What is this ‘plottuh lunt’?

The thing about Jo’burg is that almost no one you meet here is actually from Jo’burg. It was years after I moved here that I first met someone who grew up and went to school in the city and was now working in Jo’burg. At any gathering I made a habit of proving this to people, thinking I had cleverly discovered it all by myself. But – as with so many of my discoveries, such as the genius toilet-seat warmer I invented when I was 11 – someone else had already discovered this.

Everyone I knew was from Harare or Rustenburg or ’Maritzburg or Durban or the “South Coast” if the town they were from was so small it would be embarrassing to say out loud, or Port Elizabeth, Grahamstown, Devon, Dublin, Bloemfontein, Nowhereville or even Umtata (as it was previously known) – that would be me.

After a couple of years I accepted that no one in Jo’burg was from Jo’burg

Attempting to explain the meaning of the word “platteland” to an American can be somewhat challenging. Nicky Smith tries… and is transported back to her youth in Umtata.

and the mystery ceased to hold my imagination. Everyone was an economic migrant or cultural refugee. And the longer I stayed here, the thing I learnt about this grand dame of the Highveld is that she doesn’t care where you are from, she cares about what you’re doing here.

WHO YOU WERE doesn’t matter; who are you now? It is both forgiving and punishing, because you dare not stop reinventing or re-establishing or rehabilitating your last act, because if you stop moving, just like a shark, you will drown. It is a city of now.

It is this relentless energy that pulls and pushes people away from here. People jump the fence and run… Some only get as far as Cape Town; others go darker, they make it back to a place like home or to the platteland.

Plottuh lunt? the American said, looking up from my screen. No, pluttah lundt. Plutter lundT.