I Love Johannesburg? 2/2

From even a casual reading of Johannesburg’s history, it is evident that if ever there was a place on this continent where globalization blew in en masse, it was here. The ‘locals’ never had a chance. What I mean is that the experience and expertise from the exploitative commerce in Europe and the gold rush in western USA all converged here, predisposing this city’s development to a certain pattern, and meaning that if you were a local, you had to giddy-up to catch that global gravy train. No number of laws and artificial attempts to privilege the ‘national’ were going to make them competitive against this confluence of ‘talent’ (of various sorts) from different parts of the world. This push continues today and it is only in the past 15 years that an African identity has been stamped on the core of this city. (if you’re asking, ‘what constitutes an african identity‘, that’s a good question). Only when white capital moved on up to the northern suburbs and created room in the traditionally transit areas of Hillbrow, Yeoville, Braamfontein, only then did this city acquired an African identity.  And I suppose I should clarify that here I speak of an African ‘immigrant’ identity, for Johannesburg has always had an indigenous African identity (see brilliant work done on SophiaTown and other areas that precede the Group Areas’ Act).

On SA as a frontier/mining camp, check out podcast #28 here, Professor Nick Binedell’s take on eGoli.

[bodily lifted from Charles van Onselen’s ‘The Fox and the Flies’ The World of Joseph Silver: Racketeer and Psychopath].

145: “I do not know what makes me suddenly want to write to you this morning unless it be that Johannesburg always makes me think of your poem, ‘perhaps in his infinite mercy, God may remove this man’. Here’s this great fiendish hell of a city sprung up in ten years in our sweet pure rare African velt. A city which for glitter and gold, and wickedness – carriages, and palaces and brothels, and gambling halls, beats creation.” (Olive Schreiner to Edward Carpenter, Johannesburg, 13 November, 1898).

147: The Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR), in which a conquering white minority resided over an indigenous majority of black pastoralists, was founded on the principle that there would be no racial equality in Church or state. But the pursuit of racial purity had not ensured progress. An economy based on agriculture but without access to markets, and a society held together by a makeshift ideology of Christianity, paternalism and republicanism, did nothing to fill the state’s cofers. This deep – almost feudal – stupor gave way to manic intensity in the 1880s.

In 1884, a reef was uncovered at Barbeton in the eastern ZAR – a development foreshadowed by earlier discoveries of alluvial gold. With a minor rush already under way, there was more excitement twenty-four months later when the largest continuous low-grade gold reefs in the world were discovered on the Witwatersrand. At the helm of the republic’s affairs stood President S.J.P. Kruger, elected in 1881, who was to remain in office throughout the 1890s. Kruger found himself in the unenviable position of having to adapt policies that had been designed to nudge agricultural producers into the industrial age, to the needs of an economy dominated by mining and predicated on foreign capital served by an unruly, urban-based, immigrant proletariat composed of black and white men without their wives.

148: [Johannesburg] A tented diggers’ camp of 3,000 people in 1886 had, by 1896, given way to an unattractive city of 100,000 inhabitants.

148: In 1886 the ZAR produced less than 1% of the world’s gold: by 1898, the figure was 27%. Britain, the dominant power on the subcontinent, already controlled the world’s largest diamond deposits, in Griqualand West. Joseph Chamberlain, British Foreign Secretary and capitalists like Cecil Rhodes were not comfortable with a Boer republic commanding gold production and the routes to imperial expansion in Africa. In 1895 they conspired to overthrow the Kruger government, launching the poorly planned, unsuccessful Jameson Raid. The attempted coup alarmed Kruger. Benefiting from an upsurge in domestic support, the President addressed the mine-owners’ needs with renewed urgency.

150: [Johannesburg] It was a man’s town. Even in the inner core, around the Market Square, where the ratio between the sexes was most balanced, there were two white men to every white women. Beyond that the situations was as promising, with ten black men for every woman. … For all its would-be Englishness, inner Johannesburg exuded an international air and its dusty streets were more like something out of the dry American west than the damp European east. … Dismissed by anti-Semites as ‘Jewburg’, the city had, right from its inception, played host to fully half of southern Africa’s Jewish population. … What Silver found most promising was the presence of 7,000 or more poor East European Jews from Lithuania, Russia and Poland who had used the tide of globalization to carry them to south Africa.

151: Known collectively – but misleadingly – as ‘Peruvians’ by locals who disliked them, this rag-bag of unskilled immigrants hung from the lowest rung of the class ladder. In a new society, their callings as hawkers, traders or assistants in eating-houses and liquor stores placed them in close proximity to African miners and, in the white haze of colonial prejudice, their Russian and Polish identities had become elided. Yet other Peruvians, even further out in the social cold, brought up the rear of this ragged bunch as burglars, confidence men, gamblers, liars, petty thieves, pimps and touts. But whatever walk of life they came from, they had needs Silver could profit from.

152: As in other Atlantic cities, organized prostitution was dominated by the ‘French’ – a sloppy formulation that embraced Brussels as readily as Paris. Comedians and newspaper reporters sometimes referred to the area bounded by Bree Street in the north and Anderson in the south, Kruis in the east and Sauer in the west, as ‘Frenchfontein’/ Of the 95 brothels listed in a municipal survey in 1895, 36 were ‘French’. The city’s most popular brothel - Sylvio Villa – opened in the mid-1890s and only closed in 1906. In its heyday the place had a male manager, a madame, four pimps, and ten prostitutes who on the Saturday after pay-day could deal with close on a hundred black and white clients between 8pm and 1.30am.

154: Only burghers or naturalized citizens were eligible to serve in the ZAR police. This meant that, for the most part, van Dam had to rely on illiterate or poorly educated sons of the least successful farmers. Command of little more than their mother tongue, Afrikaans-Dutch, left them poorly placed to deal with international criminals raised in Babel. Moreover the Zarps were demoralized, poorly paid and, in 1895, had had to go on strike to get their wages. The officers, only slightly better paid and more experienced than their men, were often naturalized ‘outsiders’.

154: Within 24 months of their arrival in 1896, these low class Americans had taken over western Commissioner Street where their cafes, restaurants and saloons were fronts for brothels. A press report claimed that this ‘refuse of the great Republic’ conducted a nightly ‘reign of terror’ on turf where only the bravest ventured. But there were a fractious rabble whose querulousness manifested itself in public displays of disunity.

158: They owned several larger brothels which had displaced similar outfits owned by Frenchmen working with a few African pimps who had linked up with abandoned ‘continental’ whores to cater for the lower end of the market. New York-style low-price, high-turnover, non-racial brothels catering for miners were advertised by word of mouth, or through the distribution of printed cards bearing the names of women.

In a move and words that many a politician has since perfected, Joseph Silver said the following in a letter in 1898, 168: Sir, Your remarks in a leaderette of this morning’s issue regarding the Expulsion of Pimps, is a very commendable one. It would mean nothing less than relief from a gang of bandits and ruffians. It is the moral duty of every well disposed man to assist us in our efforts to remove this undesirable element from the town.

My name having been freely mentioned as one belonging to the pimping fraternity, to that I can only express my desire to hold a mass meeting during the next few days with the object of discussing the desirability of having these shameless ruffians driven out of our midst.

Johannesburg has of late become the refuge of the above-mentioned class, and the unrivalled home in South Africa of people who trade on prostitution, and unless we take some further steps to remove them, they will before long eat themselves into the community so deeply that the cure will be an impossibility.

I appeal to the large section of your readers to support my efforts in this direction so that the special detective force will be enabled to make practically a clean sweep of them.

All the members of the special police force in their desire to carry out their duties [should] leave no stone unturned.

Thanking you, sir, in anticipation, I am, yours etc. Joseph Silver.

179: Consensual and forced acts of homosexuality were commonplace among black prisoners and, more especially, among the ‘Ninevites’, a black gang whose name would have intrigued Silver who had long had more than a passing interest in Old Testament passages that explored sexuality. The rape may or may not have been his only such experience while in the Fort. But his actions remained etched in the consciousness of the Ninevites, who to this day designate those responsible for procuring their ‘boy-wives’ in prison as AmaSilva. (On the Ninevites and the role of AmaSilva see C. van Onselen, ‘The regiment of the hills: Umkosi Wezintaba, the Witwatersrand’s Lumpenproletarian Army, 1890-1920’, in New Babylon, New Nineveh, Life of ‘Nongoloza’ Mathebula, 1867-1948 (Johannesburg 1984).

I Love Johannesburg? 1/2

I’ll be honest about the one thing I love about Johannesburg. Yes, more than the glorious collection of people from all over this continent, and the erudite discussions that very sadly, remain informal. Even more than the dizzying variety of men ahem… people from a certain part of this continent known to still be steeped in traditional African culture and confidence. The history. I love most the history of this at once vibrantly beautiful and depressingly tragic city.

In the years I’ve spent here, I’ve met but a thin sliver of the nationalities and cultures that call it home right now, heard snippets of their stories, their dreams and aspirations. I have met many who, like myself, initially see it is an expedient transit point, only to find that it eventually becomes home. Guess it’s about loving the one you’re with. For all who are transplants to this city (yes, I am taking the liberty of speaking for us all), it is a place of hope. Even at the darkest of hours. There is the promise of a better tomorrow, if only you would gird your loins and stay focused. How can you deny the feeling of hope when you reside in this here pacemaker (if the hype were to be believed) of our incredible continent’s pulse?

I’ve run into people, white people, who tell me they used to own farms in Kenya, in Eldoret, before it took a turn for the worse and they moved down here. I grimace and ask exactly when that was… that history sure has a way of repeating itself. But let’s move from that Kenyan frontier town to this South African one. I’ve met others who tell me how they vacationed in Mombasa, back in the days of the first East African Community. Some were mail-order brides, others were coming to join family. Still others came from poorer pockets of Europe, joining their husbands who had rushed here to seek their fortunes. Then there are those who sought solace here after expulsion from newly freed Lusophone Africa. Their parents had the luxury of never needing to learn English because their communities, right here in Johannesburg, were tight and self-sufficient enough to provide all they needed.

Others are still horrified by the idea of being ruled by black people (I have often heard “if you think of what we did to them, what stops them from taking their revenge?” Indeed.) and it is evident in the state-of-the-art security systems in place. For those less financially endowed, however, paranoia in form of questioning any unfamiliar face in the neighborhood, and support groups (though they do not go by that name) are alternatives to the high walls crowned by electrical fencing (in the larney ‘hoods) and razor wire, in not-quite-so-larney-‘hoods.

Then we have the more recent immigrants: from the same old source pools: Europe, Russia, China (and yes, advertisers are having a field day with the recent pronouncement of Chinese as black and therefore eligible for a piece of the BEE pie), and Africa. People who’ve learnt to parlay any qualification into an opportunity here. Legally or illegally. One would love to query why this city could offer better opportunities than one’s own country should. I’ve encountered the sentiment that Africa is a good pool or testing ground before one decides they’re ready to swim in the vast ocean of global business/opportunity. Maybe that’s how the rest of the continent sees South African opportunities?

Either way, new transplants have a common thread running through their experience: everyone forms pockets of their own community, they seek ‘like’ people and socialize mostly within those circles. The adventurous, the courageous, (or is that naïve?) mix. You’ll come across signs for Greek, Portuguese, Italian, Polish societies. And if you get beyond the ‘westernized’ veneer of African Johannesburg, you’ll find churches of many nationalities: Ethiopian, Nigerian, DRCian, Kenyan. I’ve been to a DRCian church and the energy in there was palpable (beat the heck out of non-singing 7.30am mass which is my mainstay… but I still maintain that nothing yet can’t beat a 1 hour early morning encounter with God before your day begins in earnest). Between the bolingo na yesu live band (I had to remind myself not to shake ye olde booty too hard ‘cause I was in a place of worship), the bling of the high-waisties, and their sons with the low slung beltlines, my spirits lifted, and my soul thirstily wicked up the beauty and energy. The immaculately-dressed women (in African attire), the couple of guys blinging their coupés in the parking lot… And that experience is repeated in all African churches in this city.

All these interactions contribute fragments to my knowledge of the history of this city. Someone tells me their family moved here in the late 1970s. Their first couple of experiences in the traditional churches were traumatic: pews in the back for blacks. The family walked to the front (clearly unaware), and the ushers had to quickly intervene and tell them about the ‘back of the bus’. They quickly formed their own church, where they could be fully human and not seek approval that wasn’t forthcoming. It was not an easy city for an African immigrant then, neither is it now. But with the right amount of dexterity, you can carve your own niche, like every other transplant has. And with the right amount of exposure, you can sample morsels of others’ experiences. If only to reassure and educate yourself.

I raise the issue of a city’s history because sometimes, when we’re in the thick of the present, we forget that history likes to repeat itself, that we’re in the midst of an average. A trend. A pattern. We forget that the more things change, the more they stay the same. I say this, not to be fatalist, quite the opposite. I point it out so that we don’t remain mired in pessimism. That we bear in mind: once a frontier town, always a frontier town. The commodity may change, but that spirit, that vibrancy, remains. It hovers above the place. Ebbing and flowing.

I’m currently reading a book (ok, tome) touted, in certain circles, to be a history of the real ‘Jack the Ripper’, yes the same one that that knighted chap, Arthur Conan Doyle made memorable through his opium-inspired hero, Holmes. According to the author (Charles van Onselen) ‘The fox and the flies’ is the culmination of just shy of 30 years of research. Across 4 continents, a dozen countries. And it provides some interesting insight into Johannesburg of the closing decade of the 19^th century, and the start of the 20^th century. After reading van Onselen’s accounts of Johannesburg of that time, I was hard-pressed to determine much of a change. All that’s happened now is that ‘the bad guys’ are recently-arrived Africans, and those vilifying them are primarily ‘the locals’. There is the persistent presence of the morality police still, even in these so-called ‘liberated’ times. And, one would hope, those currently receiving the hind teat will work their way on up out of that position and make way for new immigrants who will also move on up.