Why don’t Bryanston people pick up dog poo?

People in Bryanston, I have noticed, don’t pick up dog poo. The people in Parkhurst do. There, not picking up after your dog is considered highly antisocial and will earn you plenty of hipster opprobrium. No sitting at Vovo Telo sipping latte for you. Why do the residents of some suburbs pick up dog poo and others not? Why are some people civic-minded, while others couldn’t give a shit – literally?

As a former Parkhurst resident who spent years wrapping my hand in Checkers packets and grasping warm squishy steaming piles before turning the whole thing inside out while holding my breath to avoid inhaling the stench, I find the Bryanston attitude galling. I know only too well the need to watch my step in the local park, especially now that it has become so popular with the locals. In some ways, the piles of dog poo are a symptom of the park’s success. It was never this popular in the past and I can’t fault City Parks for the improvements they have made: Devonshire Park is now fenced, mowed and equipped with new swings and slides and it’s become a real asset to the community. On most days there will be bossy doggy women marching around the perimeter but it is on Sunday afternoons when the sun starts to sink in the sky that this unremarkable square of grass and vlei positively boils with well-to-do families, maids and gardeners on their day off, men playing soccer and, of course, the dogs. Lots and lots of dogs. And almost all of them without exception squat and leave deposits without their owners taking the slightest bit of interest.

Which brings me back to my original question: why don’t Bryanston people pick up after their dogs? I suppose it’s silly to get one’s knickers in a knot trying to figure out exactly which flaws in the northern suburbs character this kind of behaviour points to because there are plenty of other parts of the world where people don’t pick up dog poo either — I remember being shocked by the pavements of Germany the last time I was there, in the 1990s. But there is something else going on here, an almost indefinable thing which I sense because I grew up with it. An indifference to the needs of others, I suspect and an assumption that someone will pick up after you. South Africans in Bryanston and other suburbs like it, especially the people who grew up with privilege, have never really had to consider others. The interstices of their lives have always been populated by invisible elves — there to clean their toilets, cook their dinners, sweep their leaves and fill their cars with petrol.

On these big properties with their high walls, their electric gates and intercoms and ADT guards at the booms, other people are unnecessary. You never have to exchange a word with your neighbour and many people here don’t. To walk in these roads is to experience this place in a way that was never intended: the only people who should need to walk here are the ones who have no choice. Bryanston people are not the friendliest and everything around here is a subtle reminder of how nice they are not. So even as the locals become more sociable, venturing out of their big properties to meet with others as equals in a public space, their public spiritedness goes so far and no further.

In short, dog poo symbolises everything that is wrong with the suburbs and the people who inhabit them. It is a particularly vivid externalisation of our internal malaise.

Still, walking around these roads, as I often do, it strikes me how terribly pleasant it all is. The air scented with braai smoke and yesterday-today-and-tomorrow, olive pigeons coo fatly in the branches of the silky oaks, crickets chirp in the mulchy damp where mulberries rot in kikuyu drifts under bending branches. I want to sink into its desultory embrace and never leave.

And it is this pleasantness that is part of the problem, I think. For all its landscaped acres and just-so faux French double storeys amidst the fixed up 50s bunglows, there’s a mediocrity here, a slackness. A flaccidity of thought that permeates everything. I know that there are brilliant, creative, insightful people who live in Bryanston — I met one of them the other day and, let’s be honest, I like to think that I’m one of them when I’m on form — but there is a somnolence of spirit here that mitigates against greatness. You can’t live in the suburbs in this country and imagine that they will ever inspire you, not truly. You have to set yourself against them, you have to rail against the jacarandas and the white pool fences, even just a little. You have to be curious and awaken yourself to the layer of unexamined privilege that hovers everywhere, invisible, like ultraviolet light.

You have to do some examining. You have to see the dog poo and you have to ask yourself why nobody here ever picks it up.