Are We There Yet? Read Online Free PDF

this all the more poxy is that, for all its faults and sins, Johannesburg has some of the world’s most beautiful suburban streetscapes and is regarded as a globally significant noncommercial forest. In some places you can’t see the security for the trees.
    Thanks to the deep pockets and aesthetic whims of the city’s founding fathers, the area north of the CBD is one of the most extensively wooded urban areas on the planet. I grew up in the suburbs of Parkwood and Saxonwold on streets that ran beneath a lilac canopy of jacaranda boughs and were lined with verges of soft buffalo grass. As far as vestiges of privilege go, they were bewitchingly beautiful.
    Curious to see whether this was still the case, I left Sandton City – one credit card lighter – and returned to my childhood street, Rutland Road. I asked a security guard manning the boom gate if I would be able to wander through for old times’ sake. He struck me as the type who had a nickname for his gun – along the lines of Hot Lead Mama or Princess Recoil.
    After explaining that I was on a journey of rediscovery which would eventually form a book, and acknowledging that I technically didn’t have any business on the street, he picked up his two-way radio to confer with a colleague. An animated conversation in Sotho punctuated by broad smiles and laughter followed.
    Having ascertained that the risk of my carjacking a resident was roughly equal to that of Yasser Arafat converting to Judaism, he said he’d let me proceed for R50 ($10).
    It was worth every cent. One of the things no one tells you about migration is how many memories stay behind. The big ones – weddings, bar mitzvahs and anything else that demands a buffet – travel with you, but ones like the smells, sounds and even the way the light dripped through the trees on the street where you lived can only be accessed by going back. Of course, as much had changed as remained the same. When I lived there – not in a double or single storey, but split level, thank you very much – it was whites only. Even if a black, coloured or Indian had the means to buy a property here, they would be barred from doing so by the Group Areas Act which forbade such intermingling.
    Now the cash bought you the flash, and a broad ethnic mix of residents viewed me with mild concern as I shuffled along the block with the glazed grin that can only be brought on by deep nostalgia or misreading Prozac dosage.
    The mores of urban survival are surprisingly easy to acquire and I have felt the suspicion of strangers slipping around my shoulders like a familiar cloak whenever I have returned to Johannesburg.
    My on-edge vigilance was aided by the fact that I had been besieged with warnings at home and on arrival. One of the most memorable came from a colleague who instructed me to jump as high as possible on hearing any loud bangs. “That way,” she said cheerily, “the bullets will hit you in the legs.”
    The two most chilling caveats came from separate cousins. The first instructed me: “Never give a taxi driver the bird – they will shoot you for less”. The second advised: “If you do have to stop at a robot [a traffic light to you and me], don’t pull up right to the white line. I always stop about twenty metres away. It lets me see anyone hiding near the intersection plus gives me room to pick up speed if I have to knock someone over to make my escape.”
    To the Australian psyche this may sound like paranoia taken to debilitating extremes, but for the thousands of South Africans who have lost not only their sense of security but family and friends as the result of carjackings, it’s simply a matter of making it home alive. This form of crime has become a growth sector in Johannesburg as the result of increasingly sophisticated electronic alarms and disabling systems. To steal a car, someone has to be in it.
    So prevalent is this crime that