The man with the golden trolley
The first time I saw it, I thought of a mirage.
A sudden, glittering, shimmer of lights and colour down a gloomy side street a few blocks from our house.
The northern suburbs of Johannesburg are a pleasant sprawl of tree-lined avenues, and comfortable houses hidden behind high security walls and electric fences.
The mirage turned out to be a trolley - a supermarket trolley, enclosed within a wire cage, and carefully, extravagantly decorated with hundreds of shiny compact disks and ribbons.
A tall, lean man in a shabby black raincoat was pushing the whole, precarious, structure along the road.
It seemed such an absurd, beautiful sight that I realised I was grinning broadly.
And for almost two years now, it's had the same effect on me, every time I catch a glimpse of the trolley - it's like a snatch of song, or a warm memory.
It's actually seven years since Solly Radili first started work on his walking mirage.
"She is art, he told me the other day, as we sat in a patch of shade. I am her spokesman," he says.
Solly is not sure how old he is, but he was born in a rural settlement not far from the border of what is now Zimbabwe. He never went to school; had an arranged marriage at the age of 17, to a girl called Maria; and soon afterwards, in about 1955, came to racially segregated Johannesburg alone looking for work.
He got a job cleaning and gardening for a white family. "I was a houseboy", he says - an apartheid label that still lingers in these suburbs even today.
For a short while, Solly left the city to work on a building site near the coast. But he drifted back to Johannesburg, and ended up walking the streets looking for scrap metal to sell, and sleeping rough in Joubert Park near the city centre.
The decades slipped by. He sent a little money home and visited Maria from time to time. They had four children, but Maria became an alcoholic, he says.
"Not me - I never drank once."
In 2003, Solly was pushing a trolley through a smart neighbourhood, looking for more scrap metal, when a white woman came out of her house and gave him three old CDs.
"I put them on the front," he says. "I like the way it looked. That is how I started".
As we're talking, he takes a pair of scissors out of his pocket and carefully cuts a strip of cloth. His long nails are caked with dirt, his brown trousers and woollen hat, threadbare. But somehow he manages to look almost dapper - like a tailor - as he neatly threads the cloth to the back of the trolley, just below a South African flag, a CD and a Winnie-the-Pooh teddy.
Solly is on his fourth trolley now. Two were stolen by scrap-metal hunters. One was confiscated by the police when he was visiting his family. "Now my youngest son is a drunk and a layabout," he says.
"I went home for a traditional ceremony, to try to cure him. It didn't work. This trolley, number four, is my best yet."
He parks it every day on the pavement near a small shopping centre. People stop and give him money. "Some want to take my photo," he says. In a day he can earn 70 rand ($10; £6).
It's noon, and a white woman walks up the street and hands him a sandwich. "I try to give him one every day," she says. "He is a wonderful man. We love to see his art."
Solly sometimes features in the local newspaper. He's portrayed, perhaps a little patronisingly, as a rather mystical figure - a man with no past, driven by some instinctive force to create art.
Solly shrugs. "They say this is art, and it makes them happy, and because of that, I don't starve. But I'm not trying to make a statement. White people like it. And I love them for helping me."
But Solly is more than a busker.
A local art gallery offered to buy his trolley, but he refused. Not just because it's his livelihood, but because he felt the gallery would somehow be cheating - taking a short cut. "It takes time to make this," he says proudly. He seems to be growing into the role of an artist. "Someday I will make something else. Something very different."
These days he is no longer sleeping rough. One of his admirers lets him roll out a mattress in his storeroom every evening.
"It's not safe on the streets at night," Solly says. "There are criminals everywhere today, and no truth in politics. It was better before."
On cold mornings he sometimes considers retirement. "I'm broken," he says. He must be at least 70.
But then he takes another bite of his sandwich, puts his scissors away, and stands up to admire his trolley, glittering in the afternoon sun. "I'm fit. I'm healthy. I can go on for years."
This was written for From Our Own Correspondent.
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Andrew Harding.
"..Solly says. "There are criminals everywhere today, and no truth in politics. It was better before.""
artists, like the proverbial children and drunks, always speak the truth, n'est-ce pas?
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Wow!!
Harding you have no News!!
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"There are criminals everywhere today, and no truth in politics. It was better before." ...apartheid was better?must be smoking those cd's. some people are concerned about the next meal more than they are about apreciating art
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Thanks Andrew, sometimes (or is it most times) we tend to get so carried away with all the politics and such like we forget the average Joe on the street, the simple quaint colourful lives of some...
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'.. Solly sometimes features in the local newspaper. He's portrayed, perhaps a little patronisingly, as a rather mystical figure - a man with no past, driven by some instinctive force to create art.
Solly shrugs. "They say this is art, and it makes them happy, and because of that, I don't starve. But I'm not trying to make a statement. White people like it. And I love them for helping me."..'
I would agree that many journalists, not just those at the local newspaper (for which I write) have never attempted to find out Solly’s whole story, turning him into a somewhat mystical figure, so you did a great job with this, Andrew.
However, just because Solly doesn’t consciously recognise what he does as art, doesn’t mean it isn’t. It’s not likely the San who painted images in caves thought they were creating art yet we recognise it as such today. Nor does art necessarily have to ‘make a statement.’
Perhaps portraying him as an instinctive artist is patronising but I got the definite sense, like the fashion designer Marianne Fassler said, that he is in fact one. People who grow up inculcated into the western art tradition are sensitive to the deeper meaning of art, but people like Solly from simple rural backgrounds may not have learned such an academic view. At its essence art is simply the expression of creativity.
Heather Walker
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hi heather. yes i absolutely agree with you about solly being much more than a busker. i tried to get across his own connection with his work and his growing sense of himself as an artist in the report. sorry about the "patronising" line!
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Perhaps this may be a little too cynical a view, but is his trolley considered 'art' because of qualities of and in itself, or does it derive meaning from the fact that he is a homeless, ageless man with an ordinary story of struggle and hand-to-mouth living?
I personally hesitate to appreciate this trolley as art, because I feel that in your article his presence or proximity to the trolley is as important as all the compact discs and ribbons attached to it. This is evident even in the picture that you chose to use with this article- which has no specific focus on him or the trolley (as a matter of fact, one cannot see the entire 'piece of art').
This article, in fact, has the disturbing effect of recalling a highly paternalistic relationship between races, which essentially reinforces rigid socio-cultural understandings that lead to poisonous stereotypes and generalizations.
This message is not one that intentionally wants to bash the motives of charitable acts or gestures on the part of the more privileged in society. On the contrary, regardless of such social divisions I think Solly's art, if one could truly consider it to be so, should be portrayed in a manner that does not implore us to use our feelings of sympathy to overcompensate for what his creative ability lacks in concept, scope and complexity.
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This could be the way his life was planed and therefore his art is not artistical atall
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Andrew are you the SA correspondent or the American one? i saw you covering the Chilean mine rescue. Is the BBC running out of correspondents?
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Personally I think it is a nice story, better so that someone gives this chap a place to sleep at night that is safe. But I must ask....Why do journalists insist on emphasizing that "a white woman" gave him a sandwich, or "a white woman" gave him his first CD's...? Why can it not just be "a woman"? Why does race always have to be stipulated in every conversation regarding South Africa??? Sorry but you really wind me up!
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