The amazing Yeoville pap bomb

GQ Magazine

TELFORD VICE, Cape Town

THWAK? Thwek? Thwik? Thwok? Thwuk? Whatever sound a flying fist of pap makes when it meets horizontal concrete having being flung, many slow motion seconds previously, from a window on one of Ponte City’s 54 floors, it is not pretty.

Which floor? Who can say. And if you are standing on that patch of concrete, within striking range of the next fist of pap, who cares?

Nurse to doctor: “How did he die?”

Doctor: “Smacked square on the scone by a Ponte pap bomb, poor bastard. At least it was instant.”

After a momentary afterwobble, a frission of what might have been, the pap was silent and still and at one with its surroundings, wet white on dry dirt, a bump within a lump wrapped in a dump.

The pap was as real as the stark, straight silhouette Ponte makes in defiance of the rest of Johannesburg’s rambling skyline. The rest is fictitious.

And another thing: Ponte is no-one’s idea of a lump. And still another: Hillbrow and Yeoville, the neighbourhoods that would be crushed should this modern Babel topple, are dumps only when viewed from the fabulous fakeness of Sandton.

Nothing could be more real than standing in Ponte’s core. This is what an unruined Aztec temple would look like on the inside. Below us, quartzite rock of ages. Above us, only concrete. The sky is up there somewhere but who would know. It is night, and what cold, hard, nicotine-stained light there is is sucked into dark doorways and sterile stairwells.

Ponte is its own metaphor for the balls it took to build this thing and to build it here. It is the ultimate example of how ugly Joburg can be. Or is it?

Over the hills and far away in Sandton, Tuscany meets Manhattan in a collision of capitalism and vulgarity. The suits like to call it the “richest square mile in Africa”. It is better described as the most heartless, pompous and superficial square mile in Africa.

Sandton is what results when shopping malls, office blocks, hotels and apartment buildings are separated by roads congealed with cars in which single occupants pay more attention to their cell phones than to the road. This constantly shape-shifting monster feeds on the bristling rage of those who consider themselves superior beings and expect the rest of us to know it.

If Jackson Pollock had been commissioned to capture the spirit of Sandton, he would have painted a single sludge of fat, straight line in the most boring beige - and then set fire to the canvas. Sandton is what ugly does when it has too much money and not nearly enough sense. It is the anti-city.

And yet, much of Joburg thinks of Sandton as the epitome of civilisation and of Ponte as where you end up as a consequence of catastrophe. On a recent Sunday evening, as the sun bathed Ponte and surrounds in liquid gold, nothing could be more wrong. A handful of us, tourists from the rancid republic of Sandton and places disturbingly like it, stood on the Yeoville heath looking down on the city. We knew it was a living, breathing city because to get up the hill we had walked through streets alive with the liquorice all-sorts of humanity.

We were the paying guests of Nikolaus Bauer and Michal Luptak, a journalist and a “renegade accountant” respectively. They run an NGO, Dlala Nje (Just Play - [email protected]), that is dedicated to giving the close on 1000 children who call Ponte home something besides concrete to stimulate their minds - a games room, a vegetable garden planted in disused baths and gas cylinders sliced in half.

The other month, no less a figure than Abdullah Ibrahim dropped in to give the kids a music lesson. “It was kind of freaky,” Bauer said. “Normally, the kids just make a noise with their instruments. But they seemed to get what he was about very quickly, and he actually had them playing in tune.”

Unusually for white South Africans, Bauer and Luptak live in Ponte. As Bauer likes to say, “I arrived looking for a story and left with a lease.”

Having descended the heath with the darkness coming down, we headed towards Rockey Street. Once a haven for South Africans of all races who wanted lives not overtly controlled by apartheid, it is now a vibrant slice of the African diaspora.

Drinks and starters at a Congolese bar was followed by a visit to the happy sensory chaos of Yeoville Market and dinner at a Cameroonian restaurant.

A taxi ride later, we were back at Ponte, wondering what the hell had just happened, why we had not let it happen to us sooner, and when we could let it happen again.

Yes, we were quite safe. At least, we were while we had smiling eyes meeting ours in the streets and as we stood within Ponte’s concrete protection.

But not for long. Soon, we were on our way back to Sandton, where fists are made from stuff much more deadly than pap.