Brutalist

I slept badly. Soft pillows are the devil’s spawn, and there is no place for them in this world. I have decided to do the tourist thing during this trip to Johannesburg. As with many places in the region, I’ve mainly visited it previously with a gang of British gap year kids, navigating their constant oneupmanship instead of being able to enjoy the jacaranda trees in relative peace. With groups of teenagers on their first trip to Africa it’s less about delving into a place’s history and more about dealing with a litany of health concerns.

The Johannesburg climate is known to be very sunny and the altitude is high so it feels like the sun is strong. Before boarding one of those ubiquitous red ‘hop on, hop off’ buses that ply over one hundred of the world’s cities, I creamed up and then bought some ‘sport water’ for hydration. In shops, regular water has become a thing of the past.

Johannesburg is a sprawling, complicated city of fascinating contrasts. These red bus city tours are expensive for a glorified bus ride but are well designed and informative. Most importantly today’s gave me the orientation of Jozi that I was seeking. Joburg developed around the world’s richest gold deposit, became Africa’s wealthiest city, boasts arguably the world’s most extensive manmade forest and is the planet’s largest city not on a river, lake or coastline. The Rainbow Nation has developed a progressive and inclusive constitution that is the basis of South Africa’s new equality. However I have seen recent reports that claim South Africa is still the most unequal society in the world, and that economic divisions are worsening. This must be the result of free market capitalism with less than enough social reform for post-apartheid society to truly develop in a fair and equal way.

Through the sheer need for survival, I agreed with the narrator of the bus tour that Joburg is ‘a city that has learnt to embrace its contradictions and complexities’, however could not agree about the ‘ultimately triumphant past’ if inequality is worse than ever.

This brutalist architecture was pointed out to us, built during the apartheid era to perform some authoritarian function no doubt.