The Uber driver’s name is ‘Jealous,’ number plate: 569 285GP. He pulls up on Keyes, outside the Trumpet building in Rosebank’s art district. Dineo checks the numberplate to be sure, climbs into the back seat and takes out her phone.
‘On my way, just finished up at the YANNICK opening, heading to town now. Everything okay?’ Send. A yellow thumbs-up emoji appears.
It’s the last day of the Art Fair and the closing event of the Creative City programme, an initiative that aims to ‘activate’ the pre-existing infrastructure of inner-city art projects, and ‘re-connect’ the Art Fair’s VIP audiences to the city.
Dineo works for the Art Fair as a project manager and PR strategist. Her background is in journalism, but she doesn’t do much of that these days. Who does?
This year, the Art Fair secured its first headline sponsor, a 120-year-old mining corporation founded shortly after the gold rush that saw Johannesburg rise out of the Highveld. The 2024 fair is now titled the SaxonGold Jozi Art Fair. Or just ‘Art Fair’ for short.
She opens up her chat with Johan from Big Boyz Tactical. ‘Hi Johan. Are your guys on site?’ A white thumbs-up emoji comes back.
The Creative City programme hasn’t been much of a success. Nobody attended the open studios, choosing to stay at the Art Fair instead, sipping wine and schmoozing, maybe doing a little bit of shopping afterwards at the nearby mall. ‘Safety’ was one of the main concerns, but truthfully, nobody wanted to travel into town to look at struggling artists. Dineo and her team had to make the closing event work. They had been tasked with facilitating a public, site-specific performance in and around the detritus of the Bree Street Explosion. This, Dineo was told, was in line with SaxonGold’s mandate to ‘highlight and address the enduring legacies of extractive mining practices in Southern Africa.’ They were in talks to sponsor a new theatre festival in Kimberly, too.
Just over a year ago, Bree Street – officially renamed Lillian Ngoyi Street a few years ago, but it never really caught on – exploded, leaving a ten metre-wide trench in the middle of the city. Investigations revealed that it was a methane gas explosion, but speculations ran wild at first. The most popular theory was that it was the fault of the zama-zamas, informal miners working illegally below the streets of the city, in search of gold dust and the mineral flotsam of its flooded mines. Many of the inner-city residents still choose to believe this. More than a year later, and the road has yet to be fixed, less a scar than an open wound. The closure continues to cause difficulty for commuters during the morning and evening rush, when the city’s many mini-bus taxis routinely enter into a dramatic gridlock, all blaring hooters and idling engines in the heat and smog of the city. As with many tragedies in Johannesburg, public life simply pivots, and continues around it.
They cross Empire road and head into Braamfontein from Jan Smuts.
‘Where in town are you going, my sister?’ asks Jealous.
‘Bree. Where the explosion happened.’
‘It’s closed there.’
‘I know. You can drop me nearby, there will be security.’
Jealous nods and they drive on through Braamfontein, past the Wits Art Museum, over Nelson Mandela Bridge and into Newtown where they take a left onto Bree. Dineo doesn’t know this part of town well. Moving up here from the Eastern Cape a few years ago, the treed canopies of Joburg’s Northern suburbs had been her soft landing.
Town is busy. People move through the street wherever they find a gap, weaving their way between cars and motorbikes, brushing up against the side of Jealous’ Toyota Corolla. Dineo hides her phone and places her bag between her legs. They reach Simmonds where she spots the Big Boyz bakkie, with its Punisher-style logo and the bright orange lights on its roof flashing silently. On the opposite side of the road, she sees a police vehicle flashing its deep, blue lights. Together, the lights cast a muddy purple glow over the scene.
‘Here’s fine.’
She gets out and makes her way over to the corner of Loveday and Bree, where they’ve closed off the road. SaxonGold had to approach the city for special permission to pull off this performance. The approval process took months.
The short walk over to the performance site proves overwhelming for Dineo. The acrid smell of burning plastic mixes with sunbaked urine on the pavement and stings her nostrils. She moves quickly, aware of how she looks, suddenly. She considers the electric green frames of her glasses, her loose-fitting pinafore dress and her chunky sneakers. In the art world, these things help her stay visible. Here, they make her a target. Men whistle and call out to her from across the street, making comments about her body, asking her if she’s lost, telling her that it’s not safe out here for a girl like her. She ignores them and presses on, her Art Fair tote bag over her shoulder and with both hands clutching the strap. She steps over broken glass, puddles of oily grey water, and moves around smouldering piles of rubbish. Eventually, she arrives at the site and is glad to see a decently sized crowd waiting for the performance to begin. Johan sees her and calls her over.
‘Did you walk?’ he asks, holding up the red and white danger tape for her to step under. ‘You could have gotten them to drive in and drop you, man, jissie, it’s not safe.’
‘It’s fine. Do you know if Cherise is here?’
‘Ja.’ Johan motions towards a group of people huddled together in the headlights of another Big Boyz bakkie, all on their phones.
Dineo walks over and greets her colleague.
‘How cool is this?’ says Cherise.
Dineo smiles and nods. Cherise works from Cape Town and only ever comes up for the Art Fair. Johannesburg is always appealing if you’re simply passing through it, thinks Dineo. People love visiting as much as they love leaving.
‘Where’s Khanyi?’
‘Just up there, she’s about to start.’
Dineo looks up Bree towards the explosion site and sees the performer standing on top of the detritus – gorged chunks of tarmac and dark brown soil – dressed in a shimmering gold dress and bearing two long wooden rods which she holds with outstretched arms on either side of her. It appears to Dineo as a complete spectacle – the setting Johannesburg sun bathing her in a rich, golden glow, the vista of the city’s old buildings flanking her small body and framing the scene. She quickly catches herself.
‘She can’t start! The investors aren’t here. And the collectors?’
‘The SaxonGold team is here and so are some of the partners,’ says Cherise. ‘Collectors don’t care about performance art anyways. They can’t buy it. ’
Dineo sees SaxonGold up ahead, a group of suits standing near a black SUV under the close watch of their own security team. She goes over to introduce herself to the man in charge, Adriaan, who has been talking about the sorry state of the city with the others. He stops and looks at her.
‘Hello sir. I’m Dineo. I’m the—’
‘Haai, haai,’ he says with a false smile. ‘So, what’s the story here? She’s not gonna sing, hey?’ The other suits laugh when he says this. Dineo laughs, too. She is about to explain the performance to him, but then Khanyi begins to move.
‘Come, come,’ he says to the other suits. ‘Better view up there.’
Dineo watches them walk on and then turns her attention to the performer. She watches Khanyi dip down to the left and sway into a low, stooped gait, then rise, slowly, and turn in the light, her arms still outstretched and carrying the rods. In front of Khanyi, embedded in the rubble, is a bowl of stones and metals. She motions towards it with the rods, plunges them into the bowl, the crunch of the stones somehow audible to Dineo over the din of the city. All the while, Khanyi recites, in varying tones, what seems to be a spoken word poem.
One of the partners appears at Dineo’s side and speaks in a thick German accent.
‘What is she saying? Do you know?’
Dineo tells him that it’s a poem for the dead. That the whole performance is about the act of commemorating and paying tribute to those lost to the mines, whose bodies were never found, and whose spirits could never be laid to rest. This performance, she tells him, is a way of fetching the spirits. This is what she had approved in the press release, at least.
‘Wow,’ says the German. He seems intrigued. Impressed, even. ‘People died in the mines?’
‘Yes,’ says Dineo. ‘People died.’ She feels her stomach turn. ‘People died here on this street when the explosion happened, actually.’
‘Ahah,’ he replies, pushing his glasses further up his nose. ‘Terrible. But they were illegal, yes? The ones mining beneath where we are standing?’
She hears a commotion, then, somewhere behind them. Turning, she sees a group of men surrounded by members of the police and the Big Boyz. There is shouting. She walks over to Johan.
‘What’s going on?’
‘These guys are trying to get in. They’re drunk as all hell. Probably high as well,’ says Johan, not taking his eyes off the scene.
She looks at the men and sees that they are all carrying half-empty quarts of beer in their hands, some with cigarettes in their mouths, arguing with the police to be let in. She looks back at the performance and sees many of the guests are now focused on this scene as well.
‘Look, can’t we just let them in and keep an eye on them?’ she asks Johan. ‘Maybe they just want to watch.’
‘No chance my dear, approved guests only. You let them in and then the rest of the street will be in here. We’re at capacity as is and we still need to get those other vans in here.’
‘What do you mean at capacity?’
‘Look at the state of this road. It’s a miracle they let you guys do this. And we’re on top of a whole network of underground tunnels. One person too many and the rest of the street could collapse.’
Dineo looks at the group of arguing men, and then back at Khanyi, who has just tipped the bowl of stones and metals over, scattering them down the rubble and into the crevasses of the faultline. She dips and twists once more and begins to groan.
Dineo hears hooting and turns. The rest of the collectors have arrived, three Uber vans worth.
‘Make way!’ calls Johan.
A police officer moves over to his patrol car and unfastens the danger tape, letting it fall to the ground. The vans start rolling in. Khanyi slams the rods down onto the rubble and wails. Dineo’s stomach turns again.
‘Uhm, Johan? Is it safe having these vans come in here?’
‘Ja, ja, let’s just make way here,’ he says without looking at her.
The vans drive all the way in, coming to a stop right in front of the explosion site. Dineo watches Cherise approach the van, all smiles, ready to receive the guests.
The doors of the vans slide open and she sees the collectors, all wide-eyed and open-mouthed, tumbling out.
‘Careful,’ she hears one of them say in an Italian accent as he steps out into the street. ‘It is not stable.’
A shriek from Khanyi, who seems to be reaching a fever pitch, followed by another back-wrenching crack of wood on stone. The collectors push forward, eager to join the SaxonGold crowd at the front. Dineo feels overwhelmed then – the cacophony of shouting men, Khanyi’s guttural wailing, the sharp crack of the wooden dowels on the rubble.
She smells fire and petrol, the nauseating smell of methane mingled with her own sweat.
She closes her eyes, hoping to dull one sense in order to make room for the others. She smells the earth, tastes metal at the back of her throat. Another shriek, then, and this time she cannot be sure what reaches her first: the sound of crunching stone, or the slow, seismic shift – the city moving out from under her feet.
~
‘Hello, my sister.’ Jealous is looking at her in the rearview mirror.
‘Hi again,’ says Dineo, looking up from her phone. ‘Were you waiting for me?’
‘Uh uh. I came from Newtown now, but I saw your request. There’s not a lot of people calling Uber from town. Everyone is taking taxis here.’
‘Ah.’
Seated once again in the backseat of Jealous’ Toyota Corolla, Dineo tends to a string of texts.
Cherise: ‘Yes, Khanyi’s with us. We’re going back to the Fair.’
Johan: ‘Hello ma’am. Confirming that all the guests have left safely. We’re wrapping up at the site now.’
In the moments just after the first tremor moved through the city, everyone panicked. Dineo recalls looking first to Khanyi, who had abandoned her performance and was running in the direction of the vans, and then to Adriaan and the rest of the SaxonGold team. Aided by their security cluster, they were rushed into the SUV which pulled off, broke through the danger tape, ramped the pavement and disappeared up Bree street in the direction of Nelson Mandela Bridge.
The partners and collectors had rushed to the vans, clamouring and pushing their way through the crowd as they went. Dineo’s last image of the German was of him, wide-eyed and shouting, pulling the door of the van closed on a whole group of people, including Khanyi and Cherise. Through the noise and panic of it all, none of them had noticed that the ground had ceased to tremble, and that the street remained intact.
Later, as she waited with Johan and Big Boyz Tactical to escort the rest of the guests into their transportation, Dineo turned to face the faultline and found it entirely unchanged, save for the remnants of the performance, a few glistening rocks and metals lodged in the crevices of Bree street.
She places her phone in her lap and watches the buildings filter past the window. Outside, people continue with their lives, street-side vendors packing up their goods, people criss-crossing the street as they make their way to taxis, buses, their homes.
Dineo’s phone buzzes once, twice. She picks it up and sees a new message from Cherise asking if she took any videos of the performance for socials. She also sees a meeting request for 8am tomorrow: Creative City programme: debrief with SaxonGold team and partners.
She drops her phone into her lap again and leans her head against the window. Behind her, the city endures, the intensity of the performance, the tremor, and the acute panic that followed, already faded from its collective memory. ~
