JOHANNESBURG JOZI! Gimme hope, Jo'anna Hope, Jo'anna Gimme hope, Jo'anna 'Fore the morning come. Eddy Grant sang these words in the 80 s an anthem against the injustices of the Apartheid State but the words ring true today as well. Johannesburg or JOZI as referred to by locals is undergoing a remarkable Renaissance, and is an utterly exciting place to spend at least a few days. Tourists who steer clear because of outdated fears of crime and chaos are really missing out on the heart of the new country a pulsing, cosmopolitan glimpse of where South Africa is heading! With a population of around 7 million, Johannesburg has come a long way from the dusty mining camp that emerged in the midst of Paul Kruger s Transvaal Republic in 1886, after the discovery of the world s richest gold-bearing reef, the Witwatersrand. The capital of the Gauteng Province the country s smallest but richest Johannesburg is the financial, commercial, industrial and manufacturing centre of South Africa. It s also a very beautiful city it has over ten million trees, and is now the biggest man-made urban forest in the world! Its museums are world-class and the cosmopolitan vibe electric.
After the Group Areas Act was scrapped in 1991, Johannesburg city centre was affected by urban blight. Thousands of poor, mostly black people, who had been forbidden to live in the city proper, moved into the city from surrounding black townships, joined by many immigrants from economically beleaguered and war-torn African countries. Many buildings were abandoned by landlords, especially in high-density areas such as Hillbrow, and many corporations and institutions, including the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, moved their headquarters away from the city centre, to suburbs like Sandton. Today the city centre is coming back to life a R300-million inner city renewal project driven by the province's economic development initiative, Blue IQ, is bearing dividends, and most parts of the city are again safe, thriving and pulsing with life. Buildings are being restored, public transport systems upgraded, and a huge street-art project is adding vital colour and energy to the scene.
The Jo burg (or Hillbrow) Tower, a telecommunications tower, dominates the Johannesburg city skyline, and is featured in many picture postcard views of the city. It has become a symbol of the city and appears on the city seal. Completed in 1971, it rises to a height of 270 metres, thus making it the tallest man-made structure in Africa. The Newtown area is the core of the new Johannesburg city centre. Once a teeming, racially-mixed area and the site of the city s first forced removals in 1904 it reinvented itself as the site of the city s fresh produce market, abattoir, livestock market and first coal-burning power station. Today the Newtown Cultural Precinct is a thriving arts centre home to the worldrenowned Market Theatre, Museum Africa, the Africana Museum, the South African Breweries Museum, the Workers Museum and Library, art galleries, a flea market, restaurants (including the legendary Gramadoelas), and Bassline jazz club. Johannesburg s museums and historical sites are brilliant and world-class. The Apartheid Museum is an absolute must-see chronicling the history of segregation and Apartheid, as well as the fight against it. Constitution Hill is equally powerful. It is the site of South Africa s new Constitutional Court, built on the ruins (and from the ruins) of the notorious Old Fort prison. No better example exists in the country of how a place of injustice and brutality has become a symbol of solidarity, justice and preservation of freedom.
Liliesleaf Farm is the site of the 11 June 1963 arrest of 19 members of the Umkhonto we Sizwe underground, including Govan Mbeki and Walter Sisulu. Nelson Mandela was already in prison, serving a sentence of several years for relatively minor offences, having been arrested the previous year. The police found documents during the raid incriminating Mandela, and as a result he was charged and brought to trial with the others. The so-called Rivonia Trial took place between 1963 and 1964, in which ten leaders of the ANC were tried for 221 acts of sabotage designed to overthrow the Apartheid system. Mandela s speech from the dock has taken its place among the great speeches of all time : This is the struggle of the African people, inspired by their own suffering and experience. It is a struggle for the right to live. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society, in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunity. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and achieve. But, if needs be, my Lord, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.
Eight of the defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment, while two were acquitted. The farmhouse at Liliesleaf Farm has been surrounded by the gradual spread of Johannesburg's suburbs, but the historic site has now been reopened to visitors. The buildings have been restored to their earlier condition, and visual and audio-visual displays recreate the dramatic events leading up to the police raid, and the raid itself. Sophiatown was once a seedy, mixed-race shanty town 10km from the city centre, and in the 1950 s it was the hub of a developing urban black culture. Artists, journalists (Drum became the first popular black magazine in South Africa), jazz musicians like High Masekela and Miriam Makeba, dance halls and shebeens it was the artistic and social hub of Johannesburg at the time. The Apartheid state declared Sophiatown a white group area in 1959, the people were forcibly removed (not without protest led by the charismatic Anglican priest, Father Trevor Huddlestone) to Meadowlands and Lenasia, and on its ruins a white suburb Triomf (yes, it means triumph!) was built. Sophiatown (like District 6 in Cape Town) is thus a symbol of the devastating social engineering policies of the Apartheid system. A museum has been developed in the home of Dr. A.B. Xuma, the Trevor Huddlestone Memorial Centre is actively chronicling the histories of the displaced community, and walking tours of the area can be organised through the Sophiatown Heritage Centre.
Sophiatown! It is not your physical beauty which makes you so loveable; not that soft line of colour which sometimes seems to strike across the greyness of your streets: not the splendour of the evening sky which turns your drabness into gold it is none of these things. It is your people. (Trevor Huddlestone, Naught For Your Comfort.) SOWETO is the largest black township in S.A., situated just south-west of Johannesburg, with a population of upwards of 3.5 million. It was in many ways the crucible of the struggle against Apartheid, and a visit is essential to an understanding of this country s turbulent history and to glimpse the remarkable social and economic progress made in the country over the last 20 years. Places worth visiting include : # The Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum, which commemorates the fateful events of June 16 1976, when students marched on the Orlando Stadium to protest against Afrikaans. The resultant police action left over 600 dead countrywide, and thousands in detention. # The Regina Mundi Church, which was the spiritual home of the freedom struggle. # The Nelson Mandela Museum, situated in the 4-roomed house on Vilikazi Street where he and his family lived (Vilikazi Street is the only street in the world to have been home to 2 Nobel Peace Prize winners, Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu!).
# Freedom Square in Kliptown, on the site where the Congress of the People was held in 1956, and the Freedom Charter adopted (the major principles of which are enshrined in our new constitution). # One of the many restaurants and taverns that have sprung up in recent years, such as the famous Wandie s Place.
Johannesburg has a world-class public transport system and the jewel in the crown is the Gautrain, an 80-kilometre mass rapid transport railway system which links the city and suburbs with Pretoria and O.R. Tambo International Airport. Built to relieve traffic congestion in the Johannesburg Pretoria traffic corridor, the project was completed in June 2012. Getting around this sprawling city is now quick, safe and highly efficient! Its highway system is among the best in the world and even copes with the massive Highveld summer storms the city is subjected to!
* An easy hour s drive from Johannesburg is the incredible Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site. Actually 12 archaeological sites, containing over 850 hominid remains, (40% of all humanoid fossils in the world), it is where scientists now believe that, 5 million years ago, the human lineage (hominids) split from the apes. The most important discoveries on site were Mrs. Ples in 1947, and Little Foot in 1995. The Sterkfontein Cave is the best-known site, and the Orientation Centre offers tours of the caves, and a hominid exhibition is open to the public. The most exciting attraction, however, is Maropeng (the name means returning to the place of origin in Tswana), a tumulus containing a hall with an interpretation of the origins of the earth and of humankind. This is one of the most technicallyadvanced museums in the world, and its displays place the evolution of Man easily within the reach of the layman. * PHOTOGRAPHS 1. City centre skyline, with the old Stock Exchange building centre-picture. 2. Hillbrow street sculpture with the Hillbrow Tower behind. 3. Braamfontein s famous Eland sculpture. 4. Old and new buildings, city centre. 5. Miners Monument, Braamfontein. 6. Mural art high-rise building in Hillbrow. 7. The ever-present Hillbrow Tower.
8. City centre colonial architecture. 9. Magnificent old next to utilitarian new architecture! 10. Black Angel sculpture, Hillbrow. 11. Beyers Naude Square, city centre great man, great new urban space. 12. Mapungubwe Gold Rhino statue, Main Street precinct. 13. Museum Africa, Newtown. 14. Statue of Brenda Fassie ( Ma-Brrr! ) outside Bassline jazz club, Newtown. 15. Mural art, Newtown depicting the Soweto hitch-hiking pose! 16. The Flame of Democracy, Constitution Hill. 17. The logo of South Africa s highest court, the Constitutional Court depicting the African tree of justice. 18. The Liliesleaf farmhouse / museum, Rivonia. 19. Plaque in Liliesleaf grounds, with statement by Sir Bob Hepple, one of the Rivonia trialists. 20. Wall mural, Sophiatown. 21. Father Trevor Huddlestone s grave, Christ the King Anglican Church, Sophiatown. 22. More mural art, Sophiatown. 23. Mural at Christ the King Church - depicting Trevor Huddleston walking the dusty streets of Sophiatown, with two children tugging at his cossack, as well as Gerald Sekoto's famous "Yellow Houses". 24. Nelson Mandela mural on wall in Soweto. 25. One of the Soweto Cooling Towers, part of the former Orlando Power Station spot Mandela and Hugh Masekela in the painting! 26. The iconic photograph of Hector Pieterson, by Sam Nzima the dying Hector (13 years old) being carried by another student, with his sister running next to them. At the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum, Soweto. 27. Commemorative plaque, Hector Pieterson Memorial. 28. Curio sellers, Soweto. 29. The Mandela Family restaurant, Vilikazi Street, Soweto. 30. The Gautrain at O.R. Tambo Station. 31. The new Sandton Gautrain Station. 32 and 33. Highway direction boards beneath a darkly stormy Jo burg summer sky! 34. Banner over entrance to Maropeng Museum. 35. Plaque in grounds at Maropeng says it all really! 36. The Cradle of Humankind logo human footprints leaving Africa!