Fetching the light box

And meeting Georgia Honey

In today’s Love Letter:

• A story without words

• Meeting Georgia Honey

• A short playlist of political songs you’ll recognise and want to sing, scream or shake your fist to while you jump up and down to release some frustration.

A short story

My friend Ken Barris is a novelist, poet and photographer. He ‘wrote’ this story a few years ago.

'A short story' by Ken Barris. PHOTOS: Ken Barris

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Meeting Georgia Honey

One Thursday morning in February, I was winding my way through the dry Cape Flats – a vast, wind-scoured, forlorn-looking area 20km south-east of central Cape Town, far out of the shadow of the famous mountain, but not out of its view – thinking again about how the names of the suburbs there conjure something different to reality.

Lavender Hill. Vrygrond (meaning ‘free ground’). Primrose Park. Bonteheuwel (meaning ‘colourful hill’).

They sound utopian.

Apartheid naming systems often have an edge of insult added to the injury of forced removal. Like naming Sophiatown in Johannesburg ‘Triomf’ – the Afrikaans word for ‘triumph’ – after removing its black residents to make way for a low-income white suburb.

Coming through Hanover Park, it looked like I was entering an industrial area. I was heading to someone’s house and, though I knew I was close, it didn’t look like there were houses here.

I pulled over on to the rough shoulder to check my directions again. And then a long gate started to slide open on my left. I looked up and saw Rene waving me in. I was where I needed to be collect the secondhand light box I’d come to buy.

‘Just a heads-up,’ Rene had written before I left the city for the southern suburbs, ‘I will have my teen with me and she is on a mission selling raw honey.’

As I drove into a sandy parking area, the teen entered stage left. She was carrying a shallow box half full of bottled honey. She put her box down, shook my hand as I got out of the car, and said, ‘I’m Georgia.’

Georgia hitched herself up to sit on a low wall to wait her turn. Her shorts were black. Her crisp white over-sized T-shirt had ‘WOMANDLA’ printed in red across the chest. She wore one red Converse All Star sneaker on one foot and a black one on the other.