Joko Man

This piece is by another daughter.

It is quite difficult to look him in the eyes – one stares to the left, the other dead ahead. The best you can hope to do in a brief moment, is look him in which ever one is facing you at that point in time. That’s all you get to try – a brief moment.

Johannesburg is a city of spinning wheels. The smell of sticky hot tyres skidding on tarmac, and the accompanying honking express a constant inner panic over lost time. We are a society negotiating expertly constructed traffic jams and less expertly piled-up fender-benders, with a morbid fascination in anything that stops for longer than a second on the road. Because if it stops, it is probably broken.

Broken tyres, broken windscreens. Bent bumpers, bust-up side doors. Bleeding heads, battered bodies, separated from each other by blunt force. Or by the sharpness of broken glass, smoking and glittering in the hi-veld sun. We crawl then, our time constraints reneged - the excuse to come, “there was an accident – traffic blocked up for miles”, while we gawk and gasp our way through the wreckage.

We hate the traffic – yet at the end of the day, that is where we find our communion with each other. We go together from the city, some of us charitably, some like loaded guns. We go together in worship of a system we like to call progress and we go very, very slowly. We try to make the best of it by calling friends, cutting off our neighbours, listening to the news on the radio, pulling a finger at the guy behind us, singing along to a CD and swearing at the taxi drivers.

And because we spend so much time on the road in our cars, small business has followed us there. Complete with special deals, discounts, bulk buying, bartering, and outright begging, the street market jostles with the traffic for its share of the road. The middle line is staked out as prime territory.

The code of conduct is: hands out, windows up, limp along, look the other way. It’s accepted roadside etiquette, occasionally broken (often enough to keep it there) by the transfer of silver across the breach.

As Night is gently falling closed on the rest of the city, the gate pulls tight behind you, and you have finished your laps for the day. Tomorrow will be the same.

Unless you are taking Cedar Road out of the city through Fourways, past Dainfern and on to the Lion Park road. It would be an obscure route and direction for most of us to head unless we are breaking out for Sun City, heading for the mountain biking at Northern Farms or the private school, Heron Bridge College. I used to come up to the T-junction on Hans Strydom extension frequently when traveling to Woodmead High School (another time and story), and that was where we discovered him. He is still there today (2008), doing what he does.

At first, we would approach the intersection with some alarm – there is a commotion of a creature, face and hands outstretched indicating human origin. The rest is a leaping, cardboard construction of ridiculous proportions for this sedate stretch of road. Is it a hijacking? Another lone crazy with concealed weapon, or perhaps a slightly more rabid beggar somewhat off the usual path?

But he is none of these. His hands do not stretch out for cash or control of your car. In fact his hands would stretch out whether you were there or not. He is merely stretching – himself, the landscape around him and your perceptions if you let him. He is not asking for change, he is personifying it.

Joko Man. That is what we call him, because it is a nice pun and pulls insistently on the essence of what we (my family) would like to believe he is. A Joke – quizzically constructed, and pointing in whichever direction either of his eyes may be looking. Jokes are an indication of the type of thinking going on in a society – they are mental pressure valves whereby we may lose some of the frustration that builds up through the constant cognitive friction. Every now and again it is vital to come across something that blows us sideways in our perception of the world, a situation or a person. Otherwise we tend to blow up, out of all proportion.

At first we couldn’t figure out the cardboard sign he held – a series of stick drawings – a bird, a car, the BMW symbol. And scrawled on the one side, “Joko”. The more we tried to catch the joke, the slipperier it got. What was the punch line? Where we too smart or too stupid to get it?

Then one day, truth dawned – there alongside him in the grass, someone’s rubbishy tribute to the side of the road jumped out at me. “Joko Tea” – a red and white box. His sign was a portrait - in pictures and words - of his surrounds. Smile for an eternal signature as you drive by. Nowhere was there plea or persuasion. Just art for art’s sake. But we gave him a few bucks anyway. And we held our hands out first.

His sign wasn’t the only aspect showing in this revolving open gallery. On his head was the most marvelous contraption wrought in cardboard – a “Capitan” Hat, a streetwelded crown extending half a meter all round.

There he stood for a week or two in this guise, come rain come shine, till the cardboard sogged off and new attire was acquired. Joko man became a never-ending fascination – magician of endless entertainments pulled from fresh air. Each week he would be there, sometimes bouncing, sometimes dancing, sometimes simply running on the spot, but always moving. Still, he would only stretch out his hand for change, once we had wound down the window and extended our hands out towards him.

I always wondered how he handled the heat – some deeply advanced mind trick perhaps. Inhabiting every item of clothing he could possibly own, and the local embellishments of cardboard, plastic and can, he was impossible to gauge in girth. This was in the heat of the summer day, when all I could manage was shorts and a T-shirt at a push.

For the next exhibition, he built a cardboard palace that rather too closely (to the uneducated or worse, the unconvinced) resembled the shack shelters of Diepsloot a few km’s away. The local farmer tore it down; I’m sure with some indignation at the trouble he had to go to, to maintain sanity in the face of Art. So Joko Man built it back with string – an invisible palace, laced through the long grass and the nearby trees. This one eventually blew away.

I once saw him dancing in the rain – his eyes looked a little more desperate that day as he jumped and swayed his arms with the little energy he had left. I was the only car for miles, but he looked like he had been at it all day. I could see him from way off, despite the grey and he neither sped up nor slowed down as I approached him then receded back into the distance.

When I took the photo, I felt like after all this time of watching him I had finally intruded. This time I had tried to take something from him that he wasn’t entirely willing to give – his soul or perhaps his transience. His ability to change, to dissolve and reappear – his self-appointed task to be different - quite why, his own mystery. Perhaps it’s the same reaction you would get if you walked into a gallery and snapped pics to take home. I tried to understand too hard, and froze a moment in colours that didn’t quite bounce as much as they should. My art in response to his was trite and contrived - framed.

And I learned a difference between the Joko Man and me.

He is content within his intrigue, and doesn’t give a damn whether I understand, or if I give him something or if the weather is bad. Or even if I have attributed him a name he doesn’t know. That is his job for the day. Me, I struggle with who I am, at my PC, on the road, in the traffic. An endless engine whining why…

Maybe at the end of the day, this fine gent of the corner is just another sad case of insanity waiting to be led away. Maybe it simply hasn’t occurred to him to do anything but leap and sing and dance in the street. It could be possible that his dress-up parade of an existence is nothing more than that – a mind expending energy in the only way open to it. But still, that is not what I seem to find when I get up a bit closer. He is certainly of manic description, but he does not come across as wasting time. I can’t entirely fathom his purpose – but he certainly has one. Something I’m not too sure I can say for myself with as much throaty conviction.

He has chosen such a random spot that no one else inhibits his space. He won’t invite you – to join him, to look or to give him money or pity. He won’t even notice you unless you ask him too. He is utterly individual and utterly alone. He doesn’t need anybody. He is a walking provocation.

It is a fortunate day when you get to drive by him there, though your fortune will depend more on how much you are willing to see than whether he will be there. He mostly is.

In my comfortable car and nice dry clothes with no cardboard to draw on, I find myself respectful of the dignity – the hopping, skew-eyed, rough coated essence of dignity – that the Joko Man holds up for us in the street. The Joko Man does not smile – he is a grim dancer, - but he makes me smile. He makes me pensive, he makes me slow down, and if it’s a good day, he hands out change.

He is free.