Joburg cannot be a lost cause
· Citizen
It’s easy to become despondent about Johannesburg. There’s plenty of negative reporting, most of it wholly justified but in even sharper focus because of the upcoming local government elections.
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There’s also the lived experience of perennial water leaks that go unattended for weeks, the haphazard dustbin collection, the perpetual broken traffic lights at critical intersections, the potholes…
Taken together, it’s a self-fulfilling loop of doom and more gloom and yet, if you can take a step back and see the bigger picture, you can change your perspective.
A trip to the incredible multiple exhibitions at Constitution Hill is a great start, if only for the fact that it shows how far we have come and, perhaps more importantly for those hellbent on fetishising our past, how dysfunctional this city has always been.
Two wholly contradictory things can be true at once; Johannesburg is a basket case but it is still the financial capital of Africa.
It can be saved. It’s too big to be allowed to fail.
The rot’s too deep to turn this sinking super tanker around.
All of these are true to those who utter them and yet, when you wander through Constitution Hill, whether it’s the fort that Paul Kruger, the original rent-seeking politician, ordered be converted from the Johannesburg jail that he had built to lock up the uitlanders, or the brutality wrought by the apartheid regime in Number 4, or the inhumanity and sexism perpetrated by female warders on female prisoners in the women’s jail, you realise that the doomsday clock has always been between 10 to and three minutes to 12 in Joburg.
And yet, somehow, we pull through.
We didn’t have what Rwanda had, although the world had every right to expect us to descend into a bloody racial holocaust.
The hop-on, hop-off bus that meanders from suburbs like the unbelievably privileged Houghton and Saxonwold to the sights, sounds and smells of the inner city and then the ersatz Disney World reimagining of the struggle at the Apartheid Museum, gives a vitally important glimpse of the scope and scale of a city that far too many of us take for granted.
We should all become tourists in our own city.
We are the South African origin story, even if it feels like a dystopian thriller sometimes, and because of that, we have it hardwired in our DNA to survive and even thrive.