Born a Crime - Trevor Noah Page 0,76
You ride through one of the richest neighborhoods in Johannesburg, past palatial mansions and huge money. Then you go through the industrial belt of Wynberg that cordons off the rich and white from the poor and black. At the entrance to Alex there’s the huge minibus rank and the bus station. It’s the same bustling, chaotic third-world marketplace you see in James Bond and Jason Bourne movies. It’s Grand Central Station but outdoors. Everything’s dynamic. Everything’s in motion. Nothing feels like it was there yesterday, and nothing feels like it will be there tomorrow, but every day it looks exactly the same.
Right next to the minibus rank, of course, is a KFC. That’s one thing about South Africa: There’s always a KFC. KFC found the black people. KFC did not play games. They were in the hood before McDonald’s, before Burger King, before anyone. KFC was like, “Yo, we’re here for you.”
Once you go past the minibus rank, you’re in Alex proper. I’ve been in few places where there’s an electricity like there is in Alex. It’s a hive of constant human activity, all day long, people coming and going, gangsters hustling, guys on the corner doing nothing, kids running around. There’s nowhere for all that energy to go, no mechanism for it to dissipate, so it erupts periodically in epic acts of violence and crazy parties. One minute it’ll be a placid afternoon, people hanging out, doing their thing, and next thing you know there’s a cop car chasing gangsters, flying through the streets, a gun battle going off, helicopters circling overhead. Then, ten minutes later, it’s like it never happened—everyone’s back to hanging out, back to the hustle, coming and going, running around.
Alex is laid out on a grid, a series of avenues. The streets are paved, but the sidewalks are mostly dirt. The color scheme is cinder block and corrugated iron, gray and dark gray, punctuated by bright splashes of color. Someone’s painted a wall lime green, or there’s a bright-red sign above a takeaway shop, or maybe somebody’s picked up a bright-blue piece of sheet metal just by luck. There’s little in the way of basic sanitation. Trash is everywhere, typically a garbage fire going down some side street. There’s always something burning in the hood.
As you walk, there’s every smell you can imagine. People are cooking, eating takeaways in the streets. Some family has a shack that’s jury-rigged onto the back of someone else’s shack, and they don’t have any running water, so they’ve bathed in a bucket from the outdoor tap and then dumped the dirty water in the street, where it runs into the river of sewerage that’s already there because the water system has backed up again. There’s a guy fixing cars who thinks he knows what he’s doing, but he doesn’t. He’s dumping old motor oil into the street, and now the oil is combining with the dirty bathwater to make a river of filth running down the street. There’s probably a goat hanging around—there’s always a goat. As you’re walking, sound washes over you, the steady thrum of human activity, people talking in a dozen different languages, chatting, haggling, arguing. There’s music playing constantly. You’ve got traditional South African music coming from one corner, someone blasting Dolly Parton from the next corner, and somebody driving past pumping the Notorious B.I.G.
The hood was a complete sensory overload for me, but within the chaos there was order, a system, a social hierarchy based on where you lived. First Avenue was not cool at all because it was right next to the commotion of the minibus rank. Second Avenue was nice because it had semi-houses that were built when there was still some sort of formal settlement going on. Third, Fourth, and Fifth Avenues were nicer—for the township. These were the established families, the old money. Then from Sixth Avenue on down it got really shitty, more shacks and shanties. There were some schools, a few soccer fields. There were a couple of hostels, giant projects built by the government for housing migrant workers. You never wanted to go there. That’s where the serious gangsters were. You only went there if you needed to buy an AK-47.
After Twentieth Avenue you hit the Jukskei River, and on the far side of that, across the Roosevelt Street Bridge, was East Bank, the newest, nicest part of the hood. East Bank was where the government had gone in, cleared out the squatters and their shacks, and