9 April 1986: Walking the Bustling Streets of Johannesburg

16 April 1986, 10:30 AM, Kloofwaters Farm in the Magaliesburg Range

I’m having trouble keeping my writing up-to-date given all my recent activities and travels.  After returning from my hiking trip with the Mountain Club of South Africa to the Kranskop last weekend, I’m now on a field trip with geography students from the University of the Witwatersrand (“Wits”).  Before writing about this trip, I need to catch up on last week’s activities including two visits to downtown Johannesburg.  

Bill Urmson, whose family I’ve been staying with since my arrival in South Africa, works for a multi-national accounting firm downtown and gave me a lift last Wednesday.  First, we stopped at the Royal Johannesburg Golf Club to drop off Bill’s son, Neil, and a couple of his chums who were competing in a junior tournament.  Next, we headed down Louis Botha Way in Bill’s bright red Mercedes sedan.  The ambiance reminded me somewhat of Ventura Boulevard in Los Angeles – fashionable shops, nice brick and stucco homes, and hilly terrain.  We passed through Berea and Hillbrow which Bill referred to as “flatland” because of the profusion of high rise apartment buildings (“flats” in British English).  Bill estimated that a one-bedroom flat in Berea would rent for about R250 (only about US$125).  He explained that this area attracts many young people (mostly whites but a few non-whites living here illegally) fresh out of school with their first job or immigrants newly arrived in South Africa.  After someone gets established, they generally move to a more suburban neighborhood, especially if they have married.  Berea and Hillbrow are where the “action” is (what there is of it) – nightclubs, discos, pubs, etc.  The area is very crowded with an appealing big-city feel. 

Bill parked the Mercedes in the garage under the building where his office is located.  He noted that parking in Jo’burg is getting very expensive.  We took the elevator to his office on the 9^th floor.  It looked very similar to an American office suite with a bevy of modern computers, Xerox machines, and suited employees, white and black.  A black secretary brought me hot tea (she even found me a piece of lemon to add). 

I admired the southeasterly view from Bill’s corner office.  He pointed out the old gold mine dumps surrounding this city which was literally built on gold ore deposits in the late 1800s.  Like Denver, Johannesburg is too new to have much in the way of historical buildings, and many of these few have been torn down to make way for new skyscrapers.  Not so much new construction is going on right now as the country is in an economic slump.  When the price of gold plummeted in the early 1980s, a recession was triggered here.  As a result, South Africa lacked the capital for new investment and to pay off its massive foreign debt.  This led to an increase in unemployment.  Blacks seem to suffer the most from unemployment.  They have only recently been allowed to take white collar jobs in white businesses (thus, the ol’ last hired, first fired maxim, I suppose).   With more blacks unemployed and out on the streets of the black townships, unrest has heightened.  This was Bill’s Econ 101 class for the day. 

We discussed local boycotts of white businesses and work stay-homes.  According to Bill, some of his black employees who wanted to come to work were intimidated to stay home by gangs of young men.  The intimidation also kept them away from white shops.  Bill spoke of incidents of blacks getting off commuter trains in the townships with packages from white stores.  The youth gangs would spot the packages and beat up the people carrying them or, for example, they would make them eat the box of laundry soap they had picked up from the white supermarket.  Bill claimed that the gangs move from township to township.  They might be enforcing a boycott in Soweto on a given week while Alexandra was relatively quiet. 

As I was leaving Bill’s office, I asked, “How do you tell the black buses from the white ones?” since I hoped to find some public transportation and didn’t want to ruffle any feathers by trying to get on a black bus.  “The black ones are always full and the white ones are always empty,” Bill joked.  I soon discovered that buses are rather hard to find, it’s hard to figure out their destinations, and they are infrequent.  I never did find a bus that day but got some good exercise walking.  Also, there is no metro rail system within the city.  The electric commuter trains to some suburbs arrive at a large, clean, modern station next to downtown.  They have separate cars for blacks and whites.  The station has racially separate waiting rooms and johns and once again, I’m reminded of the American South in the 1950s.

View along Rissik Street toward downtown Johannesburg, March 1, 1987.  It was rare to see a major street in Johannesburg this deserted but I took this photo early on a Sunday morning. 

Setting out from Bill’s office, I hoofed it over the Queen Elizabeth Bridge which crosses the rail yards and up to the Wits campus for a 9:00AM appointment with Dr. Graham Hart in the Geography Faculty (department).  That’s how I wound up on the geography student field trip this week.  Professor Hart and I discussed geographic education in South Africa.  After our meeting, I went over to the Senate House (student union and administration building).  A male student directed me there, and we talked briefly about the purpose of my trip to South Africa.  He didn’t feel that South Africa was a very safe place for him now because there was always the danger of an army call-up. 

From Wits, I walked back downtown, stopping at the Indian market section on Diagonal Street for samosas and other Indian lunch munchies.  After a few inconsequential administrative errands, I walked up to Hillbrow seeking out a friendly pub for a cool one.  It was 5:30PM, but most pubs were virtually deserted.  The two discos I checked out didn’t get going until 8:00 – too late for me as I was due back at Wits at 8:00 for a mountain club slide show.  I finally settled on a bar in a German restaurant which seemed fairly lively with a casually-dressed, after-work crowd.  While sipping my draught at the bar, I realized that most of the patrons were speaking Afrikaans – not what I would have expected in cosmopolitan Hillbrow.  Then it was off for pizza at an Italian joint down the street.  The sweet young things at the table next to mine warned me that South African pizza isn’t as good as American from what they’d heard.  Actually, it wasn’t all that bad (I ordered a Greek combo – calamari, anchovies, and black olives) but the tomato sauce wasn’t spicy enough to suit me. 

After dinner, I looked in vain for a bus and wound up walking a mile or so back to Wits.  Several chaps gave a long but interesting slide show on their recent climb of the highest peak in southern Patagonia (Argentina).  Looked like too much hard work for this armchair mountaineer.  After the presentation, I was able to make arrangements for the trip with the mountain club this past weekend which I previously wrote about.  I caught a ride back to Bill & Mavis’s Lombardy East home with several mountain club members in a VW bus which actually started. 

The geography students are having a volleyball game outside my window and I’m tired sitting here typing, so it’s time to play for a while.