Great Johannesburg: What happened? How to save an African economic giant

By Nickolaus Bauer

The city of gold is in a death spiral. Award-winning journalist, inner-city activist, and municipal civil servant Nickolaus Bauer takes a deep dive into how Africa’s economic hub has reached the brink of collapse and what it will take to rescue Joburg.

For local and international readers interested in tracking the collapse and possible resurrection of one of Africa’s greatest cities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tafelberg
• Release date: May 31, 2024
• ISBN: 9780624095040

Nickolaus Bauer

Nickolaus Bauer has covered Johannesburg as a political journalist since 2008 and lived in the inner city from 2010, 8 years of which were in Hillbrow and 5 years in the Ponte Towers. He worked within the Johannesburg city administration as a Deputy Director for the Environment and Infrastructure Services Department in 2022.  

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Tafelberg

There ain’t no burger like a Joburger.

This book is dedicated to everyone who calls Johannesburg home.

INTRODUCTION

It lies below the haze of smog-laced sunshine. It resonates among the chorus of traffic and the haggling in boardrooms and on sidewalks. It keeps on flowing both night and day. Pervasive on the dusty streets of Soweto and the leafy avenues of Bryanston to the corporate fortresses in Sandton and the hijacked relics in Hillbrow. And there, engulfed in the competing realities of the world’s most unequal society, thrives the thing that rests so comfortably within the complex entanglement of poverty and riches – where ambition and desperation live joined at the hip. The indescribable force that powers the city of gold and keeps its six million inhabitants equal parts engaged and on edge. Addicted to the real possibility that both catastrophe and triumph may be lurking just around the corner. It is indeed: the spirit of Johannesburg.

Welcome to a place where the past and the present dance a fragile tango and the promise of opportunity clashes violently with the harsh realities of a city in decay.

Once a beacon of hope and prosperity billed as a ‘World-Class African City’ by successive local governments, Johannesburg now is in a death spiral.

Poverty and despair reverberate through the city’s streets. Violent crime stalks every corner as basic services are choked, and unrest and discontent simmer. All this is happening while chronic political instability gnaws at the city’s rotting foundations.

It pains me to write about Johannesburg this way. But this story must be told. Not to forecast the city’s complete downfall, but to rather help navigate the journey from here, led by its past. More importantly, we need to find out what may be done to save the city from itself and present a route to a more inclusive and prosperous future. Beneath the current funk, Johannesburg remains a launchpad to the boundless possibilities that glitter beneath the African sun. There’s something about this city and its people – as the old adage goes: There ain’t no burger like a Joburger!

And if the city is to not only survive but thrive into the future, it will take the combined efforts of all its people to first understand the roots of its current plight, and then explore what they may do to help get Johannesburg back on its feet. Join me on this exploration that peels back the layers of history, exposes the wounds of the present and navigates the uncertainty of the future. Trying to write about a city as complex as Johannesburg is no easy task. But I do come with a certain level of insight as a born, bred, buttered and corrupted Joburger. The city is in my veins, and I’m deeply invested in its future. I covered Johannesburg for close on two decades as a journalist. I co-founded social enterprise Dlala Nje as a social-impact entrepreneur in 2012, and I served the city as a civil servant for a year in 2022.

I’ve invested time in thorough research, engaged with diverse perspectives, and approached the topic with an open mind in spite of my years of personal insight. This is crucial in order to acknowledge the complexities, appreciate the city’s diversity, and present a balanced and nuanced portrayal of Johannesburg.

We’ll begin our journey by diving into the historical underbelly of a city that has always been marked by its hustle and enterprise. Often punctuated by a hunger for success at any cost. Johannesburg’s roots are entwined with the pursuit of fortune – a legacy lingering in the echoes of gold prospectors and traders. As the modern-day captains of industry wrestle for a piece of the pie in the contemporary economy dominated by financial services.

We track Johannesburg’s transformation from a city of migrants to a place where xenophobia simmers. The once-welcoming arms of opportunity of a city with migrancy in its DNA are being tested, revealing a growing fragility in the tacit unity of a diverse population of countless cultures and languages that has long been taken for granted.

We’ll explore the history of gold production that fuelled Johannesburg’s rise by investigating how the glittering promise of wealth in the nineteenth century has taken a darker turn with the proliferation of informal mining in disused and abandoned shafts. The zama-zama phenomenon is the gateway into an underworld of danger and exploitation that poisons and powers the livelihoods of thousands.

Johannesburg’s housing crisis may have once again come to the fore with the horrific fire in August 2023, but the dream of a safe home has been elusive for many in the city since its inception. From the mushrooming 1890s’ prospecting encampments to the contemporary informal settlements popping up all over Joburg today. The shadow of apartheid’s legacy of spatial inequality reinforcing this heart-wrenching and protracted issue. Further compounded by ‘White Flight’, the historical act of redlining also scars the urban landscape with its racial divisions. We examine how racist laws may be gone but the city’s design and development continues to perpetuate a legacy of segregation.

Crime has also left an enduring stain on Johannesburg’s legacy and it’s not just petty crime, but often violent smash-and-grabs and the troubling spread of house robberies too. South Africa’s headquarters of white-collar crime are to be found in Johannesburg, hidden in boardrooms and on luxury estates. We investigate how the complete breakdown of the rule of law is hastening the city’s downfall and what may be done to reverse the trend.

Accessibility is what makes modern cities great, with the ability to move goods and people as well as deliver services being key. Johannesburg’s streets now also echo the question of ownership. Walkability becomes a lens through which we examine the city’s accessibility, dictated by factors beyond the control of its residents. Alongside this, we also look at the city’s clogged logistic and transport arteries that are gagging Africa’s most developed economy.

In spite of it all, Johustleburg – the city of entrepreneurs and the African dream – still offers the allure of the rags-to-riches fairy tale. Against the backdrop of decay, we’ll recount the tenacity of those refusing to surrender to pessimism. From the tenacious informal traders and quasi-industrialists to the drug-addled scam artists and polished self-made millionaires, entrepreneurship has become both a beacon of hope and a desperate gamble in a city demanding resilience.

Those who stand to gain the most certainly also benefit from the chaos and degradation. As investors circle, we explore their motivations in the city’s investment landscape. Who truly benefits from Johannesburg’s challenges, and who are the opportunistic players in this high-stakes game that plays with the city’s character and future?

The political theatrics have not helped Johannesburg’s mayoral instability which paralyses constructive development and responsible governance. We examine the political shenanigans of the past decade to reveal how the city’s residents remain captive to the whims of those in power on the mayoral merry-go-round.

Finally, we confront the question: Bull or bear market? Where will the ‘City of Gold’ go from here? We contemplate the future with the question: Will this great city rise to meet these challenges or succumb to the weight of its own dark shadows?

Why should we care about Johannesburg, you may ask. The answer lies in the anticipation of the next South African era. The city not only remains the country’s economic engine room, but it is a litmus test for the country as a whole. Can a city completely collapse despite the opportunities it presents and the goodwill of its people? Does Johannesburg symbolise South Africa’s spiritual and physical fragmentation?

Or does Johannesburg offer a crystal ball into the future by providing the hope that it can turn back from the abyss and become a shining example to the rest of South Africa?

Welcome to Great Johannesburg.

Nickolaus Bauer

April 2024

CHAPTER 1

Johannesburg’s origins: Hustlers’ haven forged in the crucible of gold

Pessimism inevitably dominates contemporary discussions about Johannesburg. It is difficult to not be somewhat despondent when you take a sober look at the state the city is in. It’s grappling with failing services amid governance ineptitude and impotency in an environment of exploding lawlessness and desperation to survive. Describing things as bleak might even sound like a bit of an understatement. But the Johannesburg of today is not without historical precedent.

It’s completely naïve to think Johannesburg’s current state is divorced from the city’s history. It has never been as inherently majestic or as sublime as some might want to believe. Since the city’s official founding in 1886, Johannesburg’s allure has never been a natural one and has drawn communities together by chance or necessity, but certainly not by design.

No water, arid land and the discovery of gold

There’s something fundamentally unnatural about a city without an abundance of humankind’s most basic necessity for life to back up its existence. Yet this is exactly what Joburg is: the world’s biggest city that is not situated near a natural water source like a river, lake or coastline.¹ Johannesburg’s six million residents today rely on man-made systems built up over the past 140 years to deliver the most precious resource to their homes and places of work from as far afield as Lesotho. At the turn of the nineteenth century, in Johannesburg’s first decades, the city emerged from the arid landscape of the Highveld. But do not assume that the city’s first residents found no signs of life when gold mining was first industrialised.

Long before the gold rush, the indigenous communities of the San, Basotho and Batswana inhabited what is now known as Johannesburg. The San were hunter-gatherers with a deep understanding of the local fauna and flora, leaving behind a rich legacy of rock art in prehistoric settlements in various parts of Johannesburg. The Basotho and Batswana were primarily involved in agriculture and had established communities in different parts of the city. Their ancient kraals were even complete with iron-age metal smelting furnaces, suggesting that the city’s mineral wealth was exploited long before 1886. The most famous sites of these settlements are to be found in the Melville koppies.²

But the most recent pre-gold rush iteration of Johannesburg is arid farmland. Before the city was formally established, the area consisted of several farms that were eventually absorbed into what is identified today as the Johannesburg metropolitan region. These early nineteenth-century farmsteads were Doornfontein, Braamfontein, Zandspruit, Rietfontein, Langlaagte and Randjeslaagte, established and developed by the ‘Boers’ – Afrikaners who took great trek inland away from British imperialism and the Cape Colony. Little did those nomads realise that the British would soon follow them northwards once the explosion of the gold rush set in at the turn of the century. In fact, the discovery of gold happened way before the prospectors began swamping the public digging sites of early Johannesburg. Afrikaners may have bought and developed the farmland where modern Joburg lies today, but it was not a Boer who stumbled upon the precious metal that set the founding of the city in motion.

In 1874 Gerhardus Cornelis Oosthuizen bought a section of the farm Langlaagte for just £100 and had no intention of using his land for any other purpose than agriculture. But 12 years later an Englishman named George Harrison stumbled upon the world’s richest deposit of gold while repairing a wagon wheel near a stream on Langlaagte. Today this spot is an abandoned and vandalised park on the corner of Nasrec and Main Reef roads adjacent to the suburb of Riverlea. One of many great metaphors for the city’s rise and fall from grace.

The story goes that Harrison noticed shiny matter in the water and upon closer inspection recognised them to be gold particles. Harrison knew this as he was one of many prospectors sniffing around the Highveld and Lowveld since the 1873 discovery of gold in modern-day Pilgrim’s Rest in Mpumalanga. Some significant discoveries of the precious yellow metal had already been made near Johannesburg. In 1884 two Struben brothers, Fred and Harry, made the city’s first gold discovery on the farm Wilgespruit in what today is known as Strubens Valley in Roodepoort. But Harrison’s June 1886 find on Langlaagte is the discovery that led to the rapid industrial development of the Witwatersrand basin which gave the title ‘City of Gold’ to Johannesburg. In September of that same year Paul Kruger, at the time the president of the then Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR), declared Langlaagte and several other farms public diggings just weeks after Harrison travelled to his offices in Pretoria to report his find.

What followed was a swift metamorphosis of an arid landscape into a mushrooming industrial settlement as Johannesburg exploded into the nineteenth century’s last great boomtown. By 1896 what was all farmland just a decade before became a city of 100 000 people. Since then, 40% of the gold ever mined in the world has come out of the earth in Johannesburg.³

As a precursor for Johannesburg’s rolling and often dodgy future it would seem only fitting that the discovery that birthed the city was made by an individual often found on the wrong side of the law.

Some historical accounts offer that Harrison was an Australian who had cut his prospecting teeth in the former penal colony in the mid-nineteenth century. But Harrison was, in fact, an Englishman who had moved Down Under from his home country, then fled to South Africa as a fugitive wanted for fraud and embezzlement. For his troubles Harrison was awarded claim rights, which he ended up selling for a paltry £10 before disappearing from Johannesburg as the gold rush was only just starting. There were various stories doing the rounds of how he met his demise, including drinking himself to death or being eaten by lions.⁴ Harrison’s story is not unlike many other characters integral to the Johannesburg story that reinforce the idea that the city is really just a hustler’s paradise with something shifty hidden not very far below the surface.

The ensuing Witwatersrand Gold Rush led to a viciously rapid influx of fortune-seekers from around the world keen to do whatever it took to make a buck in the fast-transforming region. Again, one might ponder the audacity of founding a city in a region lacking the fundamental resources – like water – that sustain human settlements. Yet, the gravitational pull of gold was so potent that it defies the conventional wisdom of what the necessities are to establish a settlement. The early settlers, driven by the feverish pursuit of fortune, erected a fast-growing encampment where none seemed possible just a few years before. And this was the beginning of Johannesburg as a melting pot of cultures.

A cauldron of cultures and inequity in racial and social hierarchies

Maverick gold-diggers from as far afield as California joined experienced British miners alongside mining novices that included destitute Afrikaner farmers, black migrants from every corner of southern Africa, as well as Chinese labourers, among others, in the opening decades of Johannesburg. They all jockeyed for a piece of the action as more and more gold was discovered and mining operations developed. This melting pot of humanity was a cauldron