GQ Magazine
TELFORD VICE, Cape Town
The first shots of my revolution were fired on Sharpeville Day, 1998. Years previously, in the blue midnight smoke of a bar, a friend had told me that you do not grow up until you leave the place where you were born. He left that place and left behind his words to percolate through my soul. I was born in East London on January 25, 1966. I grew up on Sharpeville Day, 1998.
East London is smaller than Port Elizabeth, bigger than Grahamstown and inferior to both. PE has industry and grit and a small place in the mind of the wider world. Gtown has a cathedral and Rhodes University and the arts festival. East London has a self-denigrating nickname - “Slummies” - a bad accent - “Pass the peas and carrots” becomes “Passapeasacarrots, ekse” - and cringes from the bulletproof truth that only two kinds of people live there: those who have given up on life and those who are plotting their escape.
It took me 32 years to emerge from the sewer of giving up. On March 21, 1998, I squinted at my escape.
Whatever you’re driving it’s a long way from East London to Durban. It’s even longer when you’re driving a City Golf loaded with a wife, two children, a maid, a dog, assorted potplants, and everything else we owned that would not fit into the removal van.
As I drove that road, starting in the deep dark of 4am, then wincing into the dawn light as it revealed anew the ancient crags of the Eastern Cape, feeling oddly relieved that my legs still worked when we broke for breakfast in Kokstad, wakening into the morning and the winding green welcome of KwaZulu-Natal, and finally easing into Durban at around lunchtime, I did not recognise the spark of my revolution.
Durban was a good place to escape to, a city of sass and sexiness. I was happy there. But with happiness came an irresistible longing for what life could be, if only ...
Ten years after that album cover of a day spent driving to Durban, I had lost 50kg, divorced, discovered the woman I should have married in the first place and won her heart, and moved to Johannesburg.
When I lived in East London and visited Johannesburg, it was a place of gnarling traffic, snarling drivers and walls high enough to keep out the anger. When I moved to Durban and visited Johannesburg, it was an intoxicating swirl of money and mayhem, and people who weren’t afraid to look a stranger in the eye and buy them a drink.
When I moved to Johannesburg, it became a city in denial of and simultaneously at war with its realities. It was fascinating but also ugly and frustrating. Every gleam in every eye seemed juiced with 220 volts - and if you looked back too hard you would feel the shock. Or so they wanted you to think. Like the thunderstorms that turned summer afternoon skies into lurid soap operas, Joburg was more fake than it was bake. It was also undeniably warm and forgiving, more a dysfunctional family rendered in steel and concrete than just another cold-hearted city.
Now, six years on, we are planning a move to a place where life could mean more than work: Cape Town. First, our offer to purchase an apartment in Sea Point was accepted, albeit it at the second attempt. Then we paid our deposit. All we needed was after that the approval of a mortgage bond. For people who have given up and succumbed to the salaried life, that is no big deal.
For the two of us, freelance journalists with no payslips but secure contracts, it felt like having to find all the Chappies bubblegum papers that have ever carried our fingerprints, have them authenticated by a forensic accountant, sign them in blood, scan them, and send them off to the suits. But, thank you, suits, for doing us the favour of putting us in debt so we can buy the next stage of our revolution.
By the time you read this, we will probably have worked out how to get the cat to Cape Town without making him crazier than he is, plugged and painted the holes in the walls of our rented Joburg apartment where we had hung our memories, entrusted those memories to the movers, bought our one-way air tickets, and hugged the people we are leaving behind.
For my wife, this will be the moment of her growing up. For me, it will be my third move to a new city in 16 years. Each of the other times, I have re-invented myself. This time, doubtless, I will again. Can’t say how. But I’m looking forward to it. Aluta continua.
I fear Telford that you already sound like an "high-rise nosed" Cape Tonian. I fear further that you have lost the will to be an impartial observer or fair commentator.
You will find the friendly runners on the Cape Town streets to be mostly deaf (especially if they are white)and possibly dumb, as you attempt to extort a greeting from them.
Port Elizabeth is little different and the accent you speak of is far more likely PE than the radiant city of East London.
I further invite you to compare the beaches and the adjacent coastlines of the cities you speak of, for the coast from Chilumna to Port Edward is unsurpassed in beauty, ruggedness and hospitality.
If you survive a winter in Cape Town I suggest a summer holiday in Kei Mouth or Morgan Bay for thawing purposes - in all its forms. :)