Exclusive: Johannesburg goes mad

Pardon me if this blog is interrupted by the sound of gunshots; intermittent power failures or typhoons, but I’m in Johannesburg at the moment.

I lived here for seven happy years before venturing through the curtain of pallid stares from eyes-too-close-together in the dusty Karoo and settling in the Cape. Returning — as I do nearly weekly — is always illuminating.

This week in Johannesburg, as listeners to 702 will know, is “Piles Awareness Week”. When the advert for it came on the radio I thought it was another Tom London promo, but the solemn man in the ad alerted me to the fact that the itchy feeling around my anus could, in fact, be something else.

Why do piles need an awareness week? If you’ve got them, then presumably you’re painfully aware of them already. And if you don’t, you don’t want to be. Something odd is happening in Jo’burg.

And there’s other evidence. Some time back Cape Town was hit by a spate of power failures – rolling blackouts, load shedding and spanner-in-the-works became familiar phrases to all of us, thanks to the ongoing smarmy delight of Johannesburg-based comedians, talk show hosts, columnists and opportunist cabinet ministers. Now the shoe is on the other foot, though, it’s not nearly so amusing. Now it is something that we need to be Concerned About.

And Concerned they are. I’m a big John Robbie fan but when he bangs on about the blackouts and the severity of the situation I want to knee him in the nuts and say “There -– now you know what we’ve been going through”. And then to run for my life.

To make ourselves feel better, Capetonians sent Gautengers Madame Zingara’s. It’s a revolutionary concept that involves erecting a tent and poncing about the inside of it in silly hats before emptying your wallet at the feet of the gifted entrepreneur who conceptualised the whole thing. It’s a rip-off, the food is decidedly average, the entertainment contrived and amateurish, and the staff annoying. Gautengers love it. Which just goes to show.

The typhoon scare last week also contained a lesson. It might be one as simple as “don’t believe every email you receive” or even “if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it’ll taste better with a touch of orange”. In case you live somewhere else, let me explain. Some dolt sent an email off warning his mates that there was severe weather on the way. Those mates sent it off to a few others and before you could yell “Hey, has anyone got Simon Gear’s cell number?” the highways were jammed, offices vacated and everyone scattered in the general direction of home. Why it matters where you are when a typhoon hits I’m not entirely sure. Death is death. And unless your home is filled with Turkish belly-dancers and U2 has rocked up for a private performance, you’re more likely to fulfil your dying fantasy in the office. Unless the hottie from Accounts has also ducked early in which case it’s just you and the Internet. Again.

All of this leads me to the inescapable conclusion that Gautengers are wussies. Or are more wily than we give them credit for. Wily wussies or not, they still scored a half-day so you have to give them some credit. But pity the poor bugger who, thinking death was imminent, SMS’d his girlfriend and confessed to having it off with her best friend. He wanted to purge his conscience to guarantee an audience at the pearly gates and instead returned home to find his life, and wardrobe, in tatters on the front lawn. C’mon — you know it could have happened.

And then there’s Melville.

Stay in Cape Town long enough and you’ll begin to believe that black people either don’t live there, or they still think there’s some kind of State of Emergency curfew. And no-one has bothered to let them know it’s been lifted because, well, Capetonians seem to like it this way. Apart from a couple of pubs and clubs in Long Street, Cape Town’s nightlife looks like that famous photograph Study of Snow and Dandruff. A couple of years back I accompanied a scout for a global celebrity chef who was looking at opening a restaurant in South Africa. We walked around Cape Town a bit, and then went up to Johannesburg and strolled (briskly) through the Newtown precinct.

“So where are you going to open it?” I asked at the end of the trip

“Johannesburg”

“Why not Cape Town?”

“Because we don’t want to just have black people in the kitchen and white people out front,” came the trite but uncomfortably accurate response.

Melville is one of those places where the uninhibited, cosy delight of the New South Africa is on full display.

There are two Melville crowds — pre-rush and post-rush. Stroll up Seventh Avenue in the early evening before ADT has phoned its clients with the all-clear to hit the streets, and you’ll be stopped every two steps by eager staff urging you to come on in. Compare that to a walk along Camps Bay’s beachfront, where you are glared at if you interrupt Madame Waitron’s cellphone call to her agent by daring to look in her restaurant’s direction. Post-rush is a different story. The anti-smoking laws get thrown out the window (hell, back home the only people who throw anything smoking-related out the window are British tourists). Everyone smokes everywhere. Fine for me, not great for those who would rather not peel an ashtray off their clothes at the end of an evening. And then the music gets cranked up making independent thought, let alone conversation, virtually impossible. I think that’s why everyone in Johannesburg is on drugs. It’s because you have to retreat inside yourself to hold an intelligent conversation, and drugs make it seem more normal.

My mate and I ended up at one of the few places where conversation was about hearing not lip-reading. It was a bar that caters largely to the gay market with one of those brightly coloured flags out front and waves of scented moisturiser wafting through the open front door. Filled with friendly, pleasant-smelling eye-candy it was great for my gay mate. And I could smoke inside, so we were both happy.

The thing with Melville is that people try and sell you stuff. If you let your guard down you’ll leave with armloads of genuine Nigerian wire art that you probably don’t want.

Someone tried to sell us a rainbow flag, and even the barman tried to hustle us for an aeroplane sculpture he’d constructed using straws and toothpicks. Someone has clearly over-funded the “Arts & Crafts For Everyone” NGO. Why can’t bar staff just be out of work actors and stand around pouting like the ones in Cape Town?

Apart from the crafty craftsmen, there are the gangsta car guards including, bizarrely the one with no legs in Seventh Avenue. Um … is it just me or is a car guard without legs a bit like hiring a deaf call centre agent or a lobotomised talk show host (oh dear, there’s another Tom London reference)? I’m all for equal opportunity and giving those who were previously disadvantaged a, um, leg up, but this seems to be stretching it a bit. Because he can only watch the cars as they get broken into and driven away, he isn’t much use to anyone except when it comes to the identity parade part of the chain of justice. So he earns his keep in the meantime by sitting on the pavement ranting and evangelising. He’s Melville’s own Thought Leader — a seemingly profitable business. Apparently he can score up to R1 300 a day.

Despite the madness of piles, Tom London, blackouts, typhoons and Madame Zingara’s, Johannesburg still has a lot going for it. It’s the only city in the country where you can hear John Perlman on the radio, where the Sunday Times comes out on a Saturday, and where its residents actually talk to each other. Even if its just a ranting car guard on the fast track to a holiday house in Llandudno.