I am spending a few months in East and South East Asia. One of the myriad objectives is to get an immersive understanding of communities and societies, polities and political economies as global power shifts from West to East.

This is a long and drawn-out process; it is historical, social and political-economic. I have no doubt that it will enrich my understanding of shifts in power and dominance in global affairs when I return to my little bungalow in the Cape.

I have, however, come to realise that South African society has really poisoned my brain. My mind may continue to situate and contextualise, find apologies and justification, but my brain absorbs images, states of affairs like a sponge and when I wring it all out at the end of the day I am in a mild state of bewilderment…

When I am not at my desk, I walk through the cities — not the beauty that is reflected in the ubiquitous tourist brochures — and cannot help thinking about the relentless catastrophe, the speedball that pummels communities, fapara fapara fapara fapara, boogy dabuggy, da boogy da buggy da boogy da buggy and compare it all with what passes before me as I hover, so to speak, above that liminal space like a trash collector, neither here nor there and constantly trying to find meaning in making a living.

I see rows of shoes on the pavement at the front entrance of shops and offices, clinics and kindergartens, and wonder how long rows of shoes, left on the pavements of Johannesburg would last. Local and national media in South Africa are filled with stories of thieves raiding mosques to steal shoes while people are at prayer.

This is, of course, not unique to South Africa, but the brain does what it does before the mind attempts to disambiguate, provides context and situate the depravity of South African society.

On city streets here, there are metal pipes and tubes, chrome pipes bent into benches, electricity sub-stations, and nothing is ripped out and sold on for scrap metal. It is not unusual to see large metal containers where you can drop off items of clothing, bed linen or curtains that will be disseminated to less privileged groups. Yet, there seem to have been no attempts to raid these containers.

Some cities have electric bicycles that are parked on the sides of roads next to dense shrubbery. You pay, use it, leave it by the side of the road, and nobody steals it. Nobody steals any of the electric/battery-operated scooters that are used in some cities. A commuter falls asleep on a train — this is not the exclusive Gautrain, it is part of a city-wide commuter rail network — his wallet and cellphone are on the seat beside him, nobody steals it.

Public and private transport operate collectively, as it were, to move commuters across cities. There are no reports of private taxi operators destroying public transportation networks, intimidating or abusing women or commuters in taxi wars.

I scanned newspaper archives for reports on violence among independent taxi operators, in Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, and found no reports of drivers being burnt to death in their cars.

This is not to say that there is no poverty, inequality or unemployment in the countries that I have been visiting; to be sure, poverty, inequality and unemployment are usually — quite rightfully — submitted as the reasons for crime and lawlessness. I certainly have no answers.

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It is the brain that cannot stop wondering how easy it is for young women to ride trains at night in SOME of the big cities of East and South East Asia, when 19-year-old Uyinene Mrwetyana was raped and murdered in a post office in broad daylight, or 16-year-old Franziska Blöchliger was raped and murdered on a footpath that is used daily — also in broad daylight.

When the mind starts to engage with these things, the brain fights back. There should be no confusion here. The mind is what takes control of our bodies and senses when we walk down the street in conversation with a friend. The brain is what makes us step up or down, stop at a pedestrian crossing, catch something when it falls from a table, or when we step onto an escalator. Surely, the mind does take a break from a dinner table conversation to calculate the fall of a spoon with the precision of a physicist in order to catch it.

It is, then, my brain that is poisoned. It’s impossible to ignore the spirit of collective or common good in some communities and societies, and compare them with the debauchery, the extreme atomisation that is usually such an intrinsic part of the culture of consumer capitalism. At any given time there may be more luxury automobiles on the N1 between Johannesburg and Pretoria, than on any strip of road in Europe — outside Monaco.

If only for a laugh, tell a senior public servant in South Africa to follow the India example, and drive a small Tata, Suzuki or an Ambassador — and not aspire to a luxury German car.

When I start to think of it and ask questions about the common good and the role each of us necessarily has in promoting and protecting it, I usually land at the wall of a dead end. I recall so many conversations that justify electricity theft (it was promised by the ANC; we are starving; we have no money etc). The theft of metal or copper wires and fittings is met with “people are desperate and hungry”. The theft of shoes or personal belongings (pick any of the preceding)… we can go on and on and on.

It’s difficult to avoid thinking that our fractured, violent past has inured us to the sensibilities, hopes and fears of fellow citizens. It is impossible to reach a conclusion on why the idea of “personal property” has not reached people and enabled or emboldened thieves.

Maybe it helps explain why the Economic Freedom Fighters’ policy of grand nationalisation holds promise; people seem to believe that owning your own home, car or anything else is a crime against humanity.

Perhaps one of the failures of democratic South Africa is that we did not instil, early enough, a culture of common destiny and the common good in communities and societies. Perhaps the idea of the common good, and common destiny were washed away in the rush to become wealthy, to eat because we did not fight the Struggle to be poor (some of us fought for a just society, and not to become wealthy).

And so we reach for conversation stoppers. Don’t criticise or look down at people for driving cars that cost more than a worker would earn in a lifetime because that would be critical of “black excellence” or accuse “hard-working people” of white privilege. It’s the mind that wrestles with it, the brain cannot help doing what it does.

I sat in a lecture several years ago (it was in French so I can be forgiven for misunderstanding most of it). I learned about the Parisian catacombs and sewers of Paris, and read, later a passage from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables:

“By degrees, we will admit, a certain horror seized upon him. The gloom which enveloped him penetrated his spirit. He walked in an enigma. … How was he to get out? Would he find an exit? Would he find it in time? Would that colossal subterranean sponge with its stone cavities, allow itself to be penetrated and pierced? … Would they end by both getting lost, and by furnishing two skeletons in a nook of that night? He did not know. He put all these questions to himself without replying to them. The intestines of Paris form a precipice. Like the prophet, he was in the belly of the monster.”

I cannot help thinking, sometimes, that South Africa’s guts, what the French refer to as des egouts, and its catacombs, have been turned inside out, and we walk now among the dead, wading in the sewage, tangled in the intestines of society in the monstrosity that is South Africa.

As I write all of this it seems completely out of whack, but I realise how my brain has been poisoned and everything I see, read and hear is filtered not through the paradise of the tourist brochures but through the surface of South Africa’s grotesqueries and battles to survive on the periphery of a political economy that has left so many people scavenging for a living, and in search of dignity.

And so I wander along the streets of cities I visit, with frequent visits and stays in “poor” communities and, a little like Walter Benjamin, my brain incessantly moves between what it absorbs and the streets of South Africa, and rejecting the “self-enunciative authority” of the ubiquitous tourist brochure. DM