HEIDI HOLLAND

One foot in door of opulence

The high tea experience at work is a far cry from the place Wanda calls home – the Joburg Central Methodist Church

I had tea twice last week with an admirable young man who is in the wierd position of living his dream and his nightmare simultaneously. If that sounds schizoid, it is, but welcome to a slice of daily life in our unbalanced country.
My new friend is Wanda Stafa, aged 24, who lives at Johannesburg’s Central Methodist Church. The first cuppa we shared was in a shabby café in the city’s Smal Street Mall. We met there because a nicer place I remembered from an earlier visit to Bishop Paul Verryn’s sanctuary had shut down due the unbearable stench of human waste outside the hallowed Pritchard Street premises that Wanda (along with 3 500 mainly Zimbabwean refugees) calls home.
As we were chatting, I noticed Wanda frowning disapprovingly at a crack in his cup. He seemed about to call for a replacement, but then shrugged, sweeping the matter aside with a wave of his expressive hands. Differentiating between trivia and important issues is something Wanda considers more carefully than most of us. As a poor person periodically inhabiting the realm of the rich, he knows just how vast a gulf lies between their contradictory worlds.
But let me expand on Wanda’s bio, the entire history of humankind being best told by ordinary people.
Our second meeting was at the opposite end of the social scale on a balcony overlooking the most dazzling of pools – that of Jozi’s Westcliff Hotel, where Wanda works as a waiter. He didn’t partake of the elegant high tea ritual borrowed from colonial Britain, for which the pink palace on a ridge above the zoo is well-known among those clad in costly shades and designer footwear, because he was busy tending the guests in his stylishly embossed waistcoat.
When you consider that Wanda came to the Central Methodist Church from the Cape three years ago with absolutely nothing but the tormenting memories of a deprived childhood, you have to salute him standing tall amid the marble tiles, gold brocade curtaining and fine Westcliff art. He spent hours and hours devouring English radio in order to polish up his vowels. Although he had never had a syllable of training of any kind, he simply decided one day that he could see himself as an exceptional waiter and set about preparing for his chosen career.
I found him at the Westcliff’s conference centre, Jacaranda Hill, fussing over a large regency table setting, polishing silver knives as if the survival of several species hung on their lustre. When I whispered that one would no more encounter cracked porcelain in this establishment than find a total stranger snoring on your shoulder in the middle of the night - a reference to the years Wanda spent sleeping with hundreds of others in the overcrowded church’s stairwell - he smiled ruefully.
“I had such a sore back every morning that I could sometimes hardly move but I walked for miles and miles to find an agency offering hotel appointments,” he had told me earlier. His initial job was at the Grace, another opulent Jo’burg venue, where he dared to challenge the banqueting manager on a point of principle and promptly got the sack.
To colour in my own muddled context for you, dear reader, I am one who thinks guiltily about the disparity between rich and poor almost every day, but I love the odd visit to the Westcliff. I simply couldn’t resist the Enriching Tea Experience at R145 a head once I was in its tempting orbit on this occasion. Eating warm, crumbly, cream scones, cucumber sandwiches and glazed fruit tarts until my waist band pinched didn’t stop me resenting the measly R12 per hour Wanda receives from the illustrious leisure business operator - sister of the more famous Mount Nelson in Cape Town - in exchange for tending diligently to their customers with his perfect diction and the smile of an angel. (I left several messages for the management in the hope of some sort of explanation, but answer came there none). Don’t the wealthy yet understand that we have to find a way to cut the cake more evenly?
Wanda tells me he does not admit to those at work that he lives at the Central Methodist Church because he doesn’t want them looking down on him (although he gave me permission to reveal all). And also because they call him Mother Theresa when he bemoans the fate of the poor. “I talk to them about my make-believe flat, not about life at the church,” he says. “I want to smell some fresh air when I’m working so I talk as if my fantasy has come true. It’s my secret; my escape.”
Wanda enjoys his job but says he can’t help resenting the way the rich fiddle with their food, complain about nothing and take their privilege for granted. “I think how spoilt and ungrateful they are when I’m serving them and watching them picking at the wonderful things on their plates. They don’t realize how many others behind them have nothing at all. We waiters can eat the leftovers when the diners have gone and I think to myself, ‘Well, I wish I could take it all back to the church with me but at least I can eat healthily myself for today’.
“Some of those at Central Methodist have not eaten anything at all for three days, you know. But I feel there’s a purpose to me being there even though I can’t bring food for them. For example, I see unsmiling kids sitting on the stairs at the church and I entertain them, putting a smile on their faces. My smile is my weapon, I think. I have received a lot of help from the church and I feel quite rich in some way now; no longer the poor kid who came looking for greener pastures on the streets of Jo’burg. ”
So after several cups of tea, dear South African, we’ve glimpsed the cracked crockery as well as the cream cake options on our economic menu. Having decided to make something of his hopeless life, Wanda succeeded against the odds in transforming himself. Whereas the Westcliff seems as stuck in the unequal past as its celebrated Victorian rituals suggest. Perhaps it’s no wonder that Robert Mugabe, who caused the mess in Pritchard Street in the first place, elects to stay at Jozi’s pink palace when he comes to town.