Johannesburg

Before today I always thought of Johannesburg as Africa's big city, like New York is to the United States. I assumed that since every flight I tried to book out of Africa connected in Johannesburg, the city must be the financial hub and cultural hub of the continent, as it is obviously the transportation hub. I've visited a few ghost towns before and have experienced what it's like to see a handful of small buildings that lie desolate and unoccupied, but until this morning I never imagined there could be such a place as a “ghost city”.

Apartheid permanantly shook South Africa, and the removal of Apartheid shook the country again. PJ, the South African tour guide who led myself and sixteen others on a tour of Johanessburg and Soweto today, described Johannesburg's promising beginnings to us as well as it's tragic economic downfall as we drove into the city. South Africa's history is inextricably tied to the Dutch settlers who arrived during the 17th century, and everyone in the country has a different point of view regarding the matter. Unfortunately those points of view still seem to be divided along racial lines. PJ, who is of African descent and lives in Johannesburg's black ghetto of Soweto, told us the story as he sees it...

When the white man came to Africa he didn't come with guns and armies. The white man came first with a Bible. White missionaries introduced the Bible to Africans as God's book. “Look!”, they said, “Here is God's book. From this you can learn true religion!” The black man, who at the time had all of Africa's land and all of it's wealth, took the Bible and read that if a man gets struck by another on the left cheek, he should turn the right cheek and let him strike that one also... and the next thing he knows, the black man is holding the Bible and the white man is holding all the land and all the wealth.

My opinion happens to differ somewhat from PJ's as to what, exactly, happened between the white man and the black man in South Africa, but I do agree with his description of the chain of events that led to Johannesburg's economic and cultural deterioration.

The end of Apartheid was the end of Johannesburg. During the 1980's it became obvious to both blacks and whites in South Africa that it was only a matter of time before a black government would rule the country. Johannesburg was at it's prime and boasted several modern skyscrapers filled with successful corporations, a few luxury five-star hotels, South Africa's stock exchange and the world headquarters of DeBeer's, and many banks and other notable businesses. When it became obvious that power in the country would shift to the blacks, the wealthy white businessmen began to fear a “Reverse Apartheid”, one in which whites would become the inferior race in retribution for centuries of discrimination. What investor wouldn't pull everything out of South Africa given those circumstances? For decades blacks were refused the right to own a business in South Africa, among many other basic liberties. What would stop them from imposing the same restrictions against whites? The result of a massive economic exodus from what used to be South Africa's financial center, as well as severe political mismanagement by an inexperienced, corrupt, and uneducated new government, is that downtown Johannesburg is less of a business district these days than it is a tourist attraction.According to PJ, at least ninety percent of the buildings in downtown Johannesburg are empty, and based on what I saw today, I'd be surprised if anywhere near ten percent of them are occupied. From a distance the skyline of the city is attractive and looks as suitable for business as any American city, but a closer look reveals the desolation. As we drove through the streets of what used to be South Africa's economic powerhouse, broken windows dotted the skyscrapers that towered above and intimidating iron fences sealed off the entrances below. I suspected that street traffic was light partly because it was a Sunday morning, but PJ told us that if we had come any other day, things wouldn't be much different. A few buildings that were fifty stories and higher were completely sealed at the bottom and covered in advertisements from bottom to top. It's mind-blowing to me that what used to be a valuable real-estate venture for those landowners has now been reduced to a giant billboard.

We stopped for a few minutes at one of the few places open for business in downtown Johannesburg; a street market where tribal doctors sell traditonal herbal medicine. Hundreds of shopkeepers had their goods laid out on the concrete of a former parking lot and the natural cure for any of hundreds of medical conditions was available for only a few South African rand. Among the items for sale were many different kinds of roots and tree bark, several bottles filled with mysterious, colorful, liquid concoctions, and, my personal favorite, a large, hairy baboon skin. The irony of the situation is incredible. If Johannesburg had continued to develop at it's amazing economic pace throughout the 1990's and 2000's, it could easily be Africa's Frankfurt or Shanghai by now. Instead the economy has moved hundreds of years in reverse, reverting to a collection of witch doctors on the city streets hawking tree bark and baboon skins.PJ used the figure “ninety percent” quite a bit. After a while I assumed that the expression didn't literally mean “nine times out of ten” when he said it, but that he probably meant, “almost everything”. In Johannesburg's ghetto of Soweto, “ninety percent” of vehicles are stolen or hijacked. “Ninety percent” of deaths are caused by HIV or AIDS. And “seventy-five percent” of people of working age are unemployed (perhaps that figure is a little more legitimate). Again, the end of Apartheid meant the downfall of Soweto, as the economic devestation of the nearby business district meant that nearly everyone lost their jobs. “Seventy-five percent” employment is pretty shocking, but the figure is made even more upsetting by the fact that in the 1980's only one percent of Soweto's population was jobless.

PJ drove us past several of the most filthy, oppressive housing projects that I've ever seen, then took us to a nicer part of Soweto (comparable to a poor man's Rose Park). Many of the homes were tiny brick structures constructed in the 1940's and designed about the same way a cardboard box should be designed. We passed by Desmond Tutu's personal residence, which has been nicely remodeled since he received a half-million dollars for winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Another site of historical significance was the house where Nelson Mandela lived before he became president, which was an interesting contrast to his current mansion on the other side of town that PJ showed us this morning.Since I didn't have time to visit South Africa's massive Apartheid Museum, it was nice to drop by the similar, but smaller, Hector Pieterson Museum as part of the tour. In 1976 a group of thousands of schoolkids demonstrated against the South African government that was forcing them to be taught in Africaans rather than in English. Local policemen showed up at the scene, the tense situation escalated, and at the end of the day over one-thousand schoolkids had been shot and killed over the issue of language in schools. The first to be shot was a thirteen year-old boy named Hector Pieterson.

As I said before, Apartheid shook South Africa, and if there was any emphasis at the Hector Pieterson museum then that was it. The museum, and the tour as a whole, was perhaps the most thought-provoking thing I've done since leaving home ten weeks ago. There are so many issues and problems involving race and South Africa and they're all tangled together and impossible to make any sense of. Who is to blame for the massacre in 1976? I don't blame the schoolkids for demonstrating, but the white government probably knew that educating blacks in English would be the beginning of the end. Were they justified in refusing them that right? What about the economic devestation in Johannesburg? I don't blame the blacks for being upset about Apartheid and demanding a government representative of the people, but I don't blame the whites for pulling their businesses out of the city either. Then there is the issue of the original government that replaced the one made exclusively of whites. Several of those at the top were corrupt and contributed to the downfall of the community and the country as a whole. Corruption stems from a lack of education, but were the black politicians to blame for their own uneducated ways, or were the whites to blame for failing to educate them correctly? Finally, does the country belong to the blacks any more than it belongs to the whites whose ancestors have been here for over three-hundred years? Everything involving race and politics in South Africa is a massive, tangled mess, but it doesn't make any sense to point fingers. At this point the best the country can do is step back, take an objective look at what is going on, learn from the past but forget what has happened, and then step forward and work towards solving the enormous problems staring them in the face.