BOOK SA – Magazine

The updated edition of From Joburg to Jozi contains over 50 pieces of writing on Johannesburg, selected and edited by Dinner with Mugabe’s Heidi Holland and The Wonga Coup’s Adam Roberts. All royalties from the sale of the book go to Cotlands, for the benefit of children with HIV and AIDS.

Here’s a take on Jozi – or is that Joburg? – from Christopher Hope:

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On the airport road into town two BMW convertibles neck and neck, hoods down, came barrelling past and I swear one driver had a cellphone in his ear. The Jo’burg earring. The boys were having fun. Dark and often fatal fun. Jo’burg fun. The word is ‘dicing’. It catches that curious blend of cockiness, aggression and fatalism one might call Jo’burg noir. So you get wiped out on the motorway – or playing the slots. But if you’re going to go – may as well stay in the fast lane. It’s all dicing, anyway. Isn’t it, hey? So fuck you – arsehole! Suck my exhaust.

Welcome to Jo’burg – have a nice day.

On the side of the airport road is the familiar, fearsome clutter. Some child-giant got tired of his toys and has thrown them out of his cot. Low-browed office parks, pompous warehouses, and a clenched fist of houses sphincter-tight behind beautiful walls, Jo’burg’s trademark, the anal-retentive suburb. And then the brand new architecture of liberation – the Romano-kitsch casino, a thousand slot machines wrapped around a shopping mall.

But then what do you expect? This is a town that thought mine dumps were pretty, that had a soft spot for slimes dams, and thanked God he had given it a reef of gold beneath its feet. The mine dumps are shrinking. Years ago they hung around town like drunks on day release from the detox clinic. The sandy equivalents of meths drinkers in Joubert Park. Scrubby grass like fierce unshaven stubble grew over their yellow faces. Thing was – you liked them, you blushed a bit when visitors said ‘what do you do with them?’

Some bright spark took one of these sandcastles, sheered off its head and planted a drive-in movie on the crest. Great stuff. Someone had an even better idea. What about tearing down the dumps and taking them to the cleaners all over again, for the pinpoints of gold they didn’t give up first time round?

Very Jo’burg.

I dropped down the off-ramp into a place called Motortown, into the grid of streets adorned with the names of this city’s singular rip-off merchants, its energetic scoundrels, its gold-diggers who built a brothel and a bourse, and never could tell the difference. Not then, not now, not ever – Loveday, Harrison, Rissik and Jeppe . . . Once-upon-a-time Jo’burg preserved in the poetry of their names.

The headlines roped to the lamp-posts sing the old dark songs – golden city blues –

Ten Shot Dead in Bed

Pregnant Housewife’s Poisoned Present

School Hall Stolen

Here is the Carlton Centre. To build it they had to excavate a hole, and not just any hole, the hole was the biggest, best urban hole anywhere in Africa. Nowhere in the southern hemisphere was there a hole to touch it – and people came from all over the place just to look at the hole. No one anywhere, said the people of Jo’burg, dug better holes or dug them faster, or deeper, or sunk more money into them. The Carlton hole was big enough to swallow the Empire State Building (if melted down). It did no good wondering aloud how you’d melt down the Empire State. Or why? The Carlton sneered at such questions; fifteen acres of hole was going to contain shops, restaurants, pavement cafés, movie houses and an ice-rink. On top of the hole was the tower – it was going to be fifty storeys high, it was going to be the tallest tower in Africa. And next to the tower, its rich twin would be the best luxury hotel in creation. And on top of the tower there would be an observation room that would allow you to look thirty miles into the distance. On a really clear day you might see as far as Pretoria.

The accomplices of the mining house tycoons were the New York architects Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, who seemed to have risen to the challenge of designing – even by the record standards of the 1960s – one of the most brutally ugly buildings on the planet. And how we loved it! We had the deepest hole, tallest tower, richest hotel in the country – it was very, very Jo’burg. Soon we were talking in awe of its room prices, its silver cutlery. Its sheer hulking brutal Jo’burg pizzazz, its gold-plated nerve. And the skating was fine.

We boasted about the Carlton – it was said to be the greatest concrete erection in the world – another triumph attributed to those razzle-dazzle boys who ran the town. Their collective names were spoken in that peculiar reverent drawl that is Jo’burg at prayer, whenever money, gold, big bucks, moolah is mentioned – creators of all that was good and profitable, they turned bare veld into bullion, the Godlings of Hollard Street who were collectively worshipped as the Mahninghowzez . . . See how the knee bends, the head bows at the magical invocation of true, ingot-dripping, bullion-loaded dazzle. And why not? Since buying shares or salting a gold mine is as close as most Jo’burgers ever came to a truly religious experience.

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• From Joburg to Jozi is published by Penguin
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Book details

• From Joburg to Jozi: Stories About Africa’s Infamous City edited by Heidi Holland, Adam Roberts
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  EAN: 9780143026280
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