The final week

This last week has been a cold blur. On Monday morning the light was clear and sharp as I drove to varsity – the maximum was meant to be 12 degrees and it got even colder on Tuesday. We achieved a huge amount, though, and somehow managed to get to a point very near to the level of completion we were aiming at, though I guess a few loose ends and some open-endedness would not be seen as a bad thing. We got through the week with the help of kotas for lunch which was Gareth’s suggestion and find - they were a good antidote to the cold weather - and with sweet, creamered coffee from the Cindis. It became harder and harder to give tasks to the ANCYL – for some reason I really felt this during this week, perhaps because the pressure was on and I was constantly aware of the fact that everyone needed to be as efficient as possible. The beginning of the week was marred by the fact that both steel deliveries (the long pieces previously ordered from Fleet Steel and the flat and round bar from Mac Steel) delayed January’s welding work. When it arrived, things progressed smoothly with Gareth and January collaborating on a fantastic floating fixture on the stair balustrade. Khula pulled his weight and got going with the lines for the basket ball court. The landscaping also really took shape with the first delivery of crusher stone on Monday proving to us that we needed to address the area on the south east of the beerhall with more grass and stones. When it was complete, we were very pleased with the integration of the scheme into the landscape. Unfortunately over the weekend someone had, according to Mr Cindi, out of jealousy pulled out some of the vygies donated by Peter – an indication perhaps of other claims on the site within the community.
An interesting event was a meeting that I went to on Tuesday afternoon with Mr Cindi and Stan with Tshidi Mohlabane, the regional executive manager of SRAC for the eastern region of Ekurhuleni. They had had dealings with her when she’d been a manager in KwaThema and we went on the pretext that we still hadn’t had the large pile of rubble removed. However, I suspect that their motives were somewhat different as she belonged to the wrong department to do anything about this. Just before we went into the meeting, they told me not to mention the KwaThema Working Group or Kwelemthini or Stuma. Mohlabane was enthusiastic about the project but extremely concerned that we had not gone through the correct procedures to obtain permission for it. I felt that the meeting was a mistake and that there was the possibility of her shutting us down, while Stan and Mr Cindi held that as soon as she saw it she would fall in love and wouldn’t be able to stand in our way! They admitted to me that they wanted someone to adopt the project to ensure its success.
On Wednesday, Robyn started painting the tyre bollards; this little bit of articulation made a huge difference, and Thabang and Lungu completed the job on Thursday. They also helped me to paint the lines across the road between the swings and the trees. In fact, painting got underway in a big way with undercoats being done on the sides of the concrete blocks on the ground floor and the slabs in the landscape out to the north of the building. We also decided to play with the basketball lines, extending them beyond the constraints of the ‘court’. Mr Cindi stepped in to do the undercoats on the basketball backboard. By Thursday morning, everyone had a task, and there was a hum of activity accompanied by loud reggae from one of the houses nearby. At mid morning a man in a BMW sped up followed by a front end loader and an enormous truck. A visit from a bus load of councilors the previous morning seemed to have galvanised someone into action and this man whose company was contracted to the council was sent to help us out. The huge pile disappeared, as did the areas of rubble dumping to the north of the structure, and the lumps of earth at the vehicular barrier to the south, but it took several loads. We replaced the concrete lumps in a more orderly fashion, and Thabang in fact managed to create very low benches by laying pre-stressed concrete beams across the other rubble. This was a great improvement and was later painted, though it turned out to be pale pink the next morning! The bins and no-dumping signs that Guy had ordered arrived. We managed to source crates for our panel from Simon at the Mississippi Tavern on Thursday, getting ten then and there, and having the others promised to us the next morning. We set about working out the details of their fixing and bought the required materials. Fischer sent an agent to help us install our abacus with chemical mortar and it almost immediately had a group of children playing games on it. By Thursday, Veli’s fabulous mural of the power salute from the 1976 uprisings had been completed and he moved onto painting all the particpants’ names on a beam along the side of the court. We came up with an idea of changing the painted advert ’IT’S MILLER TIME’ on the west side of the building to ‘IT’S YOUR TIME’ or ‘ITS OUR TIME’, eventually settling on the latter – a variant of Kwathema’s ubiquitous speaking walls. Veli did this early on Friday morning in a quite translucent red which gave the impression of it having been there for some time. From time to time groups of kids would appear as spectators and either watch or help – often I pulled out the black dustbin bags and got them to pick up the never-ending stream of litter.
At the Thursday braai, our group felt quite hard done by (as usual?): there was no plan for the snacks promised to our site for the afternoon, despite my having asked whether we had to organise these ourselves and being told we didn’t. Also, Hannah objected to our initiative to have Kwelemthini address the beerhall crowd briefly early in the morning. The promotion of Anthony’s chess academy is indisputably crucial, but it seemed as though this was being done at the expense of our project. On Friday, therefore, we organised that Lizzy would do the catering and Hannah fortunately gave us the go-ahead.
Through all this, our paired projects were progressing too. Kasia had found a builder through the Chess Park called Richard who would work for R150 a day. The previous week we had discussed our ideas and so he began on Monday shifting the large pieces of concrete around and preparing the soil for the paving and slab we were going to throw. On Wednesday, Kasia and I placed the plates that she had got from Liebermann Pottery plus some small blue tiles that I had on the new slab, while one of Kibas’s friends chatted to us about how this decoration was going to attract women to their stall! The whole process of the construction of what amounted to an extended plinth around Kibas’s stall was a very organic, responsive and flexible one, with Kasia and I talking through things constantly and changing things as other possibilities arose. The notion of reusing all the rubble on the site rather than dumping it in another inappropriate place grew out of this so in the end, Richard was commissioned to use the rubble as a hard core of sorts for another screeded slab on the south of the stall, where we placed more plates. The trees were happily planted, though they were looking as though the cold might have got to them. The last touch was crusher stone to form a driveway for the carwash, and a specific request for a spot to shine the cars’ tyres. Towards the end of the week, I was very neglectful of the project in the face of the pressures of the beerhall and I’m afraid that Kasia carried it substantially.
Friday saw Guy and I race around trying to buy the last items needed on the east rand which included prizes for the basketball competition and collecting the donated coke which Robyn had organised for the launch from Nigel. I also, probably rather impertinently, went along to the muti market near Cash Build and found a traditional healer who was prepared to help with the ritual of cleansing the building. On Friday night we sat in Mr Cindi’s back courtyard until 10pm bolting together the panels of red beer crates (and sharing beers) so that they could be erected in the morning. When we left we saw that someone had painted a message in the road in front of the beerhall about fallen heroes.