Going South

Early 2009 - if the guys concerned could read, there'd be loads more comments

If you’re from Johannesburg’s Southern Suburbs, you have a knack for finding others of your kind wherever you go. When I was called up to the army for basic training in Potchefstroom, it didn’t take long for all of us to congregate together while we waited in a large transport depot for hell to begin. It was somewhere near the toilets from what I remember.

‘Where you from, china, ’ we would ask each other.

‘Mondeor/Rosettenville/Linmeyer/Haddon/ The Hill…’ would be the answer.

‘Shame man, that’s kak compared to Mondeor/Rosettenville/Linmeyer/Haddon/ The Hill…. I suppose at least you don’t have so many Indians/Blacks/Coloureds/… in your part of the woods though , ’ might come the answer. More offensive terms than ‘black’, ‘Indian’ or ‘gay’ would invariably be used.

The Southern Suburbs in the eighties was somewhere you were proud to come from. Fist fights over lame video games like Kung Fu Master in a seemingly endless series of corner cafés made you like that. The café was a rite of passage. All of the owners were Mediterranean of some sort and permanently in a foul mood. When the machine ate your twenty cent piece and you ran to the cashier to complain, you’d get sworn at in a language you’d never heard before. What the owners didn’t understand was that there was an unwritten rule that said that if you didn’t get your money back, you were allowed to shoplift as much chocolate and sweets as you could carry without anybody ratting you out. These guys must still wonder how they didn’t manage to turn a profit while charging 500% mark-ups. After six in the evening they had a monopoly on the sale of everything in all the suburbs and contributed to a vicious cycle where their rotisserie BBQ chickens and fish and chips escaped from filthy cooking services that would require whoever ate them to visit again later for toilet paper and Enos. Even with that, the kids were robbing them blind and putting them in the position where they wouldn’t be able to afford to buy groceries in their own shops.

The more racist in the south (and there were lots – the Nats never lost a parliamentary seat) reveled in that they lived closer to Soweto than any other whites. They saw themselves as the first wave of defence against the angry black hordes. They were keen for the revolution to happen, even if it meant they’d be saving the liberals from the northern suburbs in the process. My grandmother was the perennial losing candidate for the seat for Turfontein. She stood for the party that, horror of horrors, wanted to let the black hordes live next door to us and give them a vote. Every few years she’d put herself through the indignity of getting a tenth of the votes that the Nat candidate who looked like a grown-up Pinocchio got. No amount of campaigning outside the Glenanda Spar (they’d make her stand underneath a poster for Smarties that caused little kids to walk up to her and demand their free sweets) seemed to help. She’d get rude phone calls from angry people late at night demanding to know why she liked certain parts of black men.

I’m not sure that guys from the south were any tougher than anybody from anywhere else. We just got the message across much better. Even my fellow cub scouts from 1st Mondeor B Pack were given a wide berth at meetings with other cubs. Our relatively tattered uniforms and maroon and gold scarves sent other kids scurrying as if they’d heard a snake. The scout hall was next to a river and it was very unusual for a meeting to end without a third of everyone there having been dunked in it one way or another. Before we started, we’d have a game of Running Red Rover that might have up to twenty of us jumping on top of whoever began the game. The weaker and more cowardly boys left to go and do something more genteel like judo.

Because I had to go out of my way to mix Afrikaans and English in the same sentence, I had to be careful. You didn’t want to stick out too much. One wrong step and you could earn yourself a smack very quickly. Laughing at the way that the Afrikaans kids refused to wear shoes or long pants well into high school was a certain way to go about this. Other more subtle ways of getting a good klap might include looking at someone in what they saw as the wrong way on the Number 54 bus. I hated those bus rides. I’d be coming back from the orthodontist in my grey private school uniform surrounded by guys from tough schools like John Orr Tech. They’d never need to go to the orthodontist because they were loosing their teeth steadily in fist fights. Most of them loved the way that ‘Pump Up The Jam’ had become a southern suburbs cultural phenomenon and were just at school waiting to finish standard eight or turn sixteen (you can probably guess which was more likely to happen first) so that they could do something in the motor trade. A lot of them looked like the sorts of guys who might try and weld wood. Still, the South isn’t littered with abandoned cars like the East Rand is in parts. We must have been cleverer if we can at least put the things back together after taking them apart. Until I got a bit bigger I was terrified of anyone wearing a uniform from the Hill or Forest High (where a mate of mine did get a hiding for making a comment about how someone’s sister was able to drink water by almost swallowing the whole tap and wondering aloud what else she might be good at.

I’m sure people are still proud to come from the South. It can only have improved now that Rosettenville Corner is no longer the last word when it comes to shopping. If you’re from the South it always remains a part of you. When my grandparents left it felt like a part of me had been wrenched out. Strangely I miss the way that fights would break out in the Rosettenville KFC if someone was accused of jumping the queue. I miss games of toktokkie (I’m not going to explain) and the way that neighbourhood dogs seemed to belong to everybody. On the off chance that I do have to visit, I can remember incidents that happened on nearly every street. Hillside Fish & Chips is still there although Manny no longer sells Castle Lager Long Toms wrapped in brown paper. I was one of his most faithful customers and I’m still grateful that he wasn’t put off by my school uniform. Manny’s chips are the best in the world, they taste like pure childhood. While I remember, I must give the Kennilworth Bottle Store a big thank you in that regard too. I’m not sad that the Mondeor Café has gone though. I hope that the kids who kept losing their coins finally drove the owner into a well deserved bankruptcy.

The original comments:

Excellent article again!!!

Two quotes that every single cafe shop owner used regularly:

"You break-ah my machine-ah, I kick-ah you out-ah my shop-ah!"
"Why-ah you bring-ah me fifty rand, you know-ah I don't have-ah change!"

By Ted on  2/14/2009 10:05 AM

NoAh Change TakeAh Chappies

By TiTT on  2/14/2009 5:47 PM

PLUS LOADS MORE ON PORAS, GREEKS, LEBS, INTERACIAL BREEDING, YOUR SISTER, YOUR MOM, FISH & CHIPS AND PLAYING RYGAR