Urbanities,
Vol. 4
·
No 2
·
November 2014
© 2014
Urbanities
76
become homeless four years earlier and had found his new ‘home’ on Long Street. Unlike the
majority of street dwellers on Long Street who were coloureds or blacks from other African
countries, Louis was white of Afrikaans origin. The fact that he was the only white made
things extremely difficult, but also offered some opportunities which Louis had learned to
exploit.
One of these was the fact that he could easily camouflage himself among the customers,
strike up a conversation with them and maybe get someone to buy him a drink, something to
eat, or at least some cigarettes. His physical appearance was extremely important to Louis; in
fact, during an interview he explained to me ‘
I have to look perfect in order to survive
’. I met
Louis in a bar in Lower Long Street. He came to sit close to me and we started talking. At the
beginning I did not understand he was a homeless person. Indeed his behaviour and his way
of dressing did not give the impression of someone living in the street. What made being
white difficult for him was trying to fit in with his new street companions. He said, ‘Being
white means you remain an outsider, even for these people. They’re united, they have their
own rules, I’m an outsider whose misfortune has led me to end up here. They often make fun
of me behind my back. It’s like a kind of revenge against whites in general; it’s just that I’m
the easiest target’.
Louis’ fall from a ‘middle-class’ life to the street had its origins in Great Britain where
he was living with a local girl who had helped him to emigrate there. Even though he was
living there without a residence permit, Louis managed to find odd jobs and live happily with
his partner. In his own words, ‘I had escaped from a country in which they gave people work
on the basis of their skin colour.... Like many whites my age I went to England to look for
work.’
One day Louis and I decided to walk around without a specific goal and headed towards
Cape Town Castle. When Louis saw the city’s old port he remembered the day he was
arrested by the police in another port in the UK and how this episode had conditioned his life.
From this connection we can see how a specific space in the city can evoke ‘other’ spaces
which are distant in terms of both time and space. It is useful to quote him at length:
‘I had been in England, in London, for three years and my residence permit had
already expired a long time before, but I didn’t want to return to South Africa.
Just thinking about going back made me feel ill; I loved London. The pent-up
energy it released made me think that everything was possible; that here there was
room for everyone. In London there was no distinction between blacks and
whites; no-one was bothered about what colour you were. In South Africa I felt
the pressure of the divisions between people; it is something within you, which
hurts you, but in the end it becomes normal. The tension between people, the hate
between people, the categories into which we are placed make prisoners of us, but
we don’t even realise it. When you leave, you understand that all that isn’t
normal, that outside you can be white without necessarily being hated. I was
living a dream with my English girlfriend; everything was easy and everything
seemed possible to me. One day we took some bloody boat to go to an island and
