THE ELEVATORS

Hillbrow – late ‘60s. Two worlds fleetingly touching in near derelict pre-War blocks of flats spilling out onto rough, seedy alleys. One high-rise, another six or seven floors, strung roughly together with stairwells in the gut and two elevators each, all juxtaposed in swirling traffic – cars, buses, pedestrians. 

Two elevators in each block essential, you see, to the functioning of a teeming mass of humanity in an artificial milieu pretending that separation of the parts was normal and desirable. Two elevators with cheap diamond sliding grates and wooden doors held nervously by bold hinges and a hydraulic closing mechanism. Two elevators, separate but unequal. One rickety and slow – painfully slow. The other slightly faster and smoother, scooping its occupants up and spitting them out on appropriate floors where they retreated into the isolation of individual units. The one had to be slow, dear reader, to haul goods and Johannesburg’s 60s working class (non-European in the parlance of the time) to the location in the sky from which they serviced the tiny apartments – cleaning and polishing floors. Renters (of a paler shade) spilled out beneath the rooftop living quarters. Two elevators. Two worlds. 

An eight-year-old is on an errand to and from the basement housing the boiler room from which hot water was brewed by the workers and pumped into the plumbing of the flats beneath the location. The residents’ elevator was once again stuck between floors one and two – once again, yet less frequently than the “goods” and workers’ lift which epitomized the struggle to be “lifted” in a society rigidly divided by the policy gurus in Pretoria. 

The choice was: “stairs” or “goods and non-Europeans.” A toss-up between a six-storey climb and a slow lift to somewhere. He’ll wait. The time – ten o’clock at night – what is an eight-year-old doing in the basement of Brookdale Heights at that time of night? Who knows? But that was the ‘60s. 

The rumble of the slow elevator promised a ride to the sixth floor. As it came closer, the noise of voices yelling boldly vernacular lingo unintelligible to a little “oemfaan” of the time, grew louder and louder and reached a crescendo with the forceful flinging open of the old wooden outer door. Out streamed the section of Johannesburg living a strangely different life on the rooftops – only interacting with flat tenants as boiler men, cleaning fellows in the serviced flats and Sherpas for the kugels and cougars intermittently. 

The beads of perspiration trickling into a violent stream of blood from head wounds, and dripping from the pangas which had caused them, adorned the shirtless bodies that had manhandled out of the elevator one of the unfortunate rooftop men who was no longer looking out of his open eyes and probably no longer bleeding – does one bleed if one’s heart no longer pumps? Noisily panga man and his cohort scuffled and ushered to “God knows where” the bloody body. An eight-year-old mind, maintained in blissful ignorance of such in-your-face brutality and also the inhumanity of the life on the rooftop, imagined the boiler as receptacle – but hastily retreated into the “other world” of the stairwell and the belly of the block. 

Two elevators. Two worlds. Ignorance. Innocence. Awakening. Stark reality of inhumanity and dawning of a reality kept secret. No more beating around the bush. Two elevators revealed to a stunned mind the horror of ignorance. Innocence impaled on a panga.

©Paul M Haupt