GIULIETTA TALEVI: District 9 or Amelie – it’s up to us

As I drove home from the BDTV studios in Parktown, Joburg, on Wednesday night, I noticed something odd.

Jan Smuts Avenue, the road that, along with Oxford and Louis Botha, is the lifeblood into and out of the city to the great sprawling north, had a clarity it’s been lacking for weeks now.

Then I realised: the streetlights were working again! There’s not much sadder than a whoop to yourself in your car over a working streetlight, but this is Joburg, November 2021, and I don’t mind admitting it.

Perhaps some heavy-duty whining on social media – from me and others – met a receptive audience in the bowels of the Joburg Roads Agency or City Power. But while I am immensely grateful that the lights have finally been fixed, it hardly is worth pointing out that it shouldn’t be this way.

Really.

Yet huge parts of the city remain shrouded in darkness at night.

Crucial roads, too, like the M1 South – an actual highway.

As we residents of the city moan daily, these are the basics that appear to have slipped away from us: working streetlights, traffic lights, walkable and weed-free pavements. That’s before you even get to running water and electricity (the thrill!).

I’m not sure what the psychological toll of confronting failing infrastructure is every time you leave your house – be it traffic that is backed up for hundreds of metres at a major intersection on the fritz, while a carful of overfed metro cops lurk under a bridge a kilometre away stopping drivers to “check their licenses”; or pavements that have been dug up and not put together again, forcing pedestrians onto the street; or litter everywhere – but it surely manifests in the uncontrolled rage that we display towards one another on a typical drive home, not to mention social media’s toxic streets.  

It’s a form of daily trauma that any resident in any crumbling SA town or city has to confront, and, to put it mildly, it cannot be good for the national psyche.

And, arguably, it’s more of a factor in the decision to leave SA for countries where you do believe these amenities to be provided as a matter of course than the horrors of our world-beating unemployment rate, or our daily murder tally. 

In his excellent book Is It Me or Is It Getting Hot in Here, Tom Eaton talks about what he describes as “Parys Poepstring” – the local variant of a curious (and sadly funny) condition known as Paris Syndrome, where, writes Eaton, “some particularly naive travellers arrive in Paris expecting Amelie and what they get is a French remake of Trainspotting”.

Eaton quotes psychologist Herve Menhamou on the subject, who told the Journal du Dimanche in 2007: “When the idea they have of the country meets the reality of what they discover it can provoke a crisis.”

In the SA version, he goes on to say: “What if so much of the outrage and anger experienced by middle-class people reading the news is the result of a kind of lurking Paris Syndrome that affects SA citizens – a condition, let’s say, called Parys Poepstring? What if many of our emotional reactions are not based on reality but misaligned expectations?”

It’s clearly particularly acute for middle-class whites, like me, who benefited from apartheid’s warped largesse, when Joburg – for a sliver of the populace – was, if not Amelie, then at least not yet District 9.

Eaton puts it so well. “Anyone who reads the news can tell you the problems facing SA. But along with these familiar crises, I think we need to start considering another problem: the extent to which our expectations are warping our perception of reality, and plunging us into a deeply stressful experience as we try to inhabit a country that doesn’t really exist.”

Still, I’m not sure that we ought to give up, just yet, on wishing to live in a place where things work properly, where there’s tangible evidence of improvement, not decay, and where elected leaders and councillors do the jobs they’re expected to, as honestly as possible, guarding every cent of taxpayer cash as it if were their own.

OK, even I rolled my eyes there.

But I can still hope, in the scrabbling for power that goes along with these post-election coalition talks, that some politicians wish for it too. And, mainly, that citizens learn to demand it.

Our shared prosperity depends on it.

Talevi is editor of the FM’s Money & Investing section