On the savannah plains of Africa, there is perhaps no greater body of myths than those about the city, and none are more fanciful than those about Johannesburg, variously known out there as Jozi, Jubheki and Egoli. It is the ill fortune of Pretoria always to tag along in the shadow cast by mammoth Johannesburg, even though it is a city that could easily get all the attention if it were anywhere else in sub-Saharan Africa.
“I was told there is a helicopter that hovers over the N1. If you are going below 120kph, it airlifts you for slowing down traffic,” said one bemused Zimbabwean visitor. “I was told,” another chipped in, “that if anyone says to you ‘eita’, know that you are in real trouble.”
A Zimbabwean national, a PhD student at Wits, was woken from his reverie about making tons of money in Gauteng by his professor. “I am sure you have realised that the streets of Johannesburg are not paved with gold.”
As has been written about New York or the United States, opportunities are supposed to abound here more than anywhere else in the whole of Africa. Everybody comes with the hope of making a quick buck and going back home as the tycoon with ship-loads of money.
Makaya, a Zimbabwean student previously based in Botswana, was told that Jo’burg was the most dangerous city in the world. “Jozi is very rough,” his brother warned.
“I was given this horrible picture of this place. People carrying guns everywhere,” he said. When he came to Johannesburg in 2003, a taxi driver charged him R70 from Park Station to Wits university — a journey of less than 5km that would normally cost R30.
“Of course, I thought that was a lot of money for the short distance, but I could not argue. I was afraid,” he confessed.
When a friend asked him to accompany him to Hillbrow, he balked at the suggestion. “I told him I did not want to get killed.” When he eventually got used to being in the city he was surprised, when he went out one night, to see that there were people who actually went out at night.
In yet another instance, an immigrant from Malawi was at once dazzled by the fabled lights of Jozi and terrified of its guns. “I had heard about the guns and I saw them here. I have witnessed a number of armed robberies.”
Yet he found the malls, the roads, the tall buildings, all the glass and steel irresistibly fabulous. “It was more beautiful than I thought. I thought it was a little London,” he enthused.
A Kenyan national, who has been living in Johannesburg for almost a decade, went back to Nairobi for the December holidays. “Where is the gold I heard is to be found in Johannesburg,” one of his countrymen asked him in Nairobi over a drink.
When his cellphone rang, another helpfully suggested: “You can pick up your phone, this is not Johannesburg. You can speak on your phone, our thugs are not as dangerous as those in Johannesburg.”
Before he came to Jo’burg, it was the aura of Nelson Mandela that defined how South Africa was viewed by the outside world. “I knew about Mandela, the girls in the miniskirts and Soweto. I was excited to be coming here.”
The opportunities that are thought to abound in Gauteng are hopelessly tied to its notoriety as a den of all manner of vice.
“The folks at home are usually excited that you are coming to the city of gold but they are also fearful that there is a lot of drugs, alcohol abuse and crime,” said a colleague from the Eastern Cape.
Any body of myths is supported by real evidence, and I must confess that I, too, shared many of the myths. And most of my preconceptions were indeed myths.
But I have not found Gauteng to be any worse or any better than any other comparable place.