Benefits could have trickled down to the poor
THE one article of heritage the member (of the Upper Jukskei Flyfishing Collective) permitted himself to celebrate at the weekend was water and the way it trickles down, or up, as the case may be. Specifically, he chose the waters of Johannesburg’s iconic Jukskei River and eponym of the member’s little angling enterprise.
He chose also to avoid lamenting the good old days when it might have happened that a prospector, gormless with gold fever, found a yoke-pin lost by a predecessor among the driftwood on the water, which he named Jukskei for the first thing that came to mind. He would then have marked the place with the yoke pin and peered into the Jukskei’s water in his pan and he would have seen the future.
But events tend to overtake dreams. Take the war in Syria, for instance. In the aspirations of the combatants, wealth and power might have been the dream, but the spark that lit the conflagration began with an isolated protest over the unfair and corrupt distribution of water in Daraa in the south. Now, weekend reports say, the water supply to Aleppo has been destroyed in an air raid and the city’s 2-million people face death from thirst and disease. Back in Jozi, where you shouldn’t drink the Jukskei’s water either, we celebrate the newly installed DA mayor Herman Mashaba’s decree (as demanded by his sometimes coalition partner EFF) to stop Bophelong, the civil engineering and construction firm, from continuing the city’s R70m bicycle-lane project. Instead, the council will see all roads in the city tarred.
That’s the spirit, Mr Mayor. It is the roads to the poor that are the most in need of tarring. But Bophelong’s project also involves rebuilding and rehabilitating the city’s precarious storm-water drainage system. On the Westdene Spruit, a tributary of the Braamfontein Spruit and ultimately of the Jukskei, the bicycle-lane project would have the effect also of improving the stream’s flow, thus reviving the downstream ecology.
So it is a shame, really. Downstream is where the poor live — usually.
You might say the leftist garden-city idea of play-play roads for the upstream bourgeoisie’s naff cycling distraction could have the consequence of allowing a better quality of water to trickle down to the poor. Noblesse oblige and all that, obliquely, but not to be taken too seriously in the type of politics in which it is better to be seen doing what the EFF says is good for the poor than actually doing good.
Except for one thing. The high-lying townships in the Westdene Spruit’s catchment, Sophiatown among them, are not exactly salubrious. This must be due to its Kofifi heritage. Kofifi (Sophiatown) sprung up on the fringes of Johannesburg’s main refuse tip in the 1940s and 1950s in one of the few areas in which blacks were permitted to own freehold property.
Kofifi gave us King Kong (the musical) and mbaqanga and Fly-taal (a version of Afrikaans with isiZulu and Sesotho words). And jazz. And shebeen culture. And gangs. And a roll call of artists and journalists and anti-apartheid activists. You might say that back then, it was one of the few places where a stream would flow upwards. All that was too much fun for the aspiring classes on the other side of the municipal tip, so the people were bulldozed away and a low-cost housing scheme arose to eradicate the idea of poor whites.
It was named Triomf (triumph, what else?) and the city re-imposed the natural order of things in which nothing would be permitted to flow upwards.
Still, no gold trickles down the Westdene Spruit. The geological formation is too old, apparently. All that it has to offer those downstream is water. Let it flow.
■
Blom is a fly-fisherman who likes to write.