Johannesburg

Rich Jozi, poor Jozi

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Riding in an Uber car on modern four-lane freeways from Johannesburg’s airport to our Airbnb flat, both Steve and I reeled from the culture shock. After the squalor of Kampala and the poverty in rural Uganda (and everywhere in Zimbabwe), what we saw of the South African megalopolis reminded us of LA. Except maybe glossier and more prosperous.

The Airbnb turned out to be the best I’ve ever booked.

It had two bedrooms, two baths, a washer/dryer, complementary granola and milk, and impeccable design and decor. All for $62 a night.

After settling into it, we walked past fancy commercial buildings and apartments to an Italian restaurant recommended by our Airbnb host. We ate delicious pasta (accompanied by a good pinotage wine and yummy ice cream.)

I felt like I was in a dream. I’d expected the city to be worse than when we whizzed through it in 2010. Instead it seemed better.

Before that trip 13 years ago (our first to sub-Saharan Africa), Steve had declared Joburg was so dangerous he never wanted to go there. He had relented but we’d only stayed for two nights, and what we saw suggested crime indeed was nightmarish. More recently we’d read about daily power outages (“load-sharing”) and the battered economy. Some of the white South Africans we met last year cruising in Turkey seemed tensely, almost desperately, eager to evacuate.

Yet the neighborhood we stayed in this time, Rosebank, appeared to be an order of magnitude posher than La Jolla. A multiracial mix of pedestrians strolled its tree-lined streets alongside us (at least during the day).

The jacarandas had just bloomed. They’re magnificent.

We dined at a top-notch restaurant on the top floor of this building.

The view of the sunset from the bar was as delightful as the food.

The next day we went back to visit a ground-floor gallery that a New York Times reporter recently praised as the best in the city.

This past Tuesday (10/17), we took the impressive Gautrain (subway) one stop north of Rosebank to the even fancier Sandton area.

A short walk from the station took us to Nelson Mandela Square.

It’s both a tribute to South Africa’s great leader and former president…

…as well as a luxe indoor shopping mall.

It connects to the near-legendary Sandton City, a shopping Mecca so over-the-top all we could compare it to were some malls in Las Vegas or Dubai.

We were looking down here from the sushi joint where we had lunch to the “food court” below.

All this was interesting, but it didn’t make either of us yearn to move to Jozi (the city’s more affectionate nickname). Luxury window-shopping might be entertaining for an hour or two, but the ubiquitous security cameras and guards and electrified fencing make it clear almost everyone here feels they have to protect themselves from local bad guys.

The protection around the local Catholic Church combined old-fashioned metal spikes with the electrified fencing.

That’s also the case in Hillbrow and Berea, but I felt much more alive and engaged throughout our three-hour excursion there. My old friend Megan and her husband Andrew were in Jozi a few months ago, and they had taken and loved the tour organized by an 11-year-old nonprofit called Dlala Nje. I looked at the organization’s website and signed Steve and me up for an outing offered on the day after we flew in from Victoria Falls. From Rosebank, we took an Uber, which is super-cheap and (along with Bolt) works superbly throughout the city. Our black driver looked dubious as we approached our destination.

“What are you guys doing here?” he asked, concerned.

We told him we were there for a walking tour, and he seemed dumbfounded. “Are you sure you want me to let you out here?” he pressed when we reached the Ponte City tower. We told him it was okay.

And it was — delightfully! I hadn’t realized it, but not that long ago, residents considered Hillbrow and the adjoining Berea neighborhood to be the scariest communities in the city. That hadn’t always been the case. Once upon a time (circa 1970), the area was an enclave of the white elite, the most elegant part of town. But in the late 1980s, as the apartheid system began to crumble, it became a magnet for artists where people of different races ignored the rules and interacted. Trevor Noah’s Swiss father and Khosa mother played out their relationship (and conceived their famous son) in an apartment in the neighborhood. The white powers-that-were found this intolerable and retaliated by cutting off all city services, including police protection and maintenance. White property owners fled to areas like Rosebank and Sandton, and Hillbrow degenerated. Squatter landlords took over some of the buildings, charging rent to folks desperate for shelter. Brutal, often violent muggings became commonplace. Hillbrow’s once-posh landmark, the cylindrical 50-plus-story Ponte City tower, filled with thousands of tenants willing to live without water or electricity. They tossed their trash into the central light well. At one point, the stinking pile reached the 14th story.

Two charming young men, Delight and Alvaro, guided our group of five (a pair of Chinese newlyweds from Sydney, a solo Japanese woman named Kimi, Steve, and me). The young South Africans acknowledged that in the late 90s and early 2000s, the area was dangerous. But things had improved, they insisted. We still needed to be on guard against phone-snatchers and pickpockets. But if we looked confident and stuck with them, we’d be fine.

Some of the streets we walked through reminded Steve and me of the bad parts of New York City during its most blighted years, or sections of the west side of Chicago in our youth: garbage strewn all over the broken pavement, hungry young men lurking like jackals. Delight warned us not to take any photos as we passed once-beautiful buildings that had been stripped of all their windows and metal innards by addicts who sold the material to buy cheap, bizarre heroin mixtures the likes of which I’d never heard.

But in the very next block, the change was startling. I didn’t see as much as a gum wrapper on the well-kept sidewalks. A little grocery store stood on one corner, and we passed women who looked like middle-class housewives.

Delight explained that a Cape Town-based property developer named Ithemba had made a deal with the city government to take over several of the highjacked buildings, renovate them, and rent them out. (The developers still didn’t own the buildings, but it was clear to everyone their original owners could never reclaim them because of the back taxes they would owe.) Ithemba hires private contractors to clean and police the streets. Rents in their buildings are higher than the squatter landlords had been charging their tenants. But the city was now getting some revenue, neighboring buildings also were being upgraded, and a piece of the urban jungle was again a decent place to live.

Along Hillbrow’s main commercial street, Delight pointed out a one-time athletic club that turned into a strip club and brothel decades ago.

The brothel occupied all the upper stories. Another building three times its size was also a brothel. Although prostitution is illegal, Delight said the cops turn a blind eye (for a price).

He stopped at the community’s version of eBay.

People seeking housing post notices here. This one was from a woman wanting to rent her bed while she wasn’t occupying it.

The energy and enterprise on the streets were palpable.

We wound up where we’d started — back at the Ponte City tower.

It’s been renovated too, and if not the gleaming showcase it once was, all the garbage has been cleared out. Once again it’s a decent place to live.

This is the view from the 51st floor, looking down the core of the building.
We also went into the basement, from which all that garbage has been cleared.
You can get an apartment these days for about $160 a month,

It didn’t tempt me to move there any more than Sandton’s luxury condos did. Still, for all South Africa’s problems, Hillbrow made me feel more optimistic about the future.

Our Joburg Insider tour

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Friday morning, February 26
The most interesting site from the tallest building in Africa, for my money, are the saffron-yellow hillsides visible in so many directions. They’re just a mile or two from downtown Johannesburg, which is where the tallest building, the Carlton Center, is located. But they’re not really hills but rather the tailings from the gold mines that put this city on the map 125 years ago or so. Danie Pretorius, the private guide we’d hired to show us around on our first afternoon in South Africa, says the government has ordained that the mine remains be restored to a natural appearance by 2012. He added that modern technology now allows for enough gold and uranium to be extracted from this one-time refuse so that the proceeds will pay for the restoration. But for the moment, they remain an exotic reminder of Joburg’s lustrous underpinnings.

When I first heard that Danie was going to take us to the top of the tallest building in Africa, I wondered if it was a good use of our time. When our plane had landed at 8:40 a.m., low-lying rain clouds were drenching the city. But the rain eased up by the time we met Danie. He drove us in his Suburu downtown, and we quickly realized what a good choice that was. Back in the 1980s, the center of Joburg was a cosmopolitan cluster of highrises from which the richest city in the richest country in Africa conducted business. According to Danie, you could walk anywhere, even after dark, and be free from crime or fear of it. But after apartheid ended in 1993, the area became the epicenter of the shocking criminal violence that exploded when Zulus and Xhosas battled for control of the new political regime. Brutal murders, terrorist bombings, and other atrocities quickly drove the corporations to flee to the suburbs. And even though the intertribal warfare has ended, the buildings for the most part remain vacant.

This is all Danie’s version of events, of course. But when we parked in the Carlton Center (in a handicapped space, for which Danie tipped the parking attendant), the scene there seemed to confirm his words. Shoppers, almost universally black, strolled around a bustling street-level shopping mall, but when we took an elevator to the observation deck on the 50th level, it was shockingly empty, except for us and one other pair of white tourists (and their guide). In every direction, Danie pointed out landmark buildings that had failed to find replacement tenants.

Despite that, the cityscape, viewed both from above and from ground level when we returned to our car and drove around, surprised me. It was shabby and filled with black people, but it reminded me much more of Detroit or Cincinnati than Cairo or Shanghai. Danie pointed out the enclaves, such as the neighborhood next to the university, that he didn’t feel safe entering at any time. Once it was a trendy student center, but now it’s a haven for violent and drug-dealing Nigerians. But for the most part, presuming one acted sensibly, visitors were fine there, he assured us.

Danie’s a white guy, I should mention, probably in his late 50s. His great, great, great-grandfather, Henries Pretorius, was one of the founding fathers of South Africa — the man after whom the capital, Pretoria, was named. Henries’s descendants became farmers and Danie continued that tradition (growing corn, raising some cattle and chickens, and dabbling in other crops) until the new South African government decided that he and some of his neighboring farmers needed to sell their land. They fought this edict in court for 9 years, but finally lost, and they received about 40-45% of the fair-market value (as Danie reckoned it). Yet he seemed appreciative things hadn’t turned out worse, as they had for the farmers in neighboring Zimbabwe (whose land was simply stolen outright). Searching for a new career, he’d trained for certification as a tour guide, and has run a tour business in the seven years since.

Given that history, Steve and I were fascinated by his empathy for what black South Africans had endured under apartheid and his optimism about the country’s future. (He thinks once Mugabe leaves power in Zimbabwe and things improve there, most of the Zimbabwean refugees who are so straining South Africa’s social networks will leave and South Africa will prosper, as it helps to rebuild its neighbors.) He seemed relaxed and full of good will as he took us into Soweto, the black township of more than 3 million people that was the flashpoint that eventually brought about the end of apartheid. But he also readily recalled his reaction back in 1976 when the South African police opened fire on a crowd of schoolchildren there, killing dozens of them. Far off in the countryside, he and even his black farmworkers (or so he claimed) assumed the kids were criminals. They thought the police should have been even tougher, Danie said.

Head-spinning stories like this seem part of the warp and woof of this country. And they only intensified after we left Joburg the next morning, picked up our tiny Tata rental car at the airport, and drove out to the bush camp where we’re now esconsced.