The charm of a vanishing world
RELIC OF THE PAST: ONLY THREE OF 52 COUNTERS WORK
Each week Marie-Lais looks out for the unusual, the unique, the downright quirky or just something or someone we might have had no idea about, even though we live here. We like to travel our own cities and their surrounds, curious to feel them out. This week she she sends a postcard off from Jeppe Street Post Office.
It’s Rahima Moosa Street, but the post office is still called “Jeppe Street”, still used for mail sorting and postal operations. I’m in the beautifully high ceilinged, late-deco postal hall, full of pastel murals. It’s gloomily unlit but post has almost become obsolete.
Three of the 52 counters are in use. One is for car licenses, another for Unisa material.
Number 20 has people leaning against its counter. Behind the counter is a man in a red peaked cap, also leaning. He excuses himself as being “offline”. After a while he tells the man ahead of me that he’s “definitely offline”.
Everyone leaves except me, and an elderly woman who had just arrived with a thick letter. On my postcard goes an airmail sticker and a franked label. I’m told to take it to the entrance, where I’ll find postboxes to post it in.
I stroll along the hall. Uniformed people keep asking me what I’m doing here. A mural arrests my attention, which I had seen previously on a tour of Johannesburg city developments.
The upper floors of this building are being turned into accommodation, but with certain post office features preserved.
I’d been puzzled by the mural. It depicts a blonde woman with plaited hairknots over her ears, one knee resting on the ground, wearing bell-bottom pants and a tight jacket, pointing at a blackskinned man in the half-distance. He’s bare-chested, also in bells. I still can’t make sense of it, even if the foregrounded woman might somehow be male and the other figure indicated as subservient.
On the upstairs landing is a huge stained glass window, unlit from behind. Its central motif is a train, this I can make out, and an airborne plane. To one side is a smaller feature, with a mail coach clear in the lead. Though I can’t quite see horses or carriage.
Another small feature, on the other side, has “Native Runner” written underneath, discernable only as a running leg with a foot below what must be a person.
In the dark vestibule are five postboxes, one standing open. Into the first I post my card. I expect to hear it flutter to the floor but there’s no sound.
I wonder where it went.