After three days in a row without electricity, I set out to write about the anger and depression of living in the dark with rotting flesh. I want to tell you about how the three tickets I raised with City Power were dismissed as resolved without resolution and how I was able to receive a callout fee from a city official who worked with double salary – by the city and then consulted during the regular period. working hours using city resources. A story of hidden economic extortion in plain sight.
I’m going to write about how I walk down Louis Botha Avenue in Johannesburg while trying to avoid the raw sewage that slowly spills from manholes onto the street and is thrown by cars onto passers-by. How gaping manholes are a menace to pedestrians, just as many manholes are a danger to motor vehicles negotiating our roads.
But now that I work in the south and the daily commute from the northern suburbs humbles me and expands my empathy beyond middle-class preoccupations. So, City Power doesn’t exist. For now. However, I invite the reader to come with me beyond the lonely mine dumps that elevate the highveld landscape in the deep south of Johannesburg. The number of new informal settlements that have sprung up in this large land, about 80km from the city center, during the coronavirus lockdown, is unclear. The estimate is just over forty new settlements.
Most of these settlements have no electricity, water, sanitation infrastructure, roads or houses. Many residents live in makeshift buildings made of iron sheets. The suffering and suffering of Eskom not registering citizens. They are not affected by load shedding, load shedding, power outages or inefficiencies.
However, he is threatened by another demon. Tired of being a permanent tenant and wanting land for her children and grandchildren, an old woman who moved from her back room in Soweto and now lives in Nana’s Farm, Patsing, Tjovitjo, Phumulamakhi and Kapok, has to walk in the dark to urinate. and defecate. This is something middle-class people do at home before removing evidence by lowering a lever or pressing a button. In Patsing, to relieve oneself is to talk about the dangers that lurk in the dark. Urination can end a fall, rape or death. Death lurks in the vacuum when glory is impossible.
Further south, after the opening of the water gates of the Vaal Dam, hundreds of people are living after a man-made flood. Their homes, infrastructure, material possessions and dreams have vanished. There, the power grid is also down and the community is contemplating a bleak future in the dark. This is depression when, like a juddering machine on the brink of collapse, the psyche shuts down and succumbs to darkness.
Residents of Teluk Kopi in the Eastern Cape know this feeling. Their children, bridges and livelihoods have been swept away by the flood. The weeping will end, but now, from behind the veil of weeping, a vision of darkness and pain. Dreams, love and infrastructure have been swept away into the roaring ocean.
In this climate, suburban Hugo, Gogo from Patsing and the family of a drowned child live in a climate of depression. My class position did not insulate me from the feeling of living through the disintegration of the state. Not even an expensive inverter could save me from the darkness.
We have a front-seat view into the collapse of government and the evaporation of the social compact. There is no place to turn. Even the great white hope, Andre de Ruyter, has proven to have feet of clay. President Cyril Ramaphosa lost capitalism a few years ago and we moved between scandal and confusion when he told us not to complain. No investigative commission or green-robed judge can arrest the swirling depression gathering in the dark.
It is depressing to live in Johannesburg. I dare say, for most of us, it is depressing to live in South Africa. If hope wasn’t there in the last years of the Zuma administration, it’s gone now. Emperor, also known as the rainbow nation, is naked. The people who bequeathed us this tacky epitaph are dead. The house parliament building sits in smoking ruins. The dream of a smart city is a joke. Spices are piled high where trains are used.
Rousing speeches cannot save us. Remixing former president Thabo Mbeki’s “I am African” from Cape Town Hall, sounds hollow and desperate. It is a failure in creativity. We are ashamed of the parade that is the ceremony of the Nation and the charades that are the provincial state. We know the truth. It was all for nothing.
As creatures of habit, we take little comfort from routine and little escape. Television is one escape. Without it, we sit in the dark and alternate between anger, loathing and self-pity. Predictability has been replaced by Eskom’s whims and chaotic schedule. The kids are annoyed and the Zoom meetings keep getting delayed.
Prolonged power outages disrupt our socialization. My daily calls to my elderly mother in Lusikisiki are often met with a silent voice on the automated answering service as power outages disrupt the small network service in rural areas. I used to call him at the time of day when he was most alone and quiet but this coincided with power cuts and no network service. That we are tethered to love and connection in online network services left bereft.
Living alone in this environment, must be accompanied by silence. To live with someone is to show irritation. The depression experienced by public infrastructure and political life has seeped into our homes and sits among us like wet coal. The air was deeply rent by the sound of depressed whining.
We often talk about hope in the air, but we rarely turn to atmospheric depression. This is the kind of depression that breathes dry air and travels among us, spreading like a viral infection. When we are tired of taking taxis, trains and buses, we follow negative feelings. We shake our heads, no longer in disbelief, but with knowing etched on our faces. We are giddy from the musical chairs that politicians play in local government chambers, even as the walls threaten to cave in.
We are living through a great depression in every sense of this description. Economically, socially, politically and emotionally. In the growing ruins, where murders, gender-based violence, unemployment and crime abound, the awareness that here we can increase the feeling of widespread depression.
I see the fear in the parents’ eyes as they think about their children’s future. In Reiger Park, Boksburg, a school playground has been dug up by people desperate for copper cables. Laughter does not ring through the playground. Fear lurks where childlike pleasure once reigned.
A few years ago, I might have baulked at the hopeful character of our social life. I may have been careful not to sound as if we were suffering from apartheid nostalgia. I might have warned that we should be wary of projecting individual depression onto a population of 60 million people. Today, however, I will question the sanity of those who enjoy life and the social, economic and political life of the country.
We don’t want apartheid. But the joy has left the building and in its place there is darkness – sometimes on schedule and at other times stretching over three days. I suspect even social media platforms like “I’m staying” lack motivation. Perhaps the members are secretly thinking of how to leave.