Waiting for the man: The quest for a helping hand

That Monday, just after 7am, the first of the pilgrims arrived. She was a sangoma from KZN who had been having visions that he could help her find her lost son. He was last seen on a bus trip to the Wild Coast Sun.
But there was no help to be had. The man was in a hurry. He reversed his Crossfire out of the driveway, closed the gate with the remote, and was off to the SABC.
He didn’t even look at her.
Nor did he look at the eight pilgrims he passed on his way down to Main Rd. He knew what their request was all about. They had relayed it to him every day for the past couple of weeks.
Seven of the eight of them were blind. They knew the rules, but they thought that because they were blind, perhaps he’d be able to make an exception.
He couldn’t.
As his car sped past them, their guide sadly announced the news and they realised they’d missed their chance. Dejectedly, they turned and began making their way back to the tree in the Meldene parking lot, where their morning umpokoqo still simmered on the fire.
There they met a man in a wheelchair, who had travelled from Maputo to state his case. Since he only showed up at eight, his chances of a personal meeting were slim, but he had something the others didn’t have. He had the guy’s phone number.
He’d bought it for 50 000 meticals from a concert promoter who had once brought the man out to Mozambique for a music festival.
At the Melville Nando’s on the corner near the parking lot, a schoolgirl bought a Portuguese roll and a salad while she typed out an SMS to the star. Would he remember her, she wondered. Of course he would. He’d given her his number. That time after the concert in Welkom.
Across the road from the Nando’s a street preacher bellowed his interpretation of the scriptures. He too had shared a pot with the blind pilgrims in the few days he’d been in the neighbourhood.
Like the sangoma stationed outside the house, the preacher had also been having visions. His dreams told him that he and the star had to work together on a gospel song. The kind of song that would change the world.
A kid from Dobsonville with a plumbing certificate, who had been unable to find work for a year, arrived at the house around lunch time and looked for the doorbell. Finding none, he peered through the gate, where he saw a car parked.
“Hallo,” he tried, and tentatively banged on the pedestrian gate. There was no sign of life, so he went and sat on the nature strip of the house across the road. But the retired gentleman who lived there was having none of it.
“You can’t sit here,” he said. “You people always want to wait here on my lawn. It’s private property this. If you want to sit, you must go to the park.” And he gestured towards the playground up the road to where the legs of the lady sangoma from KZN were just visible beneath a shrub near the swings.
The plumber decided he would have to leave a message for his hero. He dug a set of writing implements out of his bag and over the next 17 minutes, poured his heart into a two-page missive to the king of kwaito and the most famous social worker in South Africa.
Having written his note, all that remained was to get it into the yard, the house having no visible letterbox whatsoever. On the corner of the four-metre perimeter wall, he found a hydrant, from which he was just able to reach the corner of the wall.
He hopped up and grabbed the corner brick of the wall. It wobbled and gave way, as if dozens of hopefuls had pulled themselves up on it to get a look into the yard, to deliver their desperate pleas for help.
Next thing, the desperate plumber found himself flat on his back surrounded by mortar and bricks, at the feet of an ADT security man, who had been summoned by the star’s concerned across-the-road neighbour.
“You’re under arrest,” the guard told the hapless plumber. “Come with me.”
Later, as he helped the wannabe jobseeker into his patrol car, he offered this piece of advice. “If you do not follow the write-in procedure, Zola 7 will not help you. Don’t come to his house”