This City Makes Me Lose My Head

June 24 2021, 0 Comments

It’s dusk in Newtown. The cars on the M1 winding around the city appear as a train of many carriages, lights blinking on as the sun slowly sinks. I park my car.

As the daylight weakens the streets teem with people swarming towards taxi ranks and bus stops, starting to form queues, vendors packing up the day’s wares, pedestrians doing awkward dances across the streets in the face of oncoming traffic and against the signalling green light for cars.

Everyone looks to be on their way out of the city. Trying to catch taxis, buses, trains, to travel out of this place and be spat back into those other places, the suburbs and townships beyond the landscape that froze sometime in the 1970s. 

I get out of the car, reluctantly leaving my warm cocoon, steeling myself for the still frosty air of an autumn evening.

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An excerpt from I Love You I Hate You by Laurice Taitz-Buntman. For the rest of this piece as well as others like this, get the book.

Laurice Taitz-Buntman was born in the small town of Benoni, and so forever fated to yearn for the city life Joburg promises. An African Literature graduate, she is the publisher and editor of Johannesburg in Your Pocket City Guide and has spent much time both as a newspaper journalist, editor and writer trying to make sense of Johannesburg. She fiercely believes that cities  have the power and responsibility to transform people’s lives for the better and is willing to go to battle to defend this view.