Money is the new dompas

I was sitting next to the taxi driver on the way to Braamfontein this morning. In the ashtray, there was a a scrap of paper, with a doodle of a dog on it. A very artistic doodle. Not a photographic likeness of a dog, but you know those sketches that manage to capture the 'doggy-ness' of that particular dog, sometimes in more revealing ways than a photograph would? Anyway, I was enchanted, so I asked him if he had drawn it. It was like the floodgates had opened. The story of why he never studied art should be turned into a book some day. It was one of the most eloquent sketches of transformation in contemporary South Africa I've heard; I wish I'd been able to record it. I just remember snippets, here and there; the title is one of them...

....we were constrained then, by police, asking for our passes. Now it's tsotsis asking for money. Sometimes the tsotsis are criminals, street thugs. Sometimes they work in banks, and wear suits. Either way, they constrain us as much as apartheid did. I still wonder if my son could become an artist in South Africa.
......before it was the whites displacing us, now it's the Zimbabweans.

Every time I have conversations like this, I want it to be simultaneously transformed into a story, and an excerpt for my PhD....