welcome to jozi

[an indulgent aside - these 'events' were nearly two weeks ago. i'll catch up, slowlyslowly]

Joburg has never been easy for me. While I maintain that it’s not as bad as the “murder capitol of the world” stories make it out to be, it is necessary to know your way around. I don’t. I never really did. I came and went a few times when I was living in the bush and it always made me a bit anxious. Having friends there helps, a place to stay, good conversation and an evening fire in the winter. So leaving the warmth of my second family in Windhoek and going to stay with old friends from my South Africa days did not seem so bad at the beginning of last week. I wanted to do a small project on the informal economy during the World Cup – go to the stadiums, walk around, see who was selling what on the streets, and find out if FIFA’s tight restrictions on licensing and marketing were as limiting in practice as they seemed on paper.

The edges of one AM are still blurry. Nina had been crying. I heard the alarm, an alarm, it woke me, but it seemed to be coming from somewhere else. I heard Tim get up and the noise stopped. Nina was crying. I was disoriented, the first night in another bed, tired. I think I heard the dogs’ claws clicking on the wooden floors. But I still don’t really know how to describe the noise Tim made next, a scream of sorts but so much louder, angrier, like a raging roar coming three times from the other side of the wall.

I bolted out of bed, grabbing for something warm, anything solid, opened my door, stumbling as my leg ached from being still. There was a man in the garden outside my window, Tim said, who had cut the electric fence, climbed over the wall, and was sitting in the corner hiding from the motion light over the driveway as it flicked on in his presence. Tim had only seen him when shining a flashlight out the window, just out of curiosity, even after he had shut off the alarm under the assumption that it was nothing. Nina was crying. Gail had scooped her up and taken her to their room, the panic button had been pressed, the security company called, and so we waited. We called again. The space around us seemed liquid, thickened with fear and uncertainty and frustration. I sat on Gail and Tim’s bed with Nina as they tried to figure out what was going on. “I’ll keep you safe, ok?” she kept saying to me, at three and a half years old, blonde and wide-eyed, talking of how we’d shoot the bad guys if they came back.

The man in the garden had fled back over the wall at the sound of Tim’s howl, breaking the water pipes in the process and leaving us without water. When the security guard finally arrived nearly fifteen minutes later, he parked his car in our driveway to watch – since the fence was not working and it would now be easy to get into the yard. “Do you want to crawl in bed with us?” Gail asked me.

Instead, I took one of the dogs back to bed with me. Shesha growled at the security guard’s car backing into the driveway just outside. And I got back into bed to wait for daylight, staring at the pale curtains hung over the window between me and the garden, watching every shadow of every tree branch, each leaf, leaving my glasses on so that I could tell the difference between a threatening shape and what shifted in the wind.

I’ve never been a particularly fearful person, which certainly does not mean I’m never afraid. It’s more that I am too stubborn to allow fear to stop me from doing the things I want to do. But the days after 1AM were animated by a flickering memory of what that kind of ‘afraid’ felt like that flared constantly – on the road when I took a wrong turn, when someone seemed to walk too closely behind me for too long, when I had to leave the car parked in an unfamiliar neighborhood, and when I shut off the light to labor at sleeping.

There are many things to say about what happened. This, it seems, is one of the hazards of living in Joburg. Everyone around me seemed to have a story that was far worse (comforting, and not) – because in our case, the system had basically worked. No one got in, we weren’t hurt, nothing was taken – except perhaps that false sense of security one gets from living in a fortress where the neighbors classify themselves as being under siege. Last month, some guys broke into the house across the street, shot the dog, and threatened the woman living there until her husband came home and “talked them out of it.” Friends of some friends had been tied up and held hostage in their home while being robbed. At a bar a few days later, even the edges of the flatscreen on which we caught the Ghana-Serbia match were being dusted for fingerprints as we watched after the previous night’s break-in.

This flies in the face of my claims that the only real concern for tourists coming to the World Cup was vuvuzela-induced deafness from the long plastic trumpet-like horns that South Africans blast with abandon at soccer matches. Johannesburgers (if that’s a word) are used to this kind of thing. It can’t be too big of a deal when it happens, because it happens often. Just, not to me. And at the same time, as I keep saying to a friend here, it’s all fine. Really. That *system* worked, such as it is. Maybe it’s more a problem of that “as it is” than anything else. It took a few days, but when my own fear began to settle, I thought about what it would feel like to be crouched outside someone’s window, waiting, perhaps looking to steal a radio from the car, but caught in a motion light, wondering if the [white] people inside had a gun. Horrible isn’t enough of a word.

Still, I admit, the next-to-last thing I wanted to do in the following days was suck it up and keep working by going to Hillbrow – a neighborhood considered intimidating even by many city residents – to walk around a soccer stadium looking for street trading which may or may not be legal. At the same time, the last thing I wanted to do was to feed my fear by deciding that I could not do what I wanted to do, that I would not be able to answer the questions I had or talk to people affected by the wave of soccer fans arriving at their doorstep.

So I went to Ellis Park, and to Soccer City anyway. And they deserve stories of their own…soon.