Eskomeraderie – the final stage of deprivation

When I arrived in South Africa mid-June after a five year hiatus, to spend a month helping my sister sort-and-clear the rest of my deceased mother’s possessions (she died during COVID-19), I never imagined that my greatest obstacle would be access to electricity.

The first week was full of nostalgia and regret for my long-lost South African youth, brought on by sprays of aloes against the burnt-dusty veld and the calls of hadedas, loeries and even hoepoes (believe it or not).

I heard some vague talk about loadshedding, which occurred according to a predictable schedule a few times a week, but it wasn’t a big deal. I WhatsApped my children in America images of the camping gas lamps dotted around my sister’s house to show how people here cope with the occasional disappearance of their electric power. “Wow!” they said.

Week two of my visit, and I was deep into the practical details of trying to “get stuff done” on my mom’s possessions, and not wanting to leave anything to the last minute. My sister had warned me that things can often be annoyingly inefficient in Johannesburg so I was pushing through on my to-do list.  (I think the adjective she might have used was “exasperatingly”.)

By the end of June, I patted myself on the back at having made a bunch of arrangements and not having overpaid too much. The end of my work was in sight! And all of a sudden, I noticed that the electricity started disappearing for longer periods and with ever-greater frequency as we moved from loadshedding Stage 2 to Stage 4.

The bread I had prepared to bake in two hours’ time now had to wait for five hours, which basically ruins the second rise, and results in a pock-holed flat mess. But who am I to complain about my first-world problems, and we could just eat our sandwiches on government loaves?

I WhatsApped my US children about how life in South Africa was starting to remind me of luxurious camping or ‘’glamping”. Everything very comfortable as long as it didn’t involve reliable access to electric power.

You could say that I had passed through the first two of the Kubler-Ross stages of grief in relation to loadshedding: shock and denial.

One late afternoon, I decided to exit my sister’s suburban fortress to take a healthful bike ride around the neighbourhood lake and, when I returned to her gate, it wouldn’t open because of loadshedding, naturally. I made a number of attempts at entering codes manually, pressing the buzzer, and calling family member’s phones over and over. No reply because, you guessed it, loadshedding had powered-down the cellphone towers.

I watched the sun set to my west, a burning vermillion and burnt sienna, and I passed the time by exchanging pleasantries with pedestrians on their way home from work. “Hi, I’m just a little woman with a bicycle sitting outside a gate trying furiously to dial someone – anyone – on  her cellphone, as one does in Johannesburg, one of the most crime-menaced cities in the world.

Eventually, I got the attention of someone inside the family fortress, and was let in. I shouted at everyone about how pathetically inadequate their security system was. Their security company’s emergency app was a joke since it didn’t work when the power was down. How long before the robbers worked out their pathetic “security theatre”, and that the house was defenceless when the power went out?

For those of you counting, that’s stage three, the anger stage.

By early July when the electricity crisis swung off the end of the dial to Stage 6, I was in a panic. It wasn’t so much about all the small businesses losing contracts or students struggling to study for exams in the dark, but how I was going to finish everything I needed to do while the electric power had suddenly become unreliable.

My 14-year-old son, who was along with me for the trip, griped about not having access to WiFi. I started seeing a lot more of him because his computer had become a power and internet-deprived hunk of nothing.

I also started seeing a lot more of my nephews who, when the power went out, gravitated to the living room where a wood-burning stove provided the only heat in the cold winter evenings.

We started to spend more hours together talking in the living room, and it occurred to me that loadshedding was like an enforced Shabbat experience for all South Africans, where we have to spend time together without the distractions of electronics, TV and phones.

I also noticed that everyone I encountered at shops and offices had become nicer and more patient about deadlines because of this shared pain of powerlessness. Even at traffic intersections that terrified me at first because they were absent traffic lights, I noticed that the drivers were more solicitous of each other when the lights were off. I guess this must be Kubler-Ross stage five: acceptance.

Now in the second week of July, my US family still can’t believe the electricity can simply go out for long periods of time and yet the heads of the people responsible aren’t rolling off the guillotines. I doubt they’ll ever understand how native South Africans keep hoping for things to function well enough so they can continue to thrive here in a place where the weather is always great and the sunsets are unbeatable.

This must be the bargaining stage, shifted from fourth to last place, because South Africans must believe that if they pull together long enough, things will get better.

Emma Gordon Blass is an ex-South African who lives and writes in North Carolina.