Phumzile Msami. (Photo: Mark Heywood)

We are friends. 

I greet them. 

They greet me. 

I give as generously as I can on any given day. 

We part. And move on. 

Or rather I do. 

I have a car.

Today, with the coronavirus lockdown approaching I went to see them, mainly to give them a little moolah to help tide them over the next few weeks – and to find out their names.

Selby Msimango.
(Photo: Mark Heywood)

Selby Msimango is 62. He sells flowers, usually strelitzias (the “bird of paradise flower”). He’s worked on that corner “since before Mandela”. Many many years ago he had a piece job at Wits University as a plumber, but it’s been all flowers since then. Literally. 

But 1994 didn’t deliver

a better life for Selby.

Selby lives in Daveyton with his wife, so it’s a long journey to work. It also costs R50 a day in taxi fares. He usually earns R70-R100 in a day. “Fridays are better, maybe R250”.

But times have been hard and they are about to get much harder. Selby tells me that “2020 has not been good for me.” Now, with the coronavirus, he faces three weeks at home, like the rest of us.

“What must I do? I don’t know what I must eat. And in June [when the university students go on holiday] I’m going to suffer again.”

I ask if he is aware of any programme by the government to replace his income and ensure he eats during the lockdown. 

“No,” he says.

While people have been giving him extra support this week, when it comes to Friday there’s “nobody, nobody, nobody going to help me”.

Phumzile Msami I know a little better. She sells The Star. She has a big smile and occupies the road corner with much less deference. A few years ago she told me happily that her daughter had just enrolled as a chemical engineering student at Wits, on the basis of her earnings. Today I learn a lot more about her life and work. 

Covid-19 brought us together.

She’s 54, stays in Soweto and, since her sister died in 2013, supports her sister’s four children as well as two of her own. I forget to ask her sister’s name but I do wonder why so many people still die young in our country. I’m an old hand at epidemics and I’ve lived through the AIDS epidemic which took away a generation of parents. If we don’t stop Covid-19 it threatens to take away a generation of care-givers.

It costs Phumzile R26 a day to get to and from Soweto.

She has worked that corner for 22 years, but, sadly, with the recession and the decline of the print media (4IR has its victims), things are getting harder and harder. Technology comes at a price for some. In the past Phumzile tells me she might have sold up to 100 copies of The Star a day; these days it’s down to 10-15 copies. 

“I’m suffering now,” she says, and repeats “suffering” over and over, although never losing her smile.

Phumzile comes from KwaZulu-Natal. She still lacks confidence to speak in English, although I think she’s doing okay. So, when I ask about Covid-19, she suggests I speak to her children. She rummages in her skirt and suddenly I see in her hand three old Nokia phones (the type I had 20 years ago). She calls her son and then her daughter, and I overhear “mlungu”, before I get to talk to Nasiphi, the daughter who studied at Wits and then Sivuyile, one of her sister’s sons, who is in the final year of studying social work at UKZN. 

Nasiphi is reserved; it’s hard to hear her with the roar of the traffic coming from the highway above Yale Road. She tells me her mum has been selling “for a very, very long time, but these days not a lot of people buy”.  She’s in her second year at Wits and has dreams: she wants “to be an engineer in the processing field”.

Sivuyile is worried. 

The universities have closed so he is back at the family home in Harding in KZN. He tells me that although Phumzile is his aunt, “I have taken her as my Mum.” She’s a “very good person” who supported him through his studies by transferring money from her paper sales. “She supported me with that little money.” 

His worry is that, “I was supposed to finish this year, but I don’t know if I will. Things are tough but we’ve managed to overcome.” 

When your life is so precarious and so much has been invested in it by a person with so little, you can understand the fear. Education is everything. That degree certificate is a passport to a better life. It’s the end of a long road that started with Phumzile selling newspapers, standing on a street corner for eight hours a day, come rain or shine.

Hard labour.

Of course, Phumzile didn’t talk about what that feels like. She hasn’t learnt the middle-class lexicon of “I’m so depressed”, “I’m so bored”, “I’m so fucked over.” When all you really are is so lucky.

As for Covid-19, it’s as I suspected. In Harding, which Sivuyile calls a village, “people are afraid because they are not educated. People don’t understand what to do.” 

And that was that.

We are better friends now. We know a little more about each other. Phumzile and Selby will brave the next few weeks out of my sight and probably survive, but not without an anxiety that I will not feel or comprehend. 

Sivuyile and Nasiphi will sit it out and hope that Covid-19 doesn’t extinguish their hard-fought-for dreams, dreams that literally were won in the rands and cents that changed hands between a paper seller and a largely unconcerned group of buyers; buyers who, even though many of them are probably academics, economists, sociologists – in fact, all sorts of degreed “-ists” – have not managed to join the most basic of dots. 

And, even if they have, think that pity will do as penance, before continuing on their merry way.

Many people are saying that this epidemic is a clarion call to change our ways and address inequality. If you want to feel that, rather than just think that, take a few minutes to get to know the people you share these dirty streets with. And resolve that these inequalities must be brought to an end. MC