So, the REM-deprived globalfire team manages to get its collective butt out to Alex quite early. We want to get out gfire 4 in good time so that we can get on with the story of the day. Which is two-fold: the Global Peoples Forum (GPF) rally at the Alex stadium, supported by the local tripartite alliance plus one (ANC/COSATU/SACP and SANCO, the South African National Civics Organisation) and its noon march to Sandton; as well as a second morning march from Alex to Sandton under the banner of the Social Movements United .OK now the facts are out of the way. One more fact – the previous day, at the 11th hour, Sangoco (our national NGO coalition) pulls out of GPF rally and march. The march split divides, but also dynamises.

So we’re handing out gfires. The rest of the team is blitzing this heavily degraded township and no doubt scoffing down vetkoek or something. Shilowa arrives, and takes a copy reluctantly. Pallo Jordan and Eric Mann ponder their pretty pictures. Toyi-toying clusters enter the stadium sporadically. Time moves. I grab two young men in the crowd, Riyaz and Ernest, and hand over the distribution task. It’s time to check out the East Bank, dubbed the left bank, the starting point for march 2. Two Mauritian journos, both at the GPF at Nasrec, hitch a ride. Not sure where Sefako, gfire photographer is, so commandeer Alain to take pix, back-up number one.

A phalanx of red LPM (Landless People’s Movement) t.shirts counterpoints the carnival mood at Alex stadium. Here the tone is serious, the subtext hardcore. Bump into Eric Miller, the man whose picture of the Cosatu launch in the 80s had been used for the massive poster advertising the GPF march. He tells me it’s the first time he’s been back in Alex in 14 years and the first thing he sees is this picture! Arrange to get some posters to him. Find an organiser, double-check their route, question police video team about their reasons for filming – they’ve gone digital nogal. Police don’t really talk, they just act on order. Pray that whenever the day comes that we would have to access police footage (and hope not) that the production values would be tight.

Back to the Alex stadium. The place is filling up. A burkah-clad mother from the pro-Palestine contingent harangues her young son to pick up their pamphlets, “we don’t litter”. The ANC logo on the canvas covering the area for important people has been plastered with green cloth, exposing just the slogans of sustainable development and a better world for all. A Palestinian supporter explains the Intifada concept to an orange-robed Krishna, who smiles in gentle agreement with the idea of fighting injustice wherever it spawns. Lose Malcolm. Rest of team still doing what they’re doing. Decide to move on to march 2 – the left-oriented landless, the anti-privatisation protestors, the Nepad-boycotting Social Movements Indaba…. Leave Alex stadium with a young Rastafarian journalist couple from Cape Town. Walk up to Rooseveldt street, one of the few streets in Alex with a name. And the march is on. A red swathe through the grey landscape of contemporary urban degradation. Get a bit excited, a very cute foreign male journo laughingly suggests that I’ve been chowing too much lettuce (weird)… no time to even flirt, my personal summit whinge! We march. Alex goes about its business and watches. It’s been here before. From the flats Kwaito pounds the soundtrack – angry and dissonant – and the young men sit, and drink beer and look on jadedly. Mamas in white, members of the Old Apostle congregation, too sit and stare. The younger children understand what’s going on, they join, an embryonic new generation of activists. The whole place stinks of shit. Police are everywhere – later find out 100s have been deployed from all over the country.

It’s funny how solidarities and mandates engender. The initial GPF decision to march from Alexandra to Sandton was about relatively privileged groupings with access to governments and international instruments expressing solidarity with a community living in the cracks generated by capitalist exploitation and years of apartheid rule. And even though there are now two marches, and nobody really understands the politics, I get the impression that in its masked watchfulness, Alex is giving somebody a mandate. To deliver. Whether from the top, via march 1, or from the bottom, via march 2. We walk. I jump onto a courier bike briefly (thanx broer). At the cross-over from Alex to Sandton, a dreadlocked blonde woman protects a bird nestling in a disused field from the marching feet – finds a piece of concrete to enclose it with. Into some big street. March stops, chief marshall is on the walkie-talkie with Sandton: the march leadership has decided that president Thabo Mbeki and UN secretary-general Kofi Annan are to receive their LPM Memo.

We walk. It feels good to be partisan. The press contingent is massive. Some just doing a job, but there are enough hints that for many, recording this event is political. Our tape recorders and cameras and notebooks and digicams represent a conduit for the voiceless. So they record. Somewhere higher up their necessary subjectivities will be spiked or edited to meaninglessness, but they record. Another big street, more police, stoic visages. A glossy grey flurry of cars causes a slight frisson – Summit delegates led by a police car swerve to the right of the oncoming march in indecent haste. March march march. It’s gone silent, people are tired. Water and coke is shared, cigs are bounced, some complaint of the long route – there’s apparently a far quicker one. Enter Sandton city. Finally blow with an American journo parroting the non-interrogative mantra that the march politics are purely domestic. Can you not see the Alex-Sandton visual schism as global metaphor encapsulating all of the prickly issues and contradictions? Can you not understand the necessity for an individual ethic and stance on global poverty? Can’t you just drop the neutrality cop-out?

Sandton locks down the contradiction. Sky-scrapers, pristine streets, flash cars, no people. Just as you curve into Alice street where the Summit is located, a huge billboard welcomes you to “Sandton for an international shopping experience, South African style”. We stop at speaker’s corner. We wait. Mbeki and Annan do not pitch – no reasons. Local and international speakers climb onto a truck and deliver sharp fiery statements and demands. The marchers are intent and engaged. The rally bracketed and overshadowed by the glinting Sandton Towers hotel on one side, and the powerful apartheid-created financial institution ABSA bank on the other. But the march is flamboyant and stylish and raw, flaunts its message: Our world is not for sale. Good to be on the march again. Code Global.

Gael Reagon is a journalist and poet. She lives in Jozi. (gael@gfsa.org.za)