Afternoon in Tembisa

Today I spent an hour driving around Tembisa, a sprawling township of about a million people to the north east of Joburg (and so not far from where I'm living). My friend Steph is spending a lot of his time there currently, selling his BioAfrica cosmetics range, recently pepped up by the addition of the high-performance satisfaction-guaranteed menthol-oil based erection enhancer.

The tutoring I'm doing on Saturday mornings is on the outskirts of Ebony Park, which is part of Tembisa, but this was the first time I'd been into the township itself. It was a crazy experience: wealthier areas with small but neat houses, shacks with pit toilets marked by whirling methane extractors, outside markets with vegetables and clothes and live chickens stacked in cages alongside the erection enhancers, shebeens (informal bars) with men of all ages haging around drinking, the familia Pick n Pay chain supermarket, kids fixing their bides on the streets or flying kites made out of converted garbage bags, and everywhere colour and movement and people.

Steph hires pretty school girls to run his stalls. "Sex sells, Will!", Steph exclaims; he dresses the girls in high-class low-neckline t-shirts. Penny, who sat in the back of the car as we drove around, was 20 years old, from Zimbabwe, and in Grade 11, her second-to-last year of school. His products adorn the mirrors of hair dressers like Rebecca's Hair Salon in the photo. Like Penny, many of the people working for him, both the hairdressers and the school girls, are foreigners from Zimbabwe or Mozambique, or further afield.

I can count the number of visits I've made into townships like this ... they're few and far between, and I think that that's typical of white South Africans. Most have an idea of townships as being places of poverty and crime; there is no reason to go there. And there is certainly plenty of both in the townships, I don't want to paint a pretty picture of township chic. But after leaving, I drove through the suburbs which are familiar to me, the "white burbs", and thought about the obvious contrasts. In South Africa I have always disliked the suburban blandness that I grew up in: the little gardens and sameness and empty streets and people behind high walls and electric fences. They look like suburbs in other parts of the world, give or take 2 metres of wall and a couple of thousand volts. But Tembisa had something rich and vibrant about it which had me itching (like a tourist?) to take photographs and see more.