Through the looking glass

 

Subject:Through the looking glass.

I work up on my 80th birthday to an unusual treat. Promoted by Andrew, I joined the contributors of YouTube for a nostalgic drive around Johannesburg and the surrounding suburbs. 

There had been three postings, one in the Sandton/Rivonia area with its ‘oh so civilised’ modus operandi which wealth and overt opulence brings. The futuristic architecture  of the office buildings, the like I have never seen in Europe or even America. Like a modern Greek/ Roman symbol of who we are, these gated office blocks with their plush cars entering and leaving the secure parking areas signifying their right of passage and symbolising their importance. Perhaps the only time the occupant feels secure enough to leave their car and enter mainstream humanity as they enter the office. 
Outside on the streets there were no white pedestrians, only the occasional black person  making his or her way amongst the splendour of mans economic achievement only later to catch a taxi and return home to the very different world of the Township.
As we whisked effortlessly along the motorway I recognised the suburbs and the turn offs, it was as if I was back home. Turn left here and then right, down the tree lined avenues flanked by the four metre walls enclosing enormous gardens and equally enormous houses in which rich Johannesburg  families live and have continue to do so since we left. It was all so surreal to see this world we had junked, worried about the ability of a new governance and yet it was still here functioning as if nothing had happened. 

A sudden jolt brought me back to earth as the next video took me into the heart of Johannesburgs central business district. This was the Africa we know from the newsreels, the Africa, unkempt buildings, honking cars, the ubiquitous  combi taxi, twisting and turning its way through the traffic. Lots of people on the street sadly not a white face in sight, no modern architecture, just the gated shop fronts to barricade themselves and their goods from the night-times ‘other world’,  which conducts a parallel business when the sun goes down. Everything was much as I had left it but it looked run down and aimless. The life had gone out of the people as the economy ceased to thrive and a scruffy  street economy grew in its place. The few high rise buildings, famous as Insurance or Banking head offices, thousands of white collar workers keen to get to work and be part of a thriving economy, now either stand empty or are partly occupied by much smaller companies. They symbolise a different era, a monument to a different time when South Africa felt it could take on the world but which has now been reduced to a cottage industry . There is a somewhat malevolent current in the air as disgruntled black people, finding the  promised land of ANC electioneering simply transferring them from the poverty of the township, to blocks of dingy flats ringed around the CBD
The nostalgia of living there and being happy there came flooding back as I watched the first video but reality stung home watching the second as one remembered all the warning signs of the overpowering right of a majority to choose. 

A healthy warning of what popularism can do in its ideological right to do s