The sleeping bag

Most mornings I exercise in my neighbourhood.

On such a morning last week I ride my bike though Zoo Lake, here in my home town Johannesburg, cutting though the park via the small tarred road that takes you past the Bowls Club. On the right of the road there are some large hollow concrete blocks, taller than a man. They have been there for years, the detritus of some previous construction project.

Zoo Lake has had an explosion of homeless people during this pandemic. They seem to live in the darker corners of the grounds — in culverts and drains, against brick walls, nestled against dark trees, even under the flimsy cover of bus stops on Lower Park Drive. And in the tall hollow concrete structure I ride past.

They are almost all men, most just broken and desperate. A few with mental health issues, talking animatedly to themselves.

One occasionally reads an outraged comment on neighbourhood social media that ‘these people’ should be ‘moved on’, that they present a crime risk, a health risk.

Perhaps they do, although none have ever bothered me, and besides noting their new presence there, they do not cause me much alarm, other than the general despair of seeing a deeply unequal society at close quarters on my morning ride. And I am not so pure as to also have felt some nagging discomfort at these new arrivals in my comfy neighbourhood.

So on this morning last week, I ride past the concrete culverts, and I notice yellow police tape, an ambulance, a gaggle of cops, and a health worker in full hazmat. The scene whizzes by, and I wonder, but cannot work out what has happened, other than it is likely not pleasant. I forget about it quickly.

There is another park nearby, a small one block affair, swings and trees and grass and dogs and happy children. It is called George Hay Park, across the road from one of the many churches in the area, one which is well-known for its food assistance to those in need. So there are many men there too, at least at those times when food becomes available. Occasionally there are grumbles about this too, perhaps more muted because of the stewardship of the church.

One day a few weeks ago, walking my dog at this park I run into my friend Paul Zille. He points to a thick cluster of aloe in the corner of the park and says — do you know that someone lives there, tucked under the greenery? I look closer. There is the detritus of hard living — plastic, cloth, paper dug in so deep as to be nearly invisible.

Paul has befriended this man, who has clearly hidden his living circumstances from the view of affluent residents and their kids playing on the swings. Paul asks how he is doing. He is freezing, he tells Paul. All of the time. Paul goes home a unearths an old sleeping bag for him, to which he reacts as though presented with Midas’s riches.

A few days later there is a small one-man tent erected against the flora. Presumably a further neighbourhood donation.

And then the following day, everything is gone. The man. His stuff.

Someone has complained. A homeless man living in our little park? Can’t be having that, can we?

Paul finds out last week. He was evicted from the park.

He made his way with his sleeping bag and tent and paper and rags to the concrete blocks at zoo lake.

Where he dies. He was 35.

That’s what I was seeing when I rode past. Who knows, maybe the tent was stolen. Maybe the sleeping bag. It is astonishingly cold these days. Maybe he froze to death. It doesn’t really matter how.

This must happen every day, everywhere. These are people without anyone to hear their pleas for help, least of all our state. They are forgotten people. They starve and they freeze and they get sick and they die. Right next door, these days, within sight.

It is unutterably sad. Just unutterably sad.