After work yesterday I went to the SPAR to buy a few days supply of food. There's quite a bottleneck of office workers who do exactly the same thing. What surprised me as I walked up the ramp, was a long line of people snaking from well outside the shop, all the way to the lottery kiosk. More people were converging on the line as I tried to get to the door, some of them with so many lottery tickets it looked like a pack of floppy cards.
One thing I also noticed was the smell of alcohol permeating at least some members queuing up. Later yesterday evening, on the Afrikaans news there was a story about poor Afrikaans whites, and someone throwing around a figure of 430 000. If I hadn't seen what I had seen earlier in the evening, and Norwood isn't a derelict shipwrecked part of Joburg's suburbia by any means, I would have called those figures fanciful.
Bloemfontein strikes me as a major area of poverty since there are so few employment opportunities. Industria - an area on the East side of Naval Hill, was once dedicated to Spoornet's railway workers. Well the railways died and those communities have struggled on.
The good news is, the railways in South Africa are being resuscitated, and in the years ahead, if the intelligensia of this country (is there such a thing) know their stuff, railways will be turned around into something like what they were in their heyday. The days of one person, one car, are fast becoming unaffordable. And the psychology of 'something for nothing', gambling one's existence on a lottery, even less so.
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