On a trip up Baden Powell Drive’s R310 this weekend, I discovered a fantastic display of organic art alongside the busy road. It took just a minute to stop, reverse the car and run across the road at the break in streaming cars back and forth. I have driven past too many expressive creations at robots and stop streets this week without stopping.
With the artist nowhere to be seen, I could take my time taking in the detail on his handiwork. 
The stonework angels spread their wings over the desperate hope of miles and miles of shanty homes as far as the eye can see. In the background, the majestic profile of Table Mountain, ancient in blue robes, watches quietly and gracefully. I adore the humouristic jab at conventional female beauty with their enlarged heads, blackened nipples and child-bearing hips.
South Africans traditionally tut when they drive past this eyesore of endless bitter poverty. They resent what did not exist 20 years ago but is so permanent and out of control today. It’s hard to miss, too. The first welcome for foreign guests as they drive into the Mother City from Cape Town International Airport. The word “shantytown” may have been derived from the French Canadian word “chantier”, meaning “hut in a lumber camp”. Or it could have originated from the Irish “sean tí” meaning “old house”. You see, this is not a uniquely South African problem, as so many expect. It didn;t take m long to do a little digging to learn that shanty towns are present in a number of countries, including the largest in the world is in Mexico, followed by Pakistan’s version which is the largest in Asia and then Africa’s largest being in Kenya. But let’s not let those Aussies, Canadians, the Philippines, Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil, the West Indies, Peru, Haiti, Blangladesh and China off the hook. They are literally springing up everywhere. And they differ from slums in that “despite their unattractive building materials, they may also be places of hope, scenes of a counter-culture, with an encouraging potential for change and a strong upward impetus. There was a time when one did not traverse past one en route to the sirport without a companion and stopping was never an option, especially if rocks were being lobbied through your windscreen. 
At times, these settlements have expressed a unique power of the people, like the Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) which grew out of a road blockade in Durban. The words “Abahlali baseMjondolo” inisiZulu mean “people who stay in shacks.” In Brazil the Movement of Workers Without a Roof (MTST) is said to be very strong politically.
For the first time I could separate myself from the battleground of the story of haves and have not’s fighting with little but a shaky law in a country where laws are meant to be interpreted with a R100 note, enough to admire these people’s ingenuity and creativity. Some shacks are quite beautiful, with puzzles of mismatched tin roofing, tear-shaped peepholes and splashes of colour. They are here for many reasons, and they pay the price with crime amongst friends, bleak joblessness and cramped, shared living spaces.
The mountain together with the map of human poverty sets quite a poignant landscape for the artist’s statues. Wrinkled aging angels eye younger, perkier breasted ones carefully. A leopard is frozen, dangerously mid-stalk to the edge of the flitting traffic but no one blinks or slows down. 
His form is crude, with swollen chest cavity, I wonder if the urban creator has had the luck to see one such animal in person. I know spotting a leopard changed my life. At the corner of my eye, there’s baboon cheekily looking back from his position in limbo mid-climb across the wall. Through cracks in the bricks, I can see the concrete encircles unemployed stone limbs and heads. Like God’s great warehouse of bodies in various state of manufacture. There’s a cellphone contact number painted on the wall, alongside the title “African Gadern Art. Waterfalls, ponds…”. 
“Can’t someone just take one?” ask I, incredulous at the complacency of the seller, in this crime-besieged country. His abandoned bakkie tells me he could be somewhere in the nether regions, perhaps working on more pieces, but he is yet to appear. “Well,” laughs my dad, “that would be fairly tricky considering their size and weight”. “Still,” say I, playing the role of the rebellious daughter, “I can see someone wanting to do that.” For this missing artist, it seems, the angels do a good enough job, watching over his lot. 
