Can we still save a once vibrant City of Joburg?
This former place of hope, opportunities, possibilities and dreams lies fallow, its streets scenes of crime and grime
[An earlier essay I penned as edited and published in today’s City Press]
In what could make the late 1980s seem like ancient times, I used to live in Yeoville and Joubert Park.
While in Joubert Park, and during the height of the political uprisings that were sweeping the country, I occupied an apartment in Lorna Court, a building situated at the corner of Twist and Wolmarans streets. This smallish, unimposing residential apartment building was one of the many iconic and prized properties nestled across the City of Gold.
Like Brooklyn is to New York, there was a time when Hillbrow represented a melting pot of abundance in Johannesburg. The area heralded hope, opportunities and dreams for a brighter future, especially for motley crews of black professionals and known miscreants in our midst.
This was despite the apartheid government’s notoriety for its use of a plethora of tools, including rolling states of emergency, in an attempt to exert complete control over black people.
Let me resist the politics of the times for a moment while I take a short journey with my inkhorn to reminisce about the social and business scenes of that wonderful interregnum.
For a while, Hillbrow and its surrounding areas were considered ideal destinations for upwardly mobile black people. The ensuing gentrification fuelled a rise in demand for housing units and a corresponding decrease in housing affordability.
Deliberate urban planning, dogged determination and resourcefulness by, arguably, the early architects of the “new South Africa” fast-tracked the migration of the emerging black middle class into the bustling city.
The growth of a black middle class in Johannesburg followed a plan hatched by white corporate South Africa and business barons with a nod from the apartheid regime to ostensibly protect the existing socioeconomic system, which benefited white people.
“Progressive” companies such as Anglo American, JCI, SA Breweries, Unilever and Nampak on the one hand, and Bantustan governments on the other hand coalesced to provide tertiary education funding and employment pathways to a growing legion of young black people.
Entrepreneurial opportunities and an enabling environment were also created for those who opted to join the ranks of the emerging black middle class.
The establishment of the Small Business Development Corporation (SBDC), the forerunner to Business Partners by Anton Rupert, in partnership with the apartheid government, played a massive role in the emergence of black manufacturers located in various SBDC hives.
For exuberant young black adults, weekend nightlife entailed being able to move from one’s apartment to nightclubs across the Pretoria, Witwatersrand and Vaal area.
If you lived in downtown Johannesburg, Alex Hair and Dr Fingertips beauty and hair salons made for obligatory vanity stops before setting off to paint the town red.
The 24-hour Fontana Chicken on Smit Street in Hillbrow would provide pit stops for hungry revellers and families alike. Fontana’s famous rotisserie chicken and meat pies are the stuff of which legends, and memories, were made.
This was decades before Woolworths’ now-famous rotisserie was even a culinary concept – never mind an item worthy of an exuberant government minister’s ban during a pandemic!
Lucky Koele’s Mi-Vami restaurant located in Highpoint, Prince Nkosi’s Carlucious in Village Walk and the world-famous Mamma’s Pizzeria joint on Rockey Street in Yeoville were some of the stomping grounds and cultural hubs for culinary exploits and mirthful interactions.
On those days when a little intimacy and indulgence was required, nothing beat Squires Loft or The Three Ships restaurant at the Carlton Hotel.
Even Wimpy or Mike’s Kitchen on President Street did the trick. That would usually be followed by catching a movie across the street at the Ster-Kinekor on Smal Street.
Johannesburg lyk op verskillende tye van die dag anders. Foto: Derrich Gardner
There are too many jocund anecdotes, though a few beg sharing. Like that time when a well-heeled friend who, to the bemusement of patrons at Wimpy on Smal Street, walked in while talking on his rare portable Siemens C2 mobile car telephone, an ancestor of the modern-day cellphone.
According to TechCentral magazine, these contraptions “weighed almost 5kg, measured the size of a briefcase and cost R75 000 in today’s money”. Despite its monstrosity, the novelty of my friend’s device made my Alcatel radio pager, proudly hitched to my waist, look silly.
Or the time when a then newly qualified medical doctor friend, clad only in his birthday suit and fearing for his dear life, was forced to find refuge on a window ledge of an apartment in Century Plaza (diagonally opposite Lorna Court) after the owner of the flat, a known criminal and early-days blesser, unexpectedly returned from an abandoned cross-border trip while my friend was putting on his greens. But I digress.
Of course we had our fair share of petty crime and confidence tricksters. But that pales in significance when compared with the brazen daylight criminality in the city today.
It is fair to say that life in Johannesburg today is far from what seems like the magical realism of a few decades past.
The decay and abandonment of Jozi started gradually, and then it happened suddenly.
I drove past a dilapidated Lorna Court a few months ago with my visibly uneasy daughter in tow after running some errands in downtown Johannesburg.
I reminisced about how things use to be in Jozi in general and the Hillbrow-Yeoville-Berea precinct in particular. I didn’t realise that, meanwhile, tiny waterworks were forming in the corner of my left eye until my daughter offered me something to wipe them off with.
Until the mid 1990s, Lorna Court and many other blocks of residential apartments encapsulated Jozi’s potential to become the next Manhattan.
They now stand for many as a symbol of the City of Gold’s rapid decline. Most are now decaying, uninhabited or even uninhabitable symbols of dilapidated and condemned architecture in our so-called world-class African city.
The fact that some of the once-iconic buildings such as the Rissik Street Post Office, the Carlton Hotel and Lorna Court are still standing is due mostly to some of them being declared heritage sites that can’t be demolished without obtaining a special permit first.
Many buildings have been hijacked and converted into dens of criminal activity. Parking spaces that were once reserved for shiny American and German marques in the abandoned Johannesburg Sun, the Diplomat Motel and Carlton Hotel lie fallow as parts of some of these structures continue to decay.
The fires that razed the flagship Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital (formerly Johannesburg General Hospital) and the Bank of Lisbon building, and the gutted and inoperable rail network infrastructure and preventable losses have seemingly conspired to expose the gross maladministration by, and the ineptitude of, successive ANC administrations in the city.
In fact, government-owned buildings have become hallmarks of suboptimal maintenance and neglect, and egregious noncompliance with the requirements of the Occupational Health and Safety Act.
With the freight rail transport system teetering on the brink of collapse, reliance on public roads to support supply chains has added to the maintenance burden and pressure on a fast-shrinking tax base.
Empty Johannesburg streets during lockdown. Picture: Rosetta Msimango
It is disheartening that public infrastructure that was inherited from the apartheid government, including the recently torched300-plus-year-old National Assembly in Parliament in Cape Town, have fallen into such abject neglect and misuse.
As hordes of black people moved into the city during the 1990s, an increasing number of white people, who constituted the majority of residents in these areas, moved out. The rush to flee the city, particularly ahead of the 1994 elections, led to a plethora of suburban offices and residential developments sprouting up, first northwards and later north-westwards.
A few years ago, a learned friend shared an anecdote of a Johannesburg High Court judge who was reportedly mugged in broad daylight while driving out of the city from work.
When said judge was asked why he didn’t lay a criminal complaint, a telling shoulder shrug was his retort.
To say that the once-glittering City of Gold is in an complete state of disrepair would be an understatement. The current state of Jozi is a microcosm of rural towns and cities across the country.
The grime and scourge of violent crime in Johannesburg, though seemingly intractable, is an albatross around the neck of the city’s renewal project, and requires absolute political will and sustained action. No single party can turn this once jewel of a city around.
There was a glimpse of hope for inner-city renewal during former mayor Parks Tau’s tenure. However, whatever gains were made have slowly but surely regressed. The criminal takeover and surrender of Jozi to political neglect is as good as complete.
Who will save Jozi? More pertinently, should we care? I certainly do.