What’s good to say about Johannesburg? I enquired as we drove through a storm towards our dinner. ‘Well,” said Kate, ‘there’s the weather, the weather and the weather.” But it had been raining for days, so the proposition seemed dubious at present. We drove on in silence, racking our brains. Steve mumbled something about the plethora of golf courses, but drew no takers. The Contessa mentioned street markets, where you can buy artefacts from all over Africa, but someone pointed out that many were fake. As we took our seats in a restaurant called the Smokestack, Steve made a case for South Africa’s excellent red wines. I could drink to that, but they’re made around Cape Town, so they don’t really count.
Stumped, we sipped our cabernet and looked around. The restaurant was brand new and very larney, as we say here, larney meaning fashionable and expensive. The decor was bare bricks and rough-hewn finishes —rather New York 1980s, with a clientele to match: slender young women in designer silks, fat-cats in suits and ponytails, and the races mixed in proportions comfortably familiar to Americans. A row of BMWs and Porsches was visible through the plate glass windows. Everyone had straight teeth, strong bodies and radiant self-confidence, and you could bet they all had servants to pick up behind them.
Ja, well, plus ça change and all that. Jo’burg has always been world-famous for its vulgar displays of greed and ostentation. I spent the first few decades of my life longing to see the place engulfed by the fires of revolution, but the struggle petered out into a mannered bourgeois transformation, and here we were, 10 years later, the loyal subjects of Mandela and Mbeki, and richer than ever. The stock market and the IT sector are running wild. The freeways are clogged with gleaming new chariots. Property prices are rising, while crime threatens to stabilise. For the lucky few, life is more perfect than ever. The same cannot be said for the rain-soaked beggars lining the streets outside, arms waving like sea anemones, trying to earn a few cents by guiding the next Mercedes into a parking bay.
When visitors from outside want to know why I live here, I always take them into the decaying heart of our old downtown, where Africa and the West come face to face across a narrow street called Diagonal. On one side there’s a little African apothecary where a certain K Naidoo does a roaring trade in healing and magical herbs, baboon skulls, lizard feet and tiny vials of crocodile fat. On the other, there’s a soaring edifice of blue glass and steel, designed by Helmut Jahn, the great avant-garde architect from Chicago.
I’ve been there a hundred times, and the juxtaposition has never ceased to amaze and elate me — witch doctors entering one building, accountants exiting the other, and mingling on the street between. It seems extraordinary, but it isn’t, because this is the nature of the city: at once an outpost of western ‘civilisation” and a point of entry into another reality, a parallel kingdom of African consciousness. Prophets dance around fires in the shadow of skyscrapers. Ancestral cattle sacrifices are conducted in suburban gardens. Mud huts and nuclear power stations occur in the same landscape. University professors smear lion fat on their faces as they set forth to settle faculty battles. In the cafés of Hillbrow, exiles from 30 African nations gather to plot coups and comebacks in undertones.
Which is not to say that all Africans are refugees or mystics. The city teems with black merchant bankers and nuclear physicists, black rugby players, black teenagers in the uniforms of colonial Etons called Saint this or King that, speaking English with the same plummy accents as their white classmates, and subscribing to identical values.
If it is true, as Buddhist sages maintain, that materialism coarsens the spirit and that life itself is an illusion, Jo’burg is a fine place to pursue enlightenment. Theft is so common that it’s hardly worth mentioning. Everyone knows someone who was murdered. You either allow the danger to poison your psyche and deaden your soul, or you learn to be brave, and laugh at the prospect of your own annihilation. It’s not necessarily kin to wisdom, but it’s a fine quality anyway. I love Jo’burgers. They’re loud and vulgar, and the worst of them will shoot you or embezzle your trust fund if you don’t watch your back, but they all have something the Boer poet Breyten Breytenbach called ‘heartspace”. It comes from living on adrenalin, which is, of course, the intoxicant that keeps us here, or draws us back if we try to escape.
And we all come back, eventually. My life here is full of returnees. An old poet who used to knock around Tangier with William Burroughs. An ex-terrorist who blew up a nuclear power station. A webmaster who abandoned a career in Silicon Valley. An ex-Oxford professor. Foreigners think we’re nuts, coming back to a doomed city on a damned continent, but there’s something you don’t understand: it’s boring where you are. You’ll probably live longer than us and acquire more possessions, but there’s no ferment in your societies, no excitement, no edge. Your newspapers are bland and your politics are inconsequential, so many storms in teacups. You want crises? We’ve got real ones — Aids, 40% unemployment, the highest rape and murder rates on the planet and a government that wants to put blacks in our national rugby team, just on principle. We’re talking stuff that’s really worth fighting about, with real fire in the belly. We’re talking about a country where life is an insane gamble that’ll end in blinding light or darkest disaster, and there’s absolutely no way of knowing which.
We yaw between terror and ecstasy. Every day is an adventure. The only constant is the weather, the African sun that beats down on our backs as we potter around in the garden, digging up rich African soils all red with oxides and squirmy with earthworms. Our tomatoes are fat and red. Our Swiss chard grows like trees. Towards evening, we walk the dogs up the old stone path to the crest of the ridge to watch the sun go down. Flights of
sacred ibis cross the sky. Lions roar in the zoo nearby. Police chase hijackers on freeways, sirens screaming. We’re in the wild heart of Jo’burg, and it’s a pretty good place to be.
From Jo’burg to Jozi: Sories about Africa’s Infamous City is edited by Heidi Holland and Adam Roberts, and published by Penguin. All royalties go to Cotlands, which helps children affected by Aids.