KLAKIPHONI

It’s a new day and Chookie has us in the car for a tour of Johannesburg centre. As we drive her commentary continues, pointing out buildings and places, in this city that seems to me to be in constant change.

There is a road block, and Police are hauling cars over. Chookie is pulled. A black policeman with an accent so thick I can’t understand him leans into the car, gun on his hip. She shows her driving licence, he asks where we are going, and has she got any outstanding fines? Apparently if you have, they take you out of the car, stick you in kind of cell in a big van there and then. run your details through every database they’ve got, afinally they make you pay your fine before you can go. Wow! Makes Josh’s red light ticket seem so genteel.

We are now entering the University Campus, there is a big control gate and a sign that forbids guns etc. We are going to the Origin Museum at the university which charts the origin of man. The bit I found most interesting was the invention of the spirit world, and the shamans channeling forces from the energy of the animals they had hunted. After a quick refreshment, and a stroll round the campus, we narrowly avoid being in a really heavy down pour.

We were off on a drive round Central Johannesburg. The windows streaked with rain, so that I can hardly see where we are going. Chookie’s commentary is in full swing and her finger taps on the glass as she drives pointing out items of interest. . .

“ . . .and up there one of our top top boarding schools for girls . . . and here . . . you see here the old South African Berewey . . .” We are approaching a new modern bridge, I ask if it goes over a river.

“we don’t have a river here, the river is in the mines . . . a river of gold and minerals . .” The bridge goes over the main railway.

“Now we’ll go to the Harlem of Johannesburg . . .” and we drive into this morass of cars and people.

Morass is not the word, it needs a new word it is a “KLAKIPHONI” it absolute chaos there are only centimteres between cars, there is absolutly no rule of the road, there are people squeezing impossibly between cars as they move; how they don’t get squashed I don’t know. It is where the third world meets the first world. It is an unholy confluence of people and noise and cars and squalor. No.. . it needs new words . . .

The streets are SHLITTULLS which BLAWLK and CHLOOT humanity along in a tight heaving KLUDD. It’s hell on earth. Chookie tells us how she used to be a police reservist. “. . .we were at this ladida party and everyone was sitting around saying how terrible the country was . . .so I said well why don’t you get off your backsides and do something about it . . “ so she joined the Police Reservists.

A man in a black leather hat has suddenly appeared in the SHLITT and is banging his hand on a minicab wing and shouting furiously and pointing and flapping his hand, he is now off to another vehicle and splattering them with words and gestures, banging on the sides of the cars, and to my amazement little by little he manages to slightly ease the blockage.

The buildings around which this KLAKIPHONI is flowing are tall and run down with broken windows and clothes and sheets hung over the balconies. Apparently there are a lot of Zimbabwean refugees, (Zimbos) messed in with the rest of the huge hungry mass of humanity corwding into this place in search of a better life . . . or maybe just life.

KLAKIPHONI