and frustration, and every one of them has a story to tell… if you’d only ask.

It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.
~ Muhammad Ali ~

P.s. What sort of person rushes off to the car park to take pics of guards who are very suspicious of their intentions, while everyone stares and wonders? What is becoming of me? Am I turning into a BLOGGER? gasp!

Monkey Daze

The vervet monkeys visited me today. A big bloke announced his arrival with a thud on the little overhang outside my bedroom window. This ‘overhang’ is not strong and barely holds the rain out of my bedroom, so one day I could have the troop in my bedroom, tumbling one after the other through a great hole. I sat on my bed and watched, and a teenager watched me, his small face full of summer. He twitched his eyebrows and bobbed when I moved. There was a mother with her baby clinging tightly to her stomach, his small arms embedded darkly in the maternal fur as though she carried a cheerful parasite. The light caught his perfect face shining through his big ears, ears he will grow into, transparent in the sunlight like two great pink cockles on his head. His mother knows him, he is her own and she protects him with all her being.

I hear the sounds of pellet guns, and I know a neighbour is trying to chase them off. So many monkeys have pellets in them and they die slow and painful deaths. These people feel they’re pests who are out to attack them and steal their bananas or bread rolls. Now make no mistake, these guys are opportunists of note, and if you leave your custard buns on the kitchen table and the door open, a hairy guy will definitely take them. Monkeys are not out to attack people unless they are threatened, and I would so prefer these intruders to those who could come in if a door was left open, and take so much more than just some fruit. If only these narrow-minded folk would see that we have displaced these animals; their habitats are shrinking and the alien plants enveloping our indigenous trees offer no food for monkeys. These people with pellet guns deserve to be banished to a barren sandy island where there is no wildlife to threaten them, not a single tree for shade or a monkey, and just sea water stretching out in front of them.

I did have a monkey in my kitchen once and he swiped my lunchtime buns. I tried to get them back, but he sat on the roof looking at me, exposing his bright blue genitals,  and then threw the plastic bag down at me. Speaking of blue genitals, to the artist’s eye, they are the most marvellous blue, and the girls in the troop sure love a good set of them. You know sometimes you see a woman (often an academic) wearing blue eye- shadow right up to her eyebrows, like Twiggy did and like Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe from the 60’s, well to me, those are monkey ball eyes. They are the same blue and have the same startling affect when they flash at you. Of course the monkey ones are far more attractive.

When I attended writing groups many years ago, the woman whose home we wrote in, had her doors open to monkeys when she was at home. I remember one day watching them walk in, one behind the other, and then sit in a line on the banister of the sitting room stairs to watch us. I have to admit, my suburban roots did throw up some fear, which soon dissipated as they swaggered past, out into the garden through the sliding glass doors. A friend writing in the garden had her pink-lensed sunglasses (this was the 80’s, pink was in) taken from the table, and the culprit sat in the tree above her head taking some suspicious bites at them and then smelt them and put them close to her eyes and peered through them, not liking the way the world looked though the rose tinted glass. She then threw them into the leaves below. They survived to lessen the glare for my friend for quite a while after the incident and I think she quite liked telling people that those were monkey bites decorating the frame. If you're going to wear rose tinted glasses they might as well have the scars of a little wildness.

We watched each other

Later the troop moved to my bottom garden and some of the youngsters rolled and sprung and tumbled from branches, until the bull male ‘chuck chucked’ at them. They were there for the afternoon, much to the dogs’ dismay.

I remember seeing a vervet’s hands up close once, and feeling a soft but bony finger. They have perfect, dark hands with tinyt palms, and each small finger has a tiny print on it, like a human’s, but finer,  just a tiny sketch upon a finger pad. I wonder if that empty man with his gun would respond if he saw those hands so like his own, holding the flowers and fruit they find in my trees, would he still be so set on removing them from his world. Would it change his attitude or will he be happy to tell his grandchildren, that we once had monkeys, wild, in our gardens? I hope their words of, “Gee, Grandpa, that must have been so cool,” ring out in his vacant head for all eternity.

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.  ~William Shakespeare

Solving the Problem

Well, as I went up Gladys Mazibuko Road and turned left into Problem Mkhize, it brought to mind the recent debacles/discourses/rampant fist fights, about the changing of street names to honour South African heroes from the struggle times. I can just imagine our beloved Ghandi is not completely content about Point Road taking his name, but I think perhaps Problem Mkhize is a real thorn in the side of the Cowey Road residents. Not that Problem doesn’t suit the road, congestion at the intersection is stressful on a cool day let alone at 33 degrees. I’ve heard it’s difficult to sell a property there as a business owner, even if he doesn’t have problems walking under ladders or spilling salt, may not want to take a chance on having Problem Mkize road on his gold lettered letter-heads. While I waited for the traffic to move I imagined opening a bistro and calling it, Calais Bistro on Problem. Dining there might be a challenge for fine diners: would you have a finger nail in your tarte tatin or half digested garden sand in your snails? You can’t blame restaurateurs for setting up shop in one of those tiny lanes unworthy of any great hero; Bistro on 9^th Avenue, now we’re talking.

The problems I have with the name changes are, that I can’t pronounce them, they aren’t in my map books, and that the people who should know about these struggle heroes don’t know them at all. And the old familiar road signs have been ripped off their posts by the municipality, because irritated/irate/red-in-the-face, white dads standing on kitchen stools, sprayed the new signs with black paint, thus annoying the city managers (now consider that a spiteful slap on the wrist, boet).

You must understand I have an incredibly bad sense of direction. I get lost in supermarkets and whenever I visit Pinetown I end up in a taxi rank (I mean every time). So finding myself in Stalwart Simelane Street, when the original sign is gone (no more Stanger street), or being told to go to Dr Pixley KaSeme Street sends me into a panic attack of note. For all the saints, Dr Pixley KaSeme Street used to be WEST STREET. So if you don’t have a Global Positioning System in your car, or like my daughter has, in your head, then negotiating Durban is interesting and you discover places you didn’t know existed, especially if you add in the unsynchronised traffic lights and pot holes you could drown in.

Durban may be going to seed (the jury is still out on this I feel), but it’s painted in all the colours of the spectrum, with dashes of honour and sprinklings of brilliance and buckets of people and things that don’t work, and it has hours of horror and moments of heroic gutsy action and the people all glisten in this Durban steam, especially when Eskom has “met with a problem”. Ah yes, you surely need a sense of humour and great big balls to stay here.

p.s.: I thought I’d add, East Coast Radio lists Ally Cat Clothing as one of the top ten factory shops in Durban. It’s at 260 Magwaza Maphalala Street. Look it up ‘cause I have a problem.

Life is one big road with lots of signs. So when you're riding through ruts, don't complicate your mind. Flee from hate, mischief and jealousy. Don't bury your thoughts, put your vision to reality.

Wake up and live...Bob Marley

Observations and sounds from a sizzling day in Durban…driving along lamenting not having an air-con in my car or at home, sweat popping out of my eyeballs, I heard two men singing in harmony while they dug a ditch across the road, their overall tops down and the sweat gleaming on their lean muscles. A tired little girl sat on a pavement with her feet in the street and waited for a bus from school, all new and bright in her uniform but way too young to be alone. I heard a woman in the shop saying….”I just want to know about the cheese, HOW LONG DOES THAT TAKE for shit’s sake? I don’t want you to milk the cow and separate the milk and process the cheese”. 

There was a boy about 12, begging, with his glue in hand and his feet, bare on the almost liquid tar road, and as I passed Mark Gold restaurant (my car is really a bit gross for passing Mark Gold), I saw sweet, pretty young things seated alfresco, sipping iced water from a huge jug filled with water, ice and fruit. Their summer dresses were all wafty in the small breeze. Oh the bitter- sweet contrasts of our city at 33 degrees.

Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.
-- Warren Buffett