Mark Gevisser - Lost and Found in Johannesburg: A Memoir

A MEMOIR OF PLACE AND SEXUALITY, HOME AND IDENTITY

As a boy growing up in apartheid Johannesburg Mark Gevisser would play Dispatcher, a game that involved sending imaginary couriers on routes mapped out from Holmdens Register of Johannesburg. As the phantom fl eet made its way across the troubled citys atomised geographies, so too did the young dispatcher begin to fi gure out his own place in the world.

With the maps and photographs he has collected over two decades, Mark Gevisser plots his path across the city of his birth, from his early exploration of his gay identity to his brutal experience, as an adult, of an armed home invasion. He tracks back along his Jewish immigrant familys routes to South Africa, from Vilnius, Dublin and Jerusalem, before immersing himself in the Johannesburg of today. In a style that balances gripping storytelling with deep lyricism and boundary-breaking pastiche, Gevisser fi nds himself, loses himself, and fi nds himself again in the city of his birth.

Mark Gevissers previous book, Thabo Mbeki: TheDream Deferred, won both the Sunday Times and the Recht Malan prizes in 2008. His journalism has appeared in publications and journals including the NewYork Times, The Guardian, Newsweek, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Granta, the Mail & Guardian, the Sunday Times, and the Sunday Independent. He was Writing Fellow at the University of Pretoria from 2009 to 2012, and is currently an Open Society Fellow. He lives between France and South Africa.

LOST AND FOUND IN JOHANNESBURG

MARK GEVISSER

JONATHAN BALL PUBLISHERS

JOHANNESBURG & CAPE TOWN

To my mother and to Maggie Davey and Bridget Impey

Praise for Mark Gevisser

Here is your map. Unfold it, follow it, and then throw it away, if you will. It is only paper. It is only paper and ink, but if you think a little, if you pause a moment, you will see that these two things have seldom joined to make a document so modest and yet so full with histories of hope or sagas of conquest.

Beryl Markham, West with the Night

The Nation is an administrative term, consequently artificial.

The Native Land is a sentimental term, consequently natural.

The Nation has fixed frontiers (conventions established by wars, treaties, victories and defeats). A material fact.

The Native Land converges on one centre, one heart.

There are no frontiers to the Native Land.

It is an act of faith, a spiritual conception.

Le Corbusier, Aircraft

Authors Note

Several names in this book have been changed, at the request of the people whose stories I have told. The reasons for this will become evident when reading the stories of Phil and Edgar, of Hopey Molefe, of Adam, and of Bea and Katie.

Prologue

Wildsview

On the night of 11 January 2012, I went to visit my friends Katie and Bea in their flat at Wildsview, high up on Killarney Ridge. Our plan was to continue watching the Australian TV mini-series, The Slap , based on Christos Tsolkass celebrated novel of the same name. I was living in France at the time, but was back in Johannesburg for a couple of months to finish working on this book. I parked the old BMW convertible I had borrowed from my mother, said hello to Jonah, the doorman-cum-security guard, and bounded through the grand lavender-painted lobby into the lift and up to the fourth floor.

I know the place well: my partner C and I had lived in this generous and somewhat shabby flat ourselves, with its scuffed parquet floors and high ceilings and little touches of stucco, before we passed the lease on to Katie and Bea. Wildsview was built in the mid-twentieth century for the comfortable elderly Jews who came to be associated with Killarney and who are still to be seen, perhaps less comfortable, amid the gay people, students, and large multi-generational Muslim families who now call the suburb home.

When we moved here in the early post-apartheid years from the decaying inner-city suburb of Troyeville, it was at a time when many white South Africans were emigrating and were being replaced by upwardly mobile people, younger and darker. One of our friends quipped that the suburb was known as the departure lounge: everyone was en route to somewhere else off this mortal coil, or following children to San Diego or Perth, or to the ultimate middle-class goal of a house in the northern suburbs. When we went looking for a place to rent, there was the smell of chicken soup and incontinence in some of the long, glass-enclosed corridors of these old blocks that took me right back to the frequent visits I used to make, in my childhood, to Killarney aunts and uncles.

We loved the flat we finally found at Wildsview, which we rented from the retired Jewish gynaecologist and his wife who lived in the penthouse and owned the whole block. Wildsview seemed to perch on a threshold, at the edge of a ridge that housed the mansions belonging to the citys wealthiest mining magnates: you could look north over the green canopy of Johannesburgs lush northern suburbs, or east and south over The Wilds towards the wall of Hillbrows high-rises announcing the inner city beyond.

Living at the lip of The Wilds was a disconnecting experience. It is a magnificent, forty-acre, indigenous wooded botanical garden along two rocky ridges of the Witwatersrand, and it was landscaped somewhat incongruously in the form of English parkland, with stone paths winding down into a kloof between the ridges carved by the Sandspruit stream. The rivers headwaters are buried beneath the concrete of Hillbrow, and its bed now carries cavalcades of motor vehicles largely minibus taxis between the inner city and the M1 highway to Alexandra township. When we lived there, the din of invisible traffic along Houghton Drive often brought to my mind a perpetually thunderous herd of elephants, particularly before or after a big soccer match, when the trumpeting of vuvuzelas provided an antic bass line to the incessant hooting.

There were other sounds: the burglar alarm sirens that were as much a part of our aural landscape as the birdsong of the loeries who canoodled in the stately blue gum outside our bedroom window; the pre-dawn Tracker helicopters searching out stolen cars; the skid and crash of an accident across the Houghton Drive intersection; the shattering of glass from yet another smash-and-grab by petty assailants using The Wilds vegetation as cover; a womans screams of terror and pain rising up out of the dark.

The gardens of The Wilds were separated from our apartment block by a palisade fence, and I looked out over them every day for five years. In my childhood, the parks rocky pathways had provided routes for adventure; in my teenage years, refuges for romance or solitude. But now that I looked out over the Wilds every day, I never entered the park. Almost no one did, because of its reputation for crime, until a pioneering resident from Yeoville on the other side set up a dog-walking club on Sunday mornings: there would be strength in numbers. Despite the fact that The Wilds was immaculately maintained by a team of City Parks gardeners, the park had come to inhabit its name in an entirely new and unwelcome way: it became a lung as dark as it was green in the middle of the city.

On the night of the 11th of January 2012, at about 9.30 p.m., three men were exhaled out of this lung across the palisade fence into Wildsview while I was watching The Slap with my friends. The men crossed the terrace of the ground floor flat, scrambled over the service gate, and climbed the service steps until they could go no further. They opened the locked kitchen door of Katie and Beas flat without any force.