Linn’s Year Ablog

(written early and mid-November 08 — Johannesburg, South Africa)

Well, it’s been three and half months now, and sometimes it seems like it’s been no time at all. I arrived at the beginning of August, four days before my birthday, and now the malls around Johannesburg are already gearing up for Christmas. Other times, I feel as if I’ve lived in Joburg for years. I can nearly name the downtown streets in order, and friends back home say my accent is ever-so-slightly un-American. Time moving simultaneously quickly and slowly–I suppose this is a classic traveler’s paradox.

Yes, I am only a traveler, but my day-to-day life causes me to forget that fact now and then. I’m renting my own little room in a suburban backyard, and I drive a car. When my housemates ask where I’ve been in the evening, I tell them: “oh, just working late at the office.” But as I walked down the sidewalk toward the Dept. of Home Affairs last month, I reminded myself that “work” was not the right word to use with immigration officials. I repeated to myself what I would say instead: “Hello, I would like to renew my tourist visa, please.”

It’s the nature of my project, I think, that makes me feel as if I’m not a tourist. As proposed, it has three parts: work as an assistant to investigative journalists, work at media-related nonprofits and visit journalism schools. I have since added a fourth component: interview journalists I don’t have to time to shadow. In my first three months, I have managed to do all four.

* * *

I have interned at two major South African newspapers, begun writing a report for a local media NGO, visited a journalism school and spoken casually with journalists from half a dozen media outlets. Starting shortly after my arrival, I worked for two months at The Star, one of South Africa’s largest non-tabloid daily papers, where I helped reporters with research and interviews, wrote a couple of articles and assisted an editor with research for an ongoing investigative project. The project is related to the shady land deals of certain city councilors, in which councilors profited from selling off pieces of municipal land–environmentally sensitive plots in some cases–to developers.

In September I also began interning at the Mail & Guardian, a well-respected weekly that has its roots as a feisty anti-apartheid paper. The M&G does some of the best writing and investigative work on the continent, and working there was at the top of my South African wish list. I have since written an average of one and a half articles a week and offered other miscellaneous help in the newsroom. The investigative team has kept me busy doing research on another long-term project. This investigation deals with a shrimp farm on the South African coast, in an environmentally sensitive area, which is organized and bankrolled by dodgy American businesspeople. They thought I would enjoy talking to other Americans–and that I might be able to understand US government-related aspects of the story. I’m not so sure. In any case, doing this research gives me the chance to hang out with and learn from one of the top investigative journalists in South Africa, and I couldn’t ask for anything better. I’ve found the atmosphere at the M&G to be very welcoming and collaborative, and I have been constantly busy and consistently enthusiastic about what I’m doing. The investigative team has been very candid and inviting, and I’ve learned a great deal. Last weekend, they invited me to go with them to visit a source for the shrimp farm story, in a small town a couple of hours outside Joburg.

I plan to keep working in the M&G’s Joburg newsroom until I leave the city in mid-December, but I already left The Star in October. Being at both newspapers at the same time was become unworkable–not only because I was feeling overloaded but because having a desk in each newsroom became a bit sticky. The editor at The Star whom I was helping with the land deals project took me with her to meet with a source for the story, but the same guy was also a source for somebody at the M&G working on the same story. He mentioned my name, the M&G mentioned it to me, and I quickly realized that it would be awkward to be at both papers at the same time. On the other hand, it is only positive that I was involved enough with a newspaper that they cared whether I was working somewhere else. When starting out on the project, I think I would have considered that a triumph.

In addition to working at newspapers, I have recently started a research project with an NGO called the Media Monitoring Project. The MMP does mostly what its name suggests–quantitative media analysis–but I’m working on an independent qualitative analysis of media coverage of “service delivery protests.” These are demonstrations from people, usually living in poor conditions, about the government’s lack of response to issues with housing, health care, transportation, social services or utilities. I expect my final conclusion to be that the media often covers these protests superficially, without delving very far into the actual living situations of the protesters or the specific government policies in question.

A month ago, I spent a couple days visiting with people at the University of the Witwatersrand graduate school of journalism. As former journalists themselves, the professors were fascinating interviews, but I don’t think I’ll be able to say much about the school itself until I visit others. As with newspaper newsrooms, I’ve never visited a journalism school in the States, so I have little to measure it against. I plan to visit the j-school at Rhodes University, the country’s most prestigious in December or January.

* * *

In my original proposal, I figured that one of my biggest challenges would be making contacts, and I also assumed that I would have to gain the trust of editors and journalists before I could actually write articles or assist with investigative research. I also wondered if reporters would be leery of taking me along to interviews because I’m American and White. Working at newspapers, I supposed, would be the cornerstone of my project. Even as I mentioned in the proposal that I hoped journalist friends would introduce me to life beyond the newspapers’ home metropolises, I also suspected that I would have to make a concerted effort to get out of the city.

Who’d have thought, but many of those concerns turned out to be valid.

Looking back now, it seems strange that I ever would have had trouble finding contacts. The document on my laptop called “Watson Contacts” is now 18 pages long, full of color-coded names and notes-to-self. When looking for contacts now, all I need do is ask my newsroom neighbors or send a note to the staff email list. People even volunteer contacts, like a US embassy spokesperson I was interviewing the other day. “I should put you in touch with so-and-so at the Delhi embassy,” she said out of the blue. “He’s a crusty old guy, but he has lots of press contacts.”

But last summer, things didn’t work like that, and I fretted. “Watson Contacts” had several pages of names, but I had only secured one unequivocal guarantee from a Joburg editor, despite nearly a year of following leads and cold-emailing. The editor who agreed, with whom I worked on the investigation at The Star, was a friend of a friend of a student of a professor of an acquaintance of mine who went to my high school–but whom I’d only met once in Chicago three years ago. That was the kind of stretch I was making to find contacts.

I was right to assume that editors would want me to help them out with things unrelated to my project, in exchange for my taking up space in the newsroom and having access to reporters. But I was wrong about what these trade-offs would be. I figured I would sit huddled in a corner with my laptop, but I’ve been given a parking stop, a desk and a telephone at both newspapers–and even a company email address at The Star. I also supposed I would spend most of my time fact-checking, running errands, writing obits or doing research, if I were lucky. A reporter friend at The Star thought this was hilariously naïve. “I give you one day before an editor gives you something to write.” One day it was. (To be fair, I did do some grunt-work. I once spent several days running back and forth to the Johannesburg High Court collecting documents from a court case.)

* * *

While I’ve settled into Joburg life, I long to travel more, and I’m always looking for excuses. Middle-class South Africa is more like middle-class America than anywhere but Canada, I think, which has made me worry sometimes that I’m not getting a unique cultural experience. By mid-September, I had still not left the city, so I decided unilaterally to get on a bus and travel to Pietermaritzburg, near the eastern coast. The ruling-party president was to be handed an important court decision in that city, and I figured The Star could use extra interview material from the throngs of supporters who planned to demonstrate outside the courthouse. The newspaper couldn’t, as it turned out, but it was good to get out of the city anyway–and fun to witness a little South African political history. Just before leaving The Star, the newspaper sent me to cover a rural youth soccer tournament, which took me out into the desert on a corporate prop. I was offered a similar sort of story recently at the M&G. This time I would be doing promotional writing for a new game reserve, but I would get a free stay in a luxury game lodge out in the boonies somewhere. Soon, I’ll also submit a request to you to travel to Lesotho to meet an editor or two…and visit friends for Thanksgiving.

For the most part, however, I am a full-time urbanite. I listen to the radio during my morning commute. I go to plays, concerts, bars and museums; and take walks in the park with friends to glimpse nature. I buy Chinese take-out when I’m in a rush. And in general, I’ve been living here for the past few months, not visiting.

* * *

There are, of course, times when that is obviously not the case. Like a traveler, for example, my day-to-day emotions are as topsy-turvy as the markets back home, and there have been times when I too have wished for a bailout. After feeling that I was hitting a stride in mid-October, the last week of that month began a frustrating slump, fueled primarily by a string of unlucky events.

Three of these events were related to a well-known feature of Johannesburg, and one that is perhaps most instrumental in dissuading would-be fellow tourists: crime. Sure, I knew all along that Joburg had a vigorous underworld; I just didn’t expect to run into it three times in three weeks. First, a pickpocket pockets my cell phone in a bar–a hassle, but nothing serious. Then, I experience my first big-city, broad-daylight mugging–a bit traumatizing but thankfully nonviolent. And just last weekend, to round off the hat trick, a bunch of thugs trying to make off with my rental car make off with my shoulder bag instead, a bag so chock full of personal notes and doodads that I probably should not have been carrying around with me in the first place.

Around this same time, several other stresses also entered my life. I was asked to step in for a health reporter at the Mail & Guardian, and although this was a nice thought on the part of the editors, it caused me to spend more time in the office. It was also around this time that the first spring rainstorms revealed a ceiling leak in my cute little backyard room, which in turn revealed why the room had always smelled a little musty. Now the must had turned to toxic mold, however, so I slept in my car and on the bathroom floor for several days. And when I wasn’t sleeping in it, my car was having mechanical problems.

But as of this week, my life is getting back in order. My throat and nose didn’t much like the mold, but I seem to be healthy again. My room is doing better, and I now mitigate its toxicity—and my landlord’s laziness—by sleeping with my head out the window. (No kidding.)

* * *

In other news, some recent financial accounting shows that I’m not overspending outrageously, so this is also good. Renting a car here in Joburg is one of the biggest strains on my budget, essentially doubling my monthly accommodation cost. (During the few days when I was living in my car, I felt particularly slighted.) Joburg is the only place where I planned not to use public transport, however, and car rental isn’t the extreme expense it is in the States. I’ve managed to get bargain-basement rates, and having a car has made my time in Joburg incalculably more productive, adventurous, safe and doable.

A former Watsoner mentioned to me that being in Joburg without a car made it virtually impossible to really see the city. Local public transport is complicated, unreliable at non-rush-hours and occasionally dangerous. Cabs, meanwhile, run on NYC prices. “Legalized extortion” are the words I think she used. So I decided to get a car, and—beyond driving on the left—it has been a very educational experience.

Around the time when my room was disintegrating and criminals were walking off with things, I was renting a car from a local company called—and the name really means something here—Rent-a-Wreck. I once went through three different cars in one day, including one car with broken locks on both passenger and driver doors. But hey, now I know how to break into my car through the trunk.

When I leave Joburg next month, however, I’ll appreciate being back on public transport.

* * *

And it’ll be nice to be a real traveler again, too.

(2383 words)