It was the year Johannesburg turned 80. The official birthday of the declaration of the city as a city was Jazz on the Lake on September 7. Revellers were reminded that they were not there merely to listen to guitarist Jimmy Dludlu and singer Zamajobe Sithole, but to “reconnect with the story of amazing growth”. It was an important milestone in a collective history.
A grainy old photograph of the declaration of Jo’burg’s formal city status in 1928, on September 5, appeared on the flyer for Jazz on the Lake. It showed the multitudes in that far-off time crowded on the steps of City Hall, on roofs and up lampposts. The entertainment that day consisted of five bands and a choir doing an especially composed song called The Musical Shout. The festivities went on for six days.
The annual Jazz on the Lake celebration lasts for one day only, yet it has become a celebration with a dual purpose. On that day in early spring tens of thousands of blacks celebrate their ownership of a park set in the heart of upmarket suburbia. It is also a celebration of the city’s ability to contain crowds through the use of effective policing, with barricades closing off five suburbs to traffic, an onslaught of random pedestrian searches (for weapons and drink) and surveillance from helicopters. It’s not jazz, it’s war — the use of maximum intervention resulting in minimum incidents is something the cops are particularly proud of.
A recent book written by a sociology professor from New York’s Binghamton University explores Johannesburg’s insecurity. Martin J Murray’s Taming the Disorderly City (UCT Press) tells the dismal story of Johannesburg’s failure to integrate after apartheid.
The writer begins by comparing the chaotic inner-city streets with a scene from Ridley Scott’s science fiction movie Blade Runner, set in rundown Los Angeles in 2019. He goes on to describe a place where “affluent urban residents who have unencumbered access to all the city has to offer are able to enjoy the benefits of full citizenship [while] those impoverished urban dwellers with their restricted access to the advantages of city living are left with the hollow rights of empty citizenship”.
Murray foresees a city of citizens and “anti-citizens”, the former dashing, under heavy guard, down fortified highways from mall to mall where only the privileged will have access to the goodies inside.
Divided between “tourists” and “vagabonds”, there will be (and are already) citadel office blocks, gated residential communities and isolated malls owned and governed by large-scale property concerns, the rules for inclusion of which will no doubt clash with the right to access of ordinary citizens.
The villain Murray reminds us again and again is real estate capitalism in cahoots with municipal authorities that have “effectively criminalised the urban poor by treating the structural problems that arise from unemployment and poverty as matters of law enforcing”.
This is not the way city officials would like to have the place or themselves portrayed.
The latest edition of a series of souvenir hardback books called Joburg! (Affinity Publishing in association with the city’s public liaison department) arrived last week and, ironically, in all of its 330 pages there is scant mention of policing or private security. Rather, the book is devoted to the dozens of corporate and community partnerships that now characterise development in the city. Murray approaches these partnerships with cautious optimism, understanding that big business doesn’t invest where there is no chance of profit.
By necessity, though, Joburg! Towards 2010 tells a story of all-out optimism. This is the face of the “World-class African city”, a project-driven landscape borrowing the best ideas from all societies — we have the upcoming Rea Vaya! rapid transit project from Bogotá, Columbia, Gautrain tunnel-boring technology imported from Germany, skills development in the tourism industry and grand contracts awarded to outsiders for the supply of electricity.
The book goes well with what must be the best city guide produced on Johannesburg. Editor Nechama Brodie’s The Joburg Book (Pan Macmillan and Sharp Sharp) is primarily a triumph of picture research (conducted in the main by Kathy Brookes, former curator of images at Museum Africa).
Brodie deals with all aspects of the changing landscape, quoting diverse sources on history and popular culture (such as journalist Bongani Madondo on Brenda Fassie and urban geographer Keith Beavon on the demise of the inner city).
The Joburg Book The Joburg Book is also a triumph of design (by Adele Sherlock and the renowned Orange Juice studio), its handmade look hinting that Johannesburg’s story is one of creative improvisation. Its motif is a specially commissioned shweshwe fabric design with a mining headgear that the makers are hoping to put into production. At the media launch, Johannesburg Development Agency head Lael Bethlehem said her office would be giving Brodie’s book to their clients as Christmas gifts. So it has official sanction.
Finally, Johannesburg is also included in a mammoth study of cities in development titled The Endless City (Phaidon), based on a project called The Urban Age launched by the London School of Economics with Deutsche Bank.
Lindsay Bremner’s essay on the city concludes that, unlike Rem Koolhaas’s view of Lagos as a place with a chaotic, terrifying future, experts examining Johannesburg should resist identifying it as “outside-of-the-modern”. In looking for security solutions it is up to the privileged, then, to decide if the city’s mixed-use Euro-ambitious developments, such as Montecasino and Melrose Arch, are plain vulgar or offer good living. Either way, to Bremner, we are not on our way to a future resembling Blade Runner at all.
One thing we know, though, is that the city has taken us on a terrifying 80-year journey. It was once called “The Peter Pan of Cities”, referring to a little white boy who refused to grow up. Johannesburg will never be seen that way again.