The Magazine That Pays Its Own Cover Price Forward

Why every tourist in Cape Town should stop, buy a copy, and stay a moment.

There is a particular kind of invisibility that belongs to people who are present everywhere and seen almost nowhere. You pass them at traffic lights, outside supermarkets, at the entrances to car parks and the corners of busy intersections. They hold something out toward you. Most of the time, the city moves past them without breaking stride.

I would like to ask you to break stride.

What The Big Issue actually is

The Big Issue South Africa is not a charity publication. It is not a donation dressed up as a transaction. It is a street magazine — one of a global network of publications operating on the same founding principle: that the most dignified form of assistance is one that creates the conditions for self-sufficiency rather than dependence.

Here is the model, plainly stated. Vendors — people who are homeless, vulnerably housed, or living in conditions of severe economic precarity — purchase copies of The Big Issue at a subsidised rate. They sell those copies at cover price, on the street, face to face. They keep 50% of every sale as their direct income. No organisation takes a cut of that 50%. No middleman stands between the vendor and the money. The transaction is as direct and as human as commerce gets.

Since launching in South Africa in 2009, the magazine has provided income, structure, and a point of dignity to vendors in Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Durban. Many have used that income as a foothold — moving into stable housing, supporting children, rebuilding the scaffolding of a life that circumstance had dismantled.

What you are actually buying

When you purchase a copy of The Big Issue, you are buying a magazine. A genuinely good one — with long-form journalism, cultural commentary, interviews, and, currently, my twelve-part series The Architecture of Belonging, which explores what it means to belong to a city that was not designed with you in mind.

But you are also doing something simpler and more important than purchasing a publication. You are participating in an economy of dignity. You are looking at a person — a specific, individual, named person with a history and a story and a set of circumstances that brought them to that corner — and you are saying, with your five-rand coin or your tap of a card: I see you. And I think your labour is worth paying for.

That is not a small thing. In a city that has perfected the art of the beautiful surface, it is a radical act.

Creator: ASHRAF HENDRICKS

A note for visitors

If you are visiting Cape Town — and if you are reading this, there is a good chance you either are, or are planning to be — I want to speak to you directly.

You will see Big Issue vendors. They are a presence across the city: at the V&A Waterfront, in the Gardens neighbourhood, along the Sea Point promenade, outside coffee shops in De Waterkant and Kloof Street. They wear branded bibs. They will almost always greet you before you greet them.

The instinct, for many tourists, is to walk past. Not out of unkindness — but out of uncertainty, or habit, or the particular awkwardness that can arise when wealth and poverty share a pavement in a country with South Africa's history.

I am asking you to resist that instinct.

Buy a copy. It costs less than your flat white. Sit somewhere beautiful — and Cape Town will oblige you with a view — and read it. You will find stories inside that no hotel concierge will recommend and no travel itinerary will include. You will find the city that exists beneath the postcard. And you will have put money, directly and immediately, into the hands of someone who needed it and earned it.

Why I write for The Big Issue

I could write for many publications. I choose The Big Issue because the act of writing for it is, itself, a form of the argument I am making.

The Architecture of Belonging is a series about who gets to be included — in cities, in spaces, in stories, in the imagination of the people who build and run and market the places we call home. The Big Issue is, in its very structure, an answer to that question. It includes people who have been excluded. It puts their faces on a cover and their stories between two covers and asks the city to pay attention.

I am proud to be part of that.

Stop. Buy a copy. Stay a moment. It will be worth it.

The Big Issue SA is available from vendors across Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Durban.→ bigissue.org.za

The Architecture of Belonging by Tarryn Tomlinson is published across twelve issues of The Big Issue South Africa.