The Inconsiderate State of downtown jhb is anti-black

One of the things lost to impoverishment is safety. In our country and many others safety is for sale. It is not a birth or human right. If you have the capital, you can buy yourself into safe neighbourhoods, schools, malls and transport. If you have the money, you can buy yourself safety from the danger that is Park Station where many black South African commuters access their transport.

I am one of those people that can afford to buy themselves out of the precarity that is Park Station. However, there are times when I either must travel to the remote villages of the Eastern Cape which I have to do by car or bus or times when I have to pick up my loved ones for whom catching flights is never an option especially with the currently skyrocketing air ticket prices. This is to say that we can avoid Park Station but most likely not forever.

Never mind worrying about the road safety of the buses helmed by overworked drivers and known to topple over, we also have to worry about the conditions of our roads. And presently I have the road at the entrance to Park Station in mind which I would have expected to be one that is at least decent.

I have probably been to Park Station in downtown Johannesburg six times in the last two weeks due to an influx of family members traveling from the Eastern Cape and Cape Town to attend a family funeral here in Johannesburg. With each pick up and drop off at Park Station I was confronted by the obscenely big and dangerous potholes in an area of town bustling with human and vehicular traffic. Specifically, Black human traffic. The road is simply unusable yet there are no warning signs, no barriers to close off this road while its repair is coordinated. Rather its left unashamedly bare, open and unattended with no concern for the Black commuters at risk of being swallowed up by these deep holes. I bet if presidents, ministers, premiers, judges and high-profile business people and white people frequented Park Station there would be more consideration shown for its state.

Life is hard enough navigating bereavement, which is often the impetus of urgent long-distance travel, but it is made even harder and bruising by failing physical infrastructure that makes connecting to our loved ones not only tedious but treacherous. Black people’s lives are partially defined by long distance commute across our landscape. Being geographically separated from our loved ones through apartheid’s insidious design, means we are all too familiar with overcrowded trains and buses. We are all too familiar with the unglamorous trek from the margins of the country to its centre. As people of the margins why would we expect our needs to be considered? Why would we expect the infrastructure used mostly by Black people to be of human standards let alone comfortable and even dare I say, beautiful?

It is hard to imagine the road into the airport even remotely resembling that of the road leading into Park Station. Our loved one’s reception into the dull City of Gold is one of neglect. Why is this acceptable? The potholes that greet commuters at Park Station are only the tip of the deeper decrepit ruins that are downtown Johannesburg. They are only the tip of what it means to be unsafe in this country. For to be unsafe is to be poor and black.

I do not know if the City of Johannesburg is anti-black, but the state of Park Station tells me that it is. For if this was a space valued and used by white and upper-class people or prized international and local tourists, it would not look the way it does for as long as it has.

I implore whoever has the responsibility to repair this road, to do so. For to do so, is to, in some small measure make poor, black and tired people a little more considered and safer in this precarious world.