This morning I walked to the BemBom in Northcliff.
Johannesburg sports a few BemBom’s, all with the same menu, the same passable food, the same tolerable coffee.
A the BemBom in Northcliff, all the patrons are white, all those serving black. That is not always the case in Joburg, but in this hood, it looks to be the rule. (At Bootlegger’s, closer to school, both the staff and the patrons are more mixed, everything on the menu better too.)
“Don’t go outside of the gates at night,” say the people who own the flat the school has rented for me, but in this neighborhood people walk and jog and bike in the morning and on the weekends and I take advantage of this to get my early coffee on Thursday’s when I can go school an hour later.
If you happen to be in the market for penitentiary architecture, this walk could serve as a kind of outdoor convention set up to show you the options. Fence after fence, gate after gate.
On the way, this morning, I was thinking about how much more I prefer walking to hiking. Maybe because this walk reminds me how precious walking is. Maybe because the slight incline that takes me out of my gated hood and to the busy road I must cross to get to BemBom would be a Kilimanjaro by Amsterdam standards.
As it happens, three memorable days of my life came when hiking. On the first, in seventh grade, my teacher David Smith took me and a few others out for a weekend camping event. I learned what nature was. I didn’t much like it, but it was a good lesson. On the second, in high school, I learned what acid was, not because I dropped any myself, but because a bunch of the cool kids did. (They seemed to like it, but were hard to talk to.) And on the third, here in South Africa, I climbed down the ladders in the Drakensberg mountains, certainly the scariest thing I have ever done because if you slip on those ladders you die.
Still despite those clear memories, I prefer urban walks to the up and down of hikes.
I’ve been to BemBom a few times now. The same women are always there working. “Good morning, sir,” they say. They must “know” me now too, my face at least. But they offer no sign of this. No matter how friendly I aim to be, however less patronizing I think my body language and tone of voice from the other patrons, I will be customer and they will be servant.
We walk in different worlds.