Leaving

Dispatches from Gauteng when I'm no longer in Gauteng

When I first started Dispatches from Gauteng, I was a little unsure about whether I could keep up with the pace of one story every two weeks.

I could only go so many place, at some point, I figured, I’d run out of stories.

That hasn’t happened yet, but I’ve got a new question, do I continue Dispatches from Gauteng when I’m no longer in Gauteng.

Tomorrow, I’m heading back to Montreal. I’ll be there for a while, maybe forever.

I have no plans to come back to South Africa beyond a list of things that I still want to do, places I still want to see and people I’d like to visit again.

The lockdown, the pandemic, make leaving easier. The list of things I want to do one more time is mostly a list of things I haven’t been able to do since March.

City things, like drinks in Melville, the Neighbourgoods market and the fried chicken sandwiches you can get there, going out for dinner, music.

Things we had planned that got cancelled: Afrikaburn, a wilderness trek in Kruger National Park, seeing the Orlando Pirates play one more time.

Food is the easiest thing to say goodbye too, at least you can still buy it.

I get one last Bunny Chow, a mutton curry in a hollowed out bread loaf.

One last kota, because all the best takeaway foods in SA are in hollowed out bread loaves. It comes with chips (of course), russian (a type of sausage), polony (bologna), cheese and mustard. It tastes better than it looks. My favourite kota place serves it with atchar which may sound weird but is really good. Too few sandwiches in North America have french fries as an ingredient.

Almost everything else I’ll miss about this town, I’ve been missing already.

It’s day 126 of lockdown.

For us, Johannesburg has been a city of events, art on First Thursdays AfroPunk on New Years, Jazz on the Lake, polo matches in Sandtown and watching the Soweto Derby at Moja Cafe in Soweto.

Joburg’s a hard city to get your head around. Even after a year, I don’t feel like I know it. Even more than most cities, it is a place of a million experiences, who you are, where you live, what you do shape your perception of this city more than most.

This is a city of sprawling slums and high rises, a city of leafy suburbs and walls, a city of guards and electric fences.

But it’s also a city of energy, of murals and music, the smell of woodsmoke and cooking meat, a city of trees and weird orange flowers that bloom in the winter.

It is a city with an incongruous pace, sometimes too fast, sometimes too slow.

There are somethings I won’t miss, the chaos of the traffic, the frequent lack of sidewalks, the goddamn hadida ibis.

So what’s next for this newsletter?

I’m not as interested in a Dispatches from Quebec, I’m not sure you would be either.

I’ve got a couple more weeks of stories I can tell about Joburg, about South Africa, about some other places not too far from here.

After that, this newsletter will be a bit more occasional.

It’s not the end, I know I’ll have other stories you’ll want to read, stories from other places, I just don’t know them yet.

Thanks for being a part of Dispatches from Gauteng, it’s readers like you that make this newsletter special.