I’ve been told that Johannesburg has been built, knocked down, and rebuilt five times since it was founded somewhere around 1886.
Not that each wave of construction and destruction happened all at once. It was a question of “a little bit here, a little bit there”, and eventually, out of an unpromising and decidedly motley collection of tin and timber shacks, there stood a city of brick and mortar, and later on, a high-profile city of steel and concrete.
Cities being what they are, Johannesburg’s citizens were never satisfied with what they had, so they would nibble away here and nibble away there until one landmark after another disappeared, and something else rose up to fill its place.
On the few occasions I can remember coming into downtown Johannesburg as a boy (ag, shame), I recall a daunting impression of high buildings lining furiously busy caverns of tarred roads. And in between the buildings there was frequently a gaping hole in which a new monstrosity was in the process of being constructed. Scaffolding reached precariously up into the sky, and zigzagging upwards with the scaffolding stood ranks of black men throwing bricks to each other, one floor at a time, until the first brick had reached an incredible height by the sheer muscle power of a string of sinewy arms, and could be planted in cement at the top of the heap — to be followed in a steady rhythm by one brick after another, right up until it was time for the sun to set.
All that up and down of steel and gristle — for what? Heaven knows. But for better or for worse, this is the city in which we live and love and work and play and die.
Five complete makeovers is a lot for one metropolis to live through in just over 100 years. But that’s the nature of Johannesburg. Nothing is here to stay — so don’t fall in love with the place, the way you would fall in love with Paris or Rome or Dar es Salaam. You’ll only be disappointed
I am sure that few of the buildings I saw going up in the 1950s were still there when I returned in the 1990s. But there are a couple of landmarks that were embedded in my memory, or lived in the subliminal profile of my home town that I carried in my head, and that still stand.
One is the semi-detached matchbox we inhabited in Phumolong, now occupied by my aunt.
The other is the old Fort Prison in Hillbrow.
The Fort is probably the oldest surviving part of the constantly changing city of Johannesburg. The main building was constructed in 1892 as a prison, since the city was already full of tsotsis of all stripes, sexes and colours.
During the run-up to the Anglo-Boer War, earth ramparts were thrown up around it to turn it into a fortification — ostensibly to protect the city (at that time a bastion of the Boer Republic) from the Brits, but in reality to put the Boers in a position to give them hell by cannon fire from the commanding heights of Hillbrow in the event of a British attack.
The Brits took the city anyway, and the Fort along with it, where they incarcerated or executed many of the Boer soldiers they had caught.
After the end of that war the Fort became a jail once more, and remained that way until it was closed down in 1982.
Between those dates the Fort housed an extraordinary cross- section of South African society — although its jailers certainly had no idea that they were the custodians of a growing termite hill that could in later years be dissected to give the most remarkable profile of the social and political to-ings and fro-ings of the city over most of the 20th century.
Apart from its roster of star prisoners (Boer general Christian de Wet, Indian-born pacifist Mahatma Gandhi, cheerful murderess Daisy de Melker, revolutionaries Walter Sisulu, Nelson Mandela, Bram Fischer, Vesta Smith and many others) the Fort became an unwelcome home-from-home for tens of thousands of ordinary and extraordinary locals and foreigners caught up in the apartheid web while trying to mind their own business.
It was also, of course, a holiday home for thousands of genuine villains who made a living by preying on their fellow human beings on the streets of the city, and were happily able to continue their nefarious activities on the inside.
The Fort was Johannesburg in microcosm, caught in amber as the rest of the city changed around it. As such it deserves its place as one of South Africa’s true heritage sites.
But what do we mean by a heritage site? The Fort would probably have been demolished, left to decay, or turned, incongruously, into a luxury hotel if it had not been for the intervention of the judges of the Constitutional Court, who chose the highly symbolic ground on which the Fort and its associated buildings are situated as the site for the new, enlightened architecture of the court.
But in that very act, the heritage that the Fort stands for began to be compromised. Some of the most symbolic buildings have already been knocked down, and plans are rapidly unfolding to transform some of the remaining buildings so that they can serve a purpose more suited to the politically correct times in which we live — the Gender Commission housed in two new buildings that will somewhat obscure the surprisingly elegant architecture of the Women’s Prison, for example.
And there are even plans to eat into the historic earth ramparts of the Fort itself to provide the public with easier access to the scenic views of Johannesburg that can be had from their summit — the torture chamber transformed into a picnic site.
And yet the collective memory contained within the walls of the Fort is almost the only fixed point that we have in Johannesburg’s ever-changing compass. Shouldn’t we be trying a little harder to keep that fragile straw of memory intact?
John Matshikiza has been a consultant on the Constitution Hill development project
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