Gauteng - Striking Gold in the Heart of South Africa

Issue 36

Thousands of visitors to South Africa make Gauteng their first stop, but most don’t stay long enough to appreciate all it has in store. They’re missing out. With two vibrant cities, Johannesburg and Tshwane (Pretoria), and a hinterland stuffed with cultural treasures, there’s a great deal more to this province than Jo’burg International Airport, says John Malathronas. “The golf course was created in 1974,” said the manager. “Eighteen holes, par 72.” It was a Monday afternoon and the tees were relatively quiet: fewer than a dozen people were swinging their clubs among the greens. “We now have 190 full-time members,” my host went on. “It costs 350 rand per year to join for the first year and 250 rand per year afterwards. But day membership costs 60 rand only. Of course, now anyone can become a member.” This last sentence hit home. I was, after all, in Pimville, Soweto, and the fact that ‘anyone’ could become a member of the previously black-only Soweto Country Club, was spoken with due satisfaction. I looked around. Some fairways were overgrown and others so dried up it was difficult to tell the bunkers from the greens. Still, the advent of a fully-functioning golf course, an oasis of tranquillity in the noisy, bustling township, was, indeed, an achievement of which to be proud. Thirty years after the Soweto schoolboys rebelled against the apartheid regime and carved its name into the annals of modern history, the township’s predicament can be summed up by the word I kept hearing during my time there: ‘upgraded’. Hostels that were the focus of the civil war between Inkhata Zulu and the ANC in the 1990s were being ‘upgraded’ to house large families. Kliptown, a stone’s throw away from the golf course and the scene of the signing of the 1955 Freedom Charter, has been ‘upgraded’ by getting a slew of conservation orders to renovate and preserve several original shop facades. Neighbourhoods have been ‘upgraded’ by getting electricity, running water and proper sewage disposal. The city’s football stadiums are being ‘upgraded’ for the 2010 World Cup, and the Kaizer Chiefs, Soweto’s most popular football club, are sponsored by Nike. In 2006, being associated with Soweto is cool. The township itself is huge: it is diverse enough to have its own slang, tsotsitaal, a mixture of African languages, English and Afrikaans; it is so vast, it takes ten minutes to drive from one side of the main minibus station to the other; and its million-strong population is served by a gigantic medical institution, the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital, which I heard described as “the largest hospital in the country”, “in the whole African continent”, or – by someone clearly geocentric – in “the known universe”. The streets have also been ‘upgraded’, namely asphalted, and there are brand new street signs aimed at the tourist buses that bring day-trippers attracted by the power of the name, for Soweto – along with the Kruger Park and Cape Town – is one of the top three tourist destinations in South Africa. More and more visitors dine in its gourmet restaurants: trendy Wandie’s in Dube, that started as an illegal shebeen packs them in every day with its lunch buffet, and the modern, shiny Nambitha in Orlando West even accepts dinner bookings on the Internet. And yes, some tourists now choose to stay in Soweto: a good number of excellent value B&B’s have sprung around the main tourist sites and are as safe as anything in urban South Africa. Oh, yes, safety. One of the main causes of crime, unemployment, is still forty per cent but is coming down as the economy booms, precious metal prices rise and money is spent on a construction boom. If you don’t believe me, believe the banks and insurance companies that started moving back into Soweto after years of shunning the place like a leper colony. Sowetans can now get a mortgage to buy a house in an ‘upgraded’ area, something unheard of before when investment in the township was considered suicidal. They might even become householders without entering a bank: land and houses that couldn’t be bought under apartheid to emphasise that any grant of stay in Soweto was temporary were given free to sitting tenants by the government, as it was adjudged that the decades-long cumulative rent had bought their homes several times over. It would be tragically ironic if some were to wake up one day to realise they couldn’t afford the land they were squatting on.   Many black families choose a do-it-yourself ‘upgrade’; what the golf course manager failed to tell me is that there are now only half the number of members as ten years ago. In this new South Africa, colour blindness works both ways, and members of the new black middle class are moving to the more affluent districts of Johannesburg, the once forbidden megalopolis: to trendy Melville, wealthy Sandton, or fashionable Rosebank. They fear crime as much as their white counterparts and pay for 24-hour “Pro-Tec-Sure” by private security firms. Did I say Johannesburg? Call it Jozi, Joey, Jo’burg or even eGoli: no one calls the big, cheeky sprawl on the Rand by its full name any more. It may seem rather inappropriate for a place whose reputation is second only to Mordor to be referred to in affectionate terms by the locals, but the situation on the ground is changing like the face of the city itself. The white businesses – such as the Jo’burg Stock Exchange – fled around the turn of the century to the more staid northern suburbs, leaving the Central Business District (CBD) open for African traders, Indian merchants and immigrant street hawkers. But this very centre, once a no-go area, has also been ‘upgraded’ – which in this case means ‘made safe’ – by the installation of 240 CCTV cameras. The Civic Centre Square in front of the Nelson Mandela Theatre used to be a crime hotspot with down-and-outs squatting and preying on tourists; now it’s clear and clean, with children running and playing among the well-tended gardens. Depending on the source and the time span considered, crime has fallen in the area by fifty per cent (my guide) to eighty per cent (The Economist), because the effectiveness of the electronic eyes has been psychologically exaggerated in the minds of the criminal underclass. And here I was to prove it: taking a stroll among the crowds on Diagonal Street, rucksack on my back, mobile in hand, visiting a muti shop to check out an African healer’s stock of desiccated animal parts, dried herbs and liquid potions. And surprise, surprise, nothing happened to me. Once again, if you don’t believe me, believe the businesses. Urban renewal projects combining lottery money with private capital have been highly successful in turning around a part of town that had been written off. Corner House, right in the middle of the CBD, is one of three dozen high-rise buildings that have been ‘upgraded’ and converted into flats, offered for sale at high prices. The old City Hall is now the administrative seat of the State of Gauteng. The Carlton Tower is the surveillance nexus of those CCTV cameras: it serves as the nerve centre for the operators of the Cueincident security firm. At the corner of Sauer and Pritchard you can find the Star newspaper; at 11 Diagonal Street stands proudly the thirty-storey AngloGold Ashanti Diamond House; and, on Harrison Street, I passed by the headquarters of the First National Bank. The sophisticated Jo’burg of old has not simply disappeared at a stroke; it has mutated into a more complex beast, less refined, but a lot less lawless. Newtown, a few minutes’ drive away, typifies this new Jo’burg. This was a large slum area – with some pockets of destitution still visible around the old Victorian railway station – which was turned into a massive cultural precinct. The silhouette of the spanking new Museum Africa dominates the central Mary Fitzgerald Square. Like all new museums in South Africa, its purpose is not expository – “here are some Tsonga carvings, there are some Zulu beads” – but didactic. I was fascinated by pictures documenting how the city was transformed from a gold prospectors’ muddy camp into a world financial centre and I was transfixed by the copies of Khoi-San rock drawings, annotated to explain their symbolism. Next door, the restored Market Theatre complex is one of the city’s biggest nightlife draws. The productions at the Market have always played to an ethnically cosmopolitan audience, even during the apartheid era; and when I attended one performance the vast majority of the audience was, indeed, black. You notice these things in South Africa. Even Hillbrow – arguably the only no-go area still left in Jo’burg – has received its ‘upgrade’. The Old Fort Prison with its dreaded Number  Four, the section for black prisoners, has become a very interesting museum, and the hill it is built upon has been renamed Constitution Hill, chosen as it was to house South Africa’s Constitutional Court. The court itself, South Africa’s first public building commissioned after democracy, is fascinating: eleven official languages proclaim proudly its name outside and, as you enter the foyer, a combination of timber, glass, concrete and black slate provide a cheerful, bright African welcome. The old Number Four section was demolished and some of its materials were used to build the Court itself, thus allowing the guides to claim that ‘the bricks from the past were used to build the future’. You have to hand it to the Africans: they’re very hot on symbolism that is immensely moving. The seeping transformation of Jo’burg is taking visitors by surprise; more and more are deciding to spend a few days in the city rather than merely using it as a stopover to the Kruger Park. The tourist authorities have been highly skilful in exploiting South Africa’s modern history that revolves around the ‘liberation struggle’, as the fight against apartheid is dubbed. When the amusement park of Gold Reef City with its toy trains, African dancing performances and family fun rides was ‘upgraded’ with a new Casino complex so vast it has streets running alongside the slot machines, the consortium involved won their bid by promising to build an Apartheid Museum. The result was an unqualified success and the museum has now become one of Jo’burg’s top attractions. It is an eye-opener even to set foot inside the building as you are forced to enter via two different revolving doors as a ‘White’ or a ‘non-White’. Newsreels, photographs and documents succeed in conveying the inhumanity of the system as starkly as the nooses hanging from the roof that represent the political prisoners executed during those dark decades. And there is always some new twist to spring upon the visitor: I was startled to discover that people used to change colour. In 1985, for instance, 702 Coloured people turned White, nineteen Whites became Coloured, one Indian became White and eleven Coloureds became Chinese. I spent that evening in Pretoria, the leafy, quiet town thirty miles north of Jo’burg, dining with friends and being reminded that the standard of living of upper-middle class white South Africans is astonishingly high: lawns and gardens, gardeners and cooks, indoor garages and affordable two-storey villas are taken for granted, as are the balmy Gauteng nights. Looking up, I could do something I had long forgotten about: I could observe the starry sky. I was bang in the middle of a city, yet there was almost no light pollution and, as the Dog Star shone brightly on us, any notion of violence or crime seemed grotesque, blasphemous even. But then genteel Pretoria with its pious Afrikaner roots has never stooped down to the crime level of its larger, money-obsessed neighbour. We should all be thankful to the gold reef for turning up forty miles south and keeping Pretoria pristine and unsullied by greed. Even its absorption into the Greater Metropolitan area of Tshwane, along with other satellite towns around it, has left it unruffled, like a grand duchess whose blue blood doesn’t change upon marriage. With its multitude of parks, few cars, wide avenues and luxurious malls it still is the closest you’ll get to British green belt suburbia this side of the Tropic of Capricorn. But that doesn’t mean it’s boring: its history ensures otherwise. It is here you can find the most stunning architectural complex in South Africa, the Presidential Union Buildings. They were built on a hill by Herbert Baker, a Kent-born architect who had travelled extensively in Italy and Greece and brought to South Africa a unique neo-Italianate style. He broke with the colonial tradition of pre-fabricated houses “made in England” and started using locally quarried materials for his neoclassical designs that were more adapted to the clear, highveld sky than to the drizzly, cold climate back home. Just the view from the Union Buildings’ bandstand – the grand panorama of a city as green as it is paved – is worth the drive. It is a tribute to the openness and informality of the new South Africa that I could just walk into President Mbeki’s office building and be met by the receptionist who politely enquired about my business. But the state of Gauteng is not just Johannesburg, Soweto and Pretoria. One of the most exciting excursions into the highveld is to the Cradle of Humankind, South Africa’s first Unesco World Heritage site. This is an area with one of the highest concentrations of hominid fossils on the planet; it provided scientists with the missing links between apes and humans in the 1930s and 1940s. When we were deep into the dark recesses of the Sterkfontein caves, where fossil-bearing breccia rock containing primitive stone tools is staring you at eye-level, I became furious. Why was it only recently that the site had been opened to tourists? How come its existence had been kept under wraps? My guide offered an explanation: the fact that humans originated in Africa was too much for the previous white governments to swallow. It is no surprise that the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. The ANC not only started promoting the site heavily but also ‘upgraded’ it by creating a grand visitor attraction at Maropeng a few miles away. It incorporates an interactive museum, a conference centre, a fast-food café, a world-class restaurant and a boutique hotel to boot. There is even family entertainment in the form of audiovisual presentations, a real boat ride through time (whatever the signs say, trust me, you will get wet) and a kids’ cave thrown in for good measure. It is not often that man-made architecture enhances rather than diminishes a landscape, but the measured unobtrusiveness of the structure – the facilities are camouflaged below a raised hillock in the shape of a giant burial mound – provides welcome relief from the desolate, barren surroundings. The fossil finds made here were so historic they were carefully named: the Taung child, the skull of Mrs Ples. My only regret was that the original fossil displays were not yet in place, but should be by the time you read this. I suppose I’ll just have to return.

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