The Conference Ended Early and I Had a Free Afternoon in Johannesburg

The afternoon I did not plan for

I am the kind of person who plans holidays in a spreadsheet. Columns for cost, columns for travel time, a little conditional-format traffic light that turns red when I am about to overspend. So it says something that the best afternoon I have had in years happened because a workshop got cancelled.

I live in Durban. I do the books for three medical practices and a panel-beater, which is not glamorous, but it is steady, and it pays for my mother's medical aid. In May my firm sent me up to Johannesburg for a two-day continuing-education thing at a conference hotel near the airport. The kind of place with beige carpets and a coffee station that runs out of milk by ten. The second afternoon, the presenter got food poisoning, and they cancelled the last two sessions. Suddenly I had five hours and a flight that only left the next morning.

I sat in my hotel room for about forty minutes doing nothing. Refreshing my email. Watching a maintenance man fix a curtain rail across the courtyard. Then I did something I never do. I asked the woman at reception what a person should actually see if they only had one afternoon in the city and had never really been.

What Thandeka at the desk told me

Her name badge said Thandeka. She looked at me for a second, weighing something up, and then she said, do you want the tourist answer or the real one. I said the real one. She said, go to Soweto.

I must have made a face, because she laughed. I had that reflex a lot of us from outside Gauteng have, where Soweto exists in your head as a headline and not a place. A word attached to old footage. She said her grandmother still lived there, in Orlando, and that the version in my head was about forty years out of date and never that accurate in the first place.

She wrote a name and a number on the back of a compliments slip and told me to book one of the small guided Soweto Tours rather than driving in blind, because a good guide is the difference between looking at a place and understanding it. I phoned. A man answered on the second ring, said he had a driver finishing a group near Maponya Mall who could swing past and collect me, and that I should be downstairs in forty minutes. So much for the spreadsheet.

The drive in

The guide who collected me was called Sipho, and he drove the way people drive when a road is stitched into their memory, one hand loose on the wheel, greeting a man selling airtime at a robot like they were cousins, which for all I know they were. He asked me almost nothing about myself for the first fifteen minutes, which I appreciated. He just talked. He pointed out the two cooling towers painted with murals long before we reached them, the way you point out a mountain to a child.

I had expected, I am ashamed to say, a certain heaviness. What I had not expected was how ordinary it all was in the best sense. Kids in maroon school jerseys walking home in a clump, arguing about something. A woman selling grilled mielies with the husks pulled back like petals. A man washing a taxi with real devotion, a bucket and a rag and a radio. Life, at full volume, on a Wednesday.

Standing on Vilakazi Street

Sipho parked and we walked. Vilakazi Street is the only street in the world, he told me, where two Nobel Peace Prize winners once lived within a few hundred metres of each other. I did not know that. He let me stand outside the small brick house where the Mandela family lived, and instead of reciting dates he told me a story about the scorch marks, about petrol bombs, about a family trying to have supper while history kept knocking the door in.

There was a moment I keep coming back to. An older woman was sitting on a plastic chair outside her gate a few doors down, shelling something into a bowl, watching our little group with the mild amusement of someone who has watched a thousand little groups. She caught my eye and she did not perform anything. She just nodded, one adult to another, and went back to her bowl. I do not know why that undid me slightly. I think because for years I had carried an idea of a place as a symbol, and here was a person for whom it was simply the street where she lived and had always lived and would keep on living after I flew home.

The lunch I did not expect

We ate at a place off the main drag, plastic tablecloths, a woman named Mam Joyce running the kitchen like a small navy. Sipho ordered for me without asking, which turned out to be the right call. Pap, chakalaka, a piece of grilled chicken that had clearly been marinated by someone who took it personally, and a spinach thing I have tried and failed to recreate three times since. I paid for his lunch too, which felt like the least I could do, and he accepted it the way you accept from a friend, no fuss.

He told me about his own life over that meal. About learning the history of his own neighbourhood as an adult because school had skimmed it. About how he almost went into logistics instead. About a German couple he had taken around the previous week who cried at the Hector Pieterson Memorial and then bought his whole family lunch. He was funny about the whole thing, never precious. When I told him I did the books for a panel-beater in Durban he lit up and we spent ten minutes comparing notes on customers who never pay on time.

What I took home

I have thought a lot about why that afternoon landed so hard. I think it is because I went in braced for a museum and got a neighbourhood instead. Nobody was managing my emotions. The history was not behind glass. It was in a woman's scorched front wall and a boy's school jersey and a Nobel laureate's actual small kitchen.

When I got back to Durban my mother asked how the conference was and I talked for twenty minutes about a Soweto Tour instead, and she looked at me like she had never seen me get excited about anything that was not tax-deductible. My colleague Rashid is going up next month for the same course and I have already told him not to book his return flight for the second afternoon. I told him to find one of the guided Tours To Soweto and to say yes to whatever Mam Joyce puts in front of him.

I still keep spreadsheets. I still overplan. But now, when someone asks me for the real answer instead of the tourist one, I try to give it. And I try to remember the woman with the bowl, nodding at me from her chair, entirely unbothered by whatever story I had arrived carrying about her street.