World Street Children News

The art of survival
We are in the Thari Cinema in downtown Johannesburg. All around are blocks of tenements and empty office buildings. Howard, the projectionist, is focusing the projector before inviting the audience to enter a world of action and beauty, not to mention ideals that can probably never be lived up to.
Around this time it is quiet in central Johannesburg. Between about six and eight o’clock in the evening, employees quit their offices in the formerly flourishing “City of Gold”. Many head for the outlying townships. Others drive back to the carefully-guarded luxury suburbs north of Johannesburg. The commuters’ destination depends on the colour of their skin.
The affluent night owls who, in the heyday of apartheid, drove downtown in the evening to have a drink in the Carlton Tower are seldom seen. The city centre has become a kind of “grey zone”, where organized crime, prostitution, drug abuse and rough justice prevail.
Those who remain behind in the city centre have nowhere to go. They are street children or incorrigible adventurers who get a kick out of what has been stigmatized as the “most dangerous town in the world”.
All the street children are black boys most of whom have run away from poor homes to escape abuse of one kind or another. On the streets they learn the art of survival. This means finding a suitable clan and carving out a place for yourself in a hierarchy that dictates who wears the jersey on cold nights. Even if you are freezing, the worst enemy is not being cold but being alone.

A warm place to go
They might have spent the day scavenging, begging and stealing. Many sniff glue. Official shelters for street children, some run by the churches, provide bunks and a soup kitchen. On some nights Samaritans hand out food. But while almost all the children have spent time at one of these shelters, they never stay there too long. Some of them, once their basic needs have been catered for, head off for the Thari cinema in Market Street.
Although it is in dire need of renovation, this movie-house has become a kind of haven, a secure, warm place where homeless people can find shelter. As well as street kids, it attracts other underprivileged people who have slipped through the very loose “net” of the South African social security system.
The proprietor of the cinema has no objection to his auditorium being used by the waifs as a kind of dormitory. The only condition he insists on is that they do not consume alcohol or use drugs. Every night, between 20 and 30 kids make themselves as comfortable as possible on the cinema’s threadbare carpet.

‘It’s like belonging to a big family’
One regular guest remarks, “It’s pretty hard to get accepted here, but once you are it’s like belonging to a big family.” He talks about the hard reality of life in the million-population city outside. Inside, you can find a place among the rows of dilapidated seats and see second-rate films packed with action. Once, when he was spending the night outside in the street, somebody stole his shoes while he was asleep. That is just one more reason to pay two rand (50 cents) for a place to doze between Terminator and Air Force One.
Another regular is 66-year-old Miklos Zenasi, who comes in about the same time each evening and looks for his favourite place in the front row. Here he discreetly settles down for the night. Miklos, who is known to everyone as “The old man”, openly admits that he is no longer the wild bull he was once reputed to be. He deserted from the Hungarian army, fled the communist regime, and by roundabout routes eventually found his way to South Africa. Now, he says, he is too old for that kind of excitement. What’s more, he adds, pointing to different parts of his body, he’s a mass of aches and pains. For a while he lapses into silence before finally revealing that he has spent more nights in recent years beneath the screen than anywhere else.
Around six o’clock in the morning, when Arnold Schwarzenegger has got even with his last enemy, the city outside begins to throb with life again. It is time for the Thari to expel its children for another day. It may well see them again in the evening just as Howard is checking the focus of the lens for a further round of dreams.

Vital statistics

An unobtrusive eye

Thys Dullaart, a 31-year-old South African photographer on the staff of the Johannesburg Star newspaper, won the 1999 World Press Photo Award (“Daily Life” category), with the picture story on Johannesburg street children from which photos published in this feature have been selected. Dullaart worked as unobtrusively as possible using a small Leica camera. He quotes with approval the great French photographer Henri Cartier Bresson who once said “Anyone who wants to catch fish should not disturb the water.” In other words, if you want to take pictures in a cinema, it’s a good idea not to disturb the performance.
“Living and working in Johannesburg has taught me many things about street children,” he says. “Eager to see their response to the Thari cinema photos, I arranged for some of the boys featured in them to meet me at the annual World Press Photo Exhibition. I was amazed when they commented instead on a story about street children in Romania. ‘But they are white,’ was their initial reaction, followed by a discussion which gave me the impression that it was themselves they saw in those photos from Romania.”