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Why the roots of grass go way deep
Lawn is not always sweet and soft. Often, in fact, it’s a petrol bomb ready to be lit
The May 13 cover of Time magazine was a drone photograph of Germiston. The aerial image shows Pretoria Road cutting through Primrose, the fire station and Primrose public swimming pool on the left; and on the right, the Makause informal settlement.
Seen from above, the grim contrast between a green, ordered and spacious suburb and a cramped, brown slum evokes Frantz Fanon’s critique of a world “cut in two”. The colonists’ town, Fanon argues, is “strongly built … all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt, and the garbage cans swallow all the leavings, unseen, unknown and hardly thought about.” In contrast, the place of the colonised is “a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other, and their huts are built one on top of the other”...
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