Port St John's is an incestuous hell-hole amidst outrageous beauty - Paradise and the Venomous Beast of Failure; Sajonisi; town of myth-making and former home to an Apartheid bantustan's torturers and Rhodesian renegades.It is a playground to people as diverse as former SABC Board chairperson Eddie Funde, musician Thandiswa Mazwai, and the tens of thousands of township and village youth that descends onto its main beach over New Year.
It is a dump of a town, with open sewerage the norm, corrupt traffic officers, grossly incompetent police, greedy and power-crazed local government representatives, severely restrained health services and saturation crime.
It is also a place of incredibly laid-back chilling, soulful forests, extraordinarily strange characters - from the Mpondo man that hauls out his penis for a public piss and tells the nearby (female) doctor that he's got to 'release his shlong' to Rasta Dave who discovered the loveliness of the township maidens as a youth (and stayed, training as a herbalist, becoming a loved legend all around the rural areas). In-between all the chronic alcoholics and permanently doped-out drop-outs (for this is South Africa's Marijuana Paradise, too) you'll find Ben fornicating on the beach (and amplifying his already rich theatre of myth-making) or the Mayor and Municipal Manager competing for balance behind their impossibly huge stomachs. Its a place with rolling hills, dead-drop cliff-faces, misty beach vistas, picturesque villages, a township on perhaps the most valuable piece of coastal real estate inhabited by the working (and not-so-working) classes and two splendid mountains servicing as the gateway to Port St John's.
It is undoubtedly one of the most scenic places in South Africa, yet so fettered with institutional, social and infrastructural failure that it will continue to defy attempts to turn it into yet another over-priced soulless tourist destination.
It is a gateway to mad, mad beauty - for those who seek jazz in the bowels of a rat. It is Sajonisi, village town outside the globe.
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