JONNY STEINBERG: A monument to racial obsession and hopeless fantasy
At 80 Albert Street in downtown Joburg apartheid tried to do the impossible: track all SA’s black people
Of all the details to have emerged about the Marshalltown fire, the one that preoccupies me is the bodies that have been burnt beyond recognition. It has set off a string of thoughts about the living and the dead, about SA’s past, and about the building that burned down: 80 Albert Street.
The first thing that struck me is how much more governmental attention those incinerated remains have received than the people who once inhabited them. One cannot know for sure, but it is likely that those corpses were properly collected and transported to the mortuary, that soft tissue was expertly extracted, that DNA tests will be fast-tracked and performed with great expertise and care. Such intimate work: the close contact with the flesh that once belonged to a person, the scraping of samples, their close examination. ..
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