Just like new Zealand
It’s nice to see the odd
Black face now and again
* Haiku by Cape Town poet, Gus Ferguson, on the (not so new anymore) “Neighborhoods Market” (UPDATE: It’s actually the Neighborgoods Market) at the Old Biscuit Mill shop complex in gentrifying Woodstock, an inner city suburb of South Africa’s second city, Cape Town.
I am still not sure how I feel about Main Street Life, which is both a kind of video diary and a blog about a residential redevelopment in downtown Johannesburg called Main Street Life. Hotels, apartments, shops, galleries. We get to see how the place changes through the eyes of a middle class young man, Russell Grant, who is the first person to move into Main Street Life. Some people would call it gentrification (you hear the word “lifestyle” a lot). And the people are all beautiful and middle class. (Yes, they’re multiracial.) In the video above, Russell walks around his new neighborhood with his computer. Via Skype he is showing the neighborhood to Mpho, who lives in London, and “can’t wait to come back to Africa.”
