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	The Lion Park Produce Store
		On a grassy ridge, where Johannesburg's northern suburbs intrude onto a tongue of tired farmland, there is a long brick building with a dirty tin roof and a wide front stoep.  In front of the stoep, bakkies and taxis swarm across a dusty, pot-holed parking area.  Beyond that, under a clutch of acacias, large African women sit beside neatly arranged rows of crocheted white table clothes and doilies, and bowls of fruit and vegetables.  On the corner, where Cedar Road joins Nietgedacht Road, a black man in half fancy dress and a large top-hat stands silently in the middle of the intersection.  Around his neck is an illegible cardboard sign that means he believes in God, but has no money and can't feed his family.  When a car approaches he does a little jig as though a tune spontaneously resonates in his head.  The car stops, a few cents are passed on and there is a half smile of appreciation.  Occasionally, the man breaks and crosses the road to socialize with the other, permanent residents of the Lion Park Produce Store.  Among them is an old man selling live chickens, an armed guard with a World War II rifle and a uniform many sizes too small, and a blind woman rattling a can near the pay phone.  And there is Elvis, a boy without legs who is pushed around in a shopping trolley. A hundred meters from the store, towards the Dieplsloot squatter camp, prostitutes work the road.  Dressed in colorful clothing and high-heeled shoes, they are most active in the late afternoon.  Clients in passing cars are seduced with voluptuous body movements and hints of licentiousness.  A broad smile, an impatient wave of the hand says, 'I am willing; I am available'.  Some cars stop.  Most keep going.  From my house nearby, at Woodmead School, I once mustered the courage to drive with a camera to the place where they work.  As I slowed, a buxom woman with intricately braided hair and a beautiful, dark, shiny African face lifted her skirt high over her head and exposed her private parts, as a bird might show the vivid color of its breast.  As I accelerated away, she appeared in the rear vision mirror beckoning me to return. In the evenings, at around six o'clock, activity at the Lion Park Produce Store reaches a peak.  Destitute blacks - women with bags of millies or bundles of firewood on their heads, men caked in sweat and dust and small children dressed in rags, and others - come from miles away to congregate on the stoep, talking, gossiping, telling stories, contemplating what to buy with meager amounts of money.  Inside the store, there are long queues through aisles of aluminium cookware, cheap hardware and groceries.  Large bags of maize meal and flour occupy shelves that seem to go on forever.  There are crates of sorghum beer and refrigerators stuffed with chicken legs and gizzards, which are highly prized. Hot loaves of bread sit cooling on wire racks and there is the usual assortment of liquor, meat and stock feed sold at only slightly inflated prices.  The store's scruffy Portuguese owners man the checkouts.  Strong South African cigarettes hang from their mouths.  Plumes of thick smoke are blown into the air.  And African clients are treated with brash hostility and impatience.  There are a few concessionary gestures - small helpings of fish and chips, spoonfuls of pap and sauce for a rand, single cigarettes, quarter loaves of bread, cheap snuff, a single aspirin.  But for the Portuguese little has changed since the old days.  A black must always be a lesser being.  Dogma prevails at the Lion Park Produce Store. For local Africans, the Lion Park Produce Store is almost the only social life they have.  It is their escape from the rats and mosquitoes in the dingy solitude of their squatter hovels and farm shacks where there is no electricity in a tiny room shared by ten people.  But, when the doors of the store are closed and bolted at seven o'clock, they are left to their own devices in the semi darkness.  Amidst the flicker of the first mbawulas, there is momentary hesitation, a sense of regret.  Then, as the lights of Johannesburg become visible to the south and the African sun disappears over Sterkfontein, they head for the road and fade into the night.
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