Urbanities,
Vol. 4
·
No 2
·
November 2014
© 2014
Urbanities
81
get out. Then I came here to Cape Town, but things have not improved much. The
initial period, above all, before my wife arrived, was terrible. The first thing I saw
when I woke up was the roof of my shack. The alarm rang and I saw the tin roof
and said to myself: No, it can’t be true, another day has begun, and I hoped it
wasn’t true, that I was still in Zimbabwe. I couldn’t stand being on my own
anymore and I thought I’d go mad. Every evening I’d go to phone my wife to find
out how the children were, and she’d ask me how I was, and I’d tell her ‘fine’, but
it wasn’t true. I didn’t want her to know I felt wretched and I couldn’t stand it
anymore. I picked up my first customer on Long Street. I didn’t know how much
to charge for the journey and didn’t have a clear idea of the distance between one
part of the city and another. A lot of tourists ask you not to turn on the meter and
to agree a fare, but I would never do it. When I met Michael he asked me how
much I wanted to take him to Claremont, which normally costs 80-90 Rand. I
didn’t know how much it should be, and thinking that if I asked too much I’d lose
the fare, I told him 30. He looked at me in amazement and I think he must have
been frightened because he was getting out of the taxi again, so I thought I must
have asked him too much and said 20. He looked at me strangely and got in. He
didn’t say a word the whole trip and when I dropped him at this house he told me
that taxi drivers normally charged him 80 Rand and gave me 70. I gave him my
card and he became my first regular customer.’
After this customer, Desmond had many regular customers, including myself. I spent
many days in Cape Town with him and we went through many of its areas. I discovered with
him how one could live in a city while always having one’s mind elsewhere. Desmond lives
in Cape Town and Zimbabwe at the same time. He is perpetually outside of and in the city.
Conclusion
Noeleen Murray (2007) uses the expression ‘lines of desires’ to describe the complex plot of
‘memories and desires (but) also fear and forgetting’ which reach across the urban spaces of
South African cities in the post-Apartheid time. According to the author’s perspective, the
‘lines of desires’ do not follow a linear and uniform pathway but are ambiguously interlaced
and juxtaposed. This analogy seems particularly appropriate to the case of Long Street where
the ‘lines’ of memory, desire and hope are intersected and never converge into a single
direction (Murray 2007: 12). In Long Street, there was a convergence of different ways of
reconstructing the past, envisioning the future, and building the world. These perspectives on
the world intersected like independent lines in a single space to form a whole. Long Street is
made up of each of these lines, but can be reduced to none of them.
In this article I decided to observe Long Street through its dual space-time dimension. It
was taken as an urban chronotope made up of the intersection of the temporalities of its
regulars with the city’s urban spaces. Folch Serra noted how in Bakhtin the landscape
‘becomes not only graphically visible in space but also narratively visible in time, in a field of
discourse all attempting to account to human experience’ (Folch Serra 1990: 258). It can be
