The Parkhurst Bowling Club in Joburg’s northern suburbs is a reminder that much of the country looks like the set of District 9, and even the leafy suburbs are not immune to its creep.
Soot-scorched walls rise from a sea of plastic waste. Winter-dry grass pokes through a sagging fence. A blanket flaps in a doorway. A tent of refuse bags shelters the unfortunate son who doesn’t have a spot to sleep on the floor of the abandoned clubhouse.
It is especially nightmarish in the small hours on a winter’s night when hunched shapes sit unmoving over campfires.
The club — its fate sealed when its last dapper member rolled, like a bowl, off the green and into the sunset — is another battlefield in South Africa’s unfinished class war.
It is especially nightmarish in the small hours on a winter’s night when hunched shapes sit unmoving over campfires
The bageriesi — “those looking for something valuable” — huddle on the perimeter of this inverted, suburban Alamo, while, surrounding them, in the high-walled houses, are those who wish the waste pickers weren’t there at all. (Except maybe on bin day.)
Looking at the green spread of Delta Park and the shady banks of the Braamfontein Spruit, it’s a wonder that the place hasn’t long ago been “resettled”, or sold off to a “developer”, the ancient stipulations behind these gifts of land notwithstanding.
The outcry, then, over the city’s garbled communications about the future of Marks Park, and other as-yet undeveloped public spaces, comes, like the Spanish Inquisition, as no surprise.
On the one side is an administration that struggles to fix a broken pipe or fill a pothole but excels at thoroughly irritating its ratepayers.
On the other is a rising clamour of “the green lung belongs to the people” — a lot of it coming, I bet you, from the same people who’ll let their dogs defecate wildly in that same lung but won’t pick up after them.
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