Into Africa
Trip Start
Jan 01, 2005
1
10
17
Trip End
Aug 05, 2005
Johannesburg,
South Africa
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
A typical northern suburb of Jo'burg is characterized by high walls and electrified wires to keep intruders out
Barbed Wire Fences
. Gates and guards are commonplace, as are razor wire and other conspicuous displays of security and protection. Driving around Jo'burg's nicer neighborhoods is not unlike driving through Beverly Hills, where it's possible to see the roofs of houses and to glimpse the upscale homes through iron gates. When Alex was last in Jo'burg for work in 2001, she was escorted at all times by armed bodyguards and was not allowed even to cross the street from her hotel to the mall. Fear of rape, murder, car-jacking and other violent crime has dominated the international view of the city. Today, especially in upper middle-class neighborhoods, it seems that, despite falling crime rates, fear still prevails, and it rare to see a home that is not surrounded by these extreme features.Picture of Home, Gate, etc.
Although the streets are quite clean and the adjoining commercial properties and public spaces seem well manicured, at many intersections there are hawkers selling newspapers, flowers, or even beach toys to earn money. There are also many people begging for food or money and, at night, prostitutes stand just off the street at a few of these locations. All hotels are guarded and gated, creating a distinctly compound-like feel.
However, we have the feeling that Jo'burg is changing
Electric fences- very common
. In the neighborhoods of Melville, Greenside, and Parkhurst, we walked freely on the streets, feeling only as uncomfortable as we would in the East Village of New York. Upscale cafes and restaurants, art galleries, bookstores, and furniture or antique shops form the core of the neighborhoods and seemed to invite a good cross-section of visitors. Although we've been warned about car-jacking and have been instructed to keep our doors locked, our windows shut but slightly cracked, as that makes them harder to shatter, and to always have an escape route planned while driving, we're slowly sensing that, in general, the paranoia is unwarranted. There are plenty of both white and black locals who drive very expensive cars, many convertibles, with their windows rolled down. Also, it is not uncommon to see women, children (both white and black), and families on the sidewalk during the day. However, while the wealthier suburbs seem to be pretty safe, we have not experienced the "no-go" zones that are comprised of the predominantly black and impoverished suburbs of Hillbrow and Yeoville. Jo'burg was founded as a mining town in the late 19th century after gold was found by prospectors. The city sits on top of rich gold deposits (I think it's something like 40% of the world's commercially viable gold deposits). However, because the ore is of low quality and is in deep veins, it takes a lot of labor to remove, process, and refine the ore into gold
For Sale- notice it comes with help...
. Currently, the yield is around 4-10oz per ton of ore. This low-grade nature of the ore and need for cheap labor, most often in the form of exploited blacks, combined with colonialism, were the roots of the racial oppression that would later become institutionalized in the mid 20th century in the policy of apartheid. Today 35% of South Africa's GDP is found in the Guateng (pronounced "hoh-tung") province in which Jo'burg and the gold deposits are located. Amazingly, this represents 10% of the whole of Africa's GDP.The city is still ringed by large mine tailing deposits as well as mine structures known as "headgear". There's a theme park and casino built on top of a reef of gold deposits, and some of the once cast-off ore piles are being reprocessed as technology makes extraction more efficient. Some are also being saved as historical sites, so that you can still get the famous view of Jo'burg as the city of modern glass skyscrapers rising from behind the slime piles. Much as mining created diversity in the western United States, bringing in immigrant workers to work the mines as well as provide services, mining in South Africa gave rise to a diverse society. We have been struck by the city's diverse population, which includes South Asians, Jews, English, Afrikaans, East Asian, and, of course, the majority of Blacks, which are comprised of a number of different ethnic groups. Jo'burg is truly an international city, although it seems that even over a decade after apartheid ended, there is a limited amount of true mixing between races: few interracial couples, etc.
It's probably no surprise, but Jo'burg has an image problem. Guidebooks devote few pages to the neighborhoods of the city and, compared with the national parks and Cape Town, few characterize Jo'burg as a worthwhile tourist destination
Malls, the center of the universe
. Only a few sights are recommended: the Apartheid museum, Soweto, the Gold Reef City casino and theme park, and the malls of Sandton. When we've asked Jo'burg locals for recommendations, they have suggested a trip to Cape Town, hundreds of miles away. We've found it hard to find anything beyond a few neighborhoods, but it seems this is the new city, one which is emerging from a post-apartheid depression and is still struggling to find an identity as a tourist destination. There's tremendous potential to continue to highlight the struggle for equality and history of the city, but it's far from a coherent theme in the tourist industry. In addition to the Apartheid Museum, which we also visited this week, Constitution Hill, the site of South Africa's highest court, emphasizes the idea that Jo'burg is a unique historical destination. Built on the site of an old Boer fort and one of the country's most notorious prisons, a modern African structure has been erected, functioning as both a museum focused on the injustices of the past and a symbol of hope for the future. The central aim of the grounds is to provide historical context for and justification to the new constitution. The document affords all South Africans fundamental political and socio-economic rights, such as education and healthcare. It's a remarkably progressive document which explicitly includes people of all races, classes, and sexual orientations
Selling in the street
. Our tour consisted of sites within the old jail and fort including the isolation chambers and rooms where both guilty and innocent prisoners were tortured and killed. We were shown where Mandela and his cohorts were held during the Treason Trials and learned how the rules of apartheid were applied to the prison society. We also saw the inside of the new constitutional court which contains many symbolic African elements and modern African art that recalls both tribal customs and the civil rights struggles of the past century. Interestingly, even the architecture of the site evokes both the old and new. Straddling a position on a high on a hill above Jo'burg, and between a neighborhood known as Braamfontein, home to "Wits", the highly respected University of Witswatersrand, and the impoverished neighborhood of Hillbrow, the court grounds are designed to unite the two areas and serve as a hopeful visual presence for the city.
Although we learned a great deal from the tour, the highlight of the experience was becoming friends with a South African family and, in particular, their 8-year old daughter, Basestane. A precocious child, she asked many frank questions about the HIV/AIDS crises, even quoting South Africa's health minister, and she seemed to really enjoy the details of the tour. Alex and Basestane became fast friends when, within moments of meeting, Basestane took Alex's hand, as she would for much of the afternoon. Basestane's brother, Bogane, was a bit more reserved because, as his mother, Flora, put it, "He's too proud and wants to be like his father... a typical Zulu man!" We also met a group of American volunteers from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who are conducting socio-epidemiological research and visiting Jo'burg for the week.
