For Highlands News: Waiting for Godot...

- Charles King

 "Who is my neighbour?" the young man asked the teacher. The teacher then told him this story.

Late one night a farmer was travelling from Dullstroom to Lydenburg, when he was attacked by hijackers. Stripped of his clothes, beaten up and his bakkie stolen, he was left half dead on the road.

Not much later a dominee drove past rushing to get home after a late appointment. In his headlights he saw the man lying there, but quickly veered to the other side of the road and passed him.

A travelling salesman, with business in the town the next day also drove past, briefly slowed down and quickly averted his gaze, then sped past.

Then a refugee fleeing from violence in his country to the north came along on foot. When he saw the man, he felt compassion for him. Going over to him, the refugee soothed his wounds with river water from his old bottle and bandaged him with his T-shirt.

He put the man on his back and carried him to a B&B 4 km away, where he washed his face under the garden tap and nervously called the owner (he had no papers and feared being arrested).

He handed the B&B owner his last two faded brown R20 notes and said to him, "This is all I have, will you take care of this man?"

"Now which of these three would you say was a neighbour to the man who was attacked by hijackers," the teacher asked.

"The one who showed him mercy," replied the young man.

Then the teacher said, "Yes, now go and do the same – go and love your neighbour as yourself."

Last week, as part of the Wits University-based Investigative Journalism Workshop (IJW), I spent a morning outside the main refugee reception centre in Johannesburg.

I say outside because our group was thrown out after having just made it through the gate, past the aggressive, pompous-angry security guards.

While luminous yellow reflector jackets were garish badges highlighting their egos, cruelty and pseudo-power, their megaphones and batons were straight out of fascist Italy or Germany, apartheid South Africa... or modern-day Zimbabwe.  

I saw hundreds of this continent's most disempowered people waiting. They were waiting in a ripping August wind laden with the grit-and-dust-and-shit of the winter, amongst the reek of human excrement.

The public 'portaloos', maybe ten of them, had only arrived the day before. Until then, those waiting had shat-and-pissed, menstruated-and-spat-out-their-phlegm on the pavements and in the surrounding open lots.

Arrogantly think what you like, but even for the poorest of the poor, time is money. People waiting here for permits, papers and extensions (only 50 refugees and asylum seekers from the daily hundreds are processed every day) already lost outside 'the system' stood to lose what menial jobs they had.

Every single person I spoke with told of bribery and corruption that started at street level with the translators, but seeped like sewerage though the gates and into the refugee centre.

Tonight as I type these words, a couple of hundred people at least -  including children and babies - are sleeping in the bitter cold on the filthy pavement, maybe in rain, but certainly in the reek.

Those I'd spoken to had got there on the Tuedsay morning in the hope of making it into the reception centre on Thursday, maybe Friday. If they didn't make it, they'd be back next week. And the week after that. Nobody gives a damn.

Most of those I spoke to were Zimbabwean. Despite May's xenophobic attacks, not a single one of them would go back even if they could. They'd rather face violence, bleak conditions and destitution here than Mugabe's poverty of spirit and mind.

Sleep easy tonight, when you do.

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Charles King is a writer and journalist living in Waterval-Boven. His blog Beautiful Mind, which celebrates life, tourism and travel in Mpumalanga's Highlands can be seen at http://btflmind.blogspot.com/.