Return to Yeoville

Back when I was a student, Yeoville was one of the best parts of Joburg to live in - Rocky Street was full of cafes, bars and bookshops, and the flats in the streets around, with pressed ceilings and parquet floors, were occupied by artists and students. My first flat, Glenton Court, was just around the corner from Rocky Street, and my 18 months there have to count as one the happiest phases of my life. But already when I was living there in 1995, urban decay had set in. Drug dealers killed someone just around the corner, and I was mugged just outside Glenton Court, and never felt secure there again.

Today I rode through Yeoville again. Glenton Court is boarded up, and the book shops and cafes are long gone, although the legendary House of Tandoor is still there. The library seemed closed. There are a lot of spaza shops (people selling sweets and other small items of groceries from a garage) and fried fast food joints now dominate Rockey Street. There's a combination taxi rank and open-air market which has been built by the city. Congolese hairdressers and money transfer offices ply their trade. In New York, what has happened to Yeoville would be called something like degentrifaction.

Joburg is notorious for changing again and again and again and not preserving the past, but for me the city has lost something precious with Yeoville.

Crocodile Views at Ngwenya

Spent 4 days in a house on the banks of the Crocodile River on the edge of the Kruger National Park with my parents. The house had a view over a section of the rushing river with basking crocodiles and wading buffalo. The Kruger Park with its teeming wildlife was a short drive away.




Slept and read a lot, and suffered a mysterious express bout of flu which allowed my mother to mother me and left me feeling like I was 8 years old again.

Castle Gorge

Took my old friend David, his wife Kedi and their three great kids, Leroto, Tshepiso and Tiamo hiking in Castle Gorge in the Magaliesberg today. Its was great fun for the kids - they went swimming in the winter-cold water pools, 'discovered' the waterfall, kept on saying "Where's the steep part?", saw monkeys and buck, and loved being up in the hills for the day.

Me, at the end of the day, I was exhausted!

Trad Climbing at Grootkloof

Went Trad Climbing for the first time in the Magaliesberg (Grootkloof) with the Mountain Club of South Africa. I didn't lead, but it was a great experience to be high up on the dizzying cliffs with just a couple of tricams keeping me up there. Abseiling down was also huge fun, but on the last section, I got attacked by wasps.

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.

Will 1, Inefficient SA Parastatal 0

My first ever court experience went well - I took SA Airways to the small claims court, after a load of camera equipment and data on CD's was stolen while my luggage was at their mercy, and they paid me back for only a bottle of rum. It was a small victory - the money for the flash I'd bought for my sister's wedding - but it was a victory. And I found the experience of going through the courts really interesting. My sue threshold has been lowered; it's the American Way.

Teaching an Entry-Level Photo Course

Took 3 hours off work today to teach a beginner's class in photography at the Ikamva Winter School. The kids have never touched a camera before. We went over the basics of a camera and some composition tips. It was huge fun, I'm hoping some good stuff will come out of it.