“The fractured, shifting city of Johannesburg.”

And its magpie inhabitants.

This week seems to have eroded my usually buoyant and glass-half-full attitude towards the decaying city I call home.

A friend of mine, with whom I do my hallowed Friday morning shop at the Randburg Wholesale Market at the Carrreiras Shopping Centre, returned from one of her many trips to Portugal to visit her family (that she has ties to Portugal makes her Royalty at Carreiras), and driving along our pot-holed roads, the highveld blue-sky, the cheerful people we interact with (I would be unable to live in a country where a complete stranger doesn’t call me “my darling”. “Morning my darling, what is the price on that plant?”), the scarring poverty and degradation all around us, and I said, “Oh Johannesburg is such a shit-hole, why do we love it so much?”.

But this week, that gloss of affection was dimmed and all I could think was what am I doing here? What is going on? Why is it such a mess?

Maybe it began with an article in the Daily Maverick from an outgoing Randburg ward councillor who said, among other things, that “The City of Joburg is effectively run via WhatsApp”[1].

“It is unfathomable that a city the size of Johannesburg, with the largest budget for capital and operational expenditure, fails to have integrated and working systems and resources to monitor service delivery which ensures it takes place without the need for ward councillors to be so intertwined in the basics.”

This week our suburb, along with the surrounding suburbs fed from the same reservoir, have had on-again, off-again water. Greenside is at the bottom of the hill, so we are, luckily, always the last to run out of water. Our local mosque has filtered borehole water that is open to all community members – a mercy of living in a suburb of kind and middle-class people, who are able to (partially) secure themselves against these all too frequent system failures. Almost every second house in Greenside now has some kind of solar panel and/or inverter system in place. Not everyone is this fortunate.

So there’s that. Interrupted water and electricity, irate whatsapp groups, and the constant stream of desperate people ringing my doorbell. I alternate between sadness and irritation when I hear their stories. It is too much, too frequent, my empathy evaporates with the morning dew: Mozambicans chased out of Yeoville and sleeping at Zoo Lake, people who are sick and need food to take their medication, “I am cold, do you have a blanket?”, “do you have milk for my child?”

In the past I would have been able to see these instances of hardship as part of the reality of a large and unequal city. I would be able to romanticize it somehow – it is good for us to come face-to-face with human reality, we are exposed to a microcosm of social inequality in real-time, it keeps us aware. But there was still the relief of beauty and adventure to be found.

I needed some work done on my cello. There is an artisan who lives on the Kensington koppies in a magical home, built right into the rock, with views eastwards, the green trees, the blue skies, that are quintessential to exhaling in our city. His workshop is magical, but I was last there 15 years ago, as a brand new Joburger.

As I drove through the city, through Bertrams and past Ellis Park and along Kitchener Ave, through Troyeville, I remembered my first drive on these streets in December 2006. My first job out of varsity and my employer had sent a driver to fetch me from the airport and deposit me at our offices in Braamfontein.

As we made our way from the east of the city to the centre, I marveled at this version of my country I had never known existed. The old mining houses, the rocky outcrops, the trees, and the resilient Joburgers going about their days. I would soon discover the prawns at the Troyeville Hotel, the free Friday night jazz at the Radium Beerhall, eating dim sum in Cyrildene, eating curry in Fordsburg, I would do yoga at the Johannesburg Art Gallery – the glorious dilapidation of Joburg won my heart. Maybe that feeling is what makes me feel most at home – no other city has offered me a view of beauty in brokenness.

But this week, my heart broke, making this journey in the reverse, from Greenside to Kensington, through the city centre. All the romance and nostalgia were gone. All I saw this time (was it always this way?) was the rubbish, the poverty, the hollowed-out buildings. All I thought was, if cushy Greenside residents are beside themselves with frustration at interruptions in water and electricity, what must be going on here? What is fomenting in the hearts of these stony-faced people on the side of the road, this old man dragging his trolley of dirty belongings under the highway?

And then yesterday I went to the Johannesburg Art Gallery, home to over a billion rands worth of art, the largest collection in Southern Africa, and all my longing for beauty and hope was gone. The faulty sense of nostalgia colonial buildings offered in the face of urban degradation felt ridiculous. Paint is peeling off the walls, 70% of the gallery is unusable, there is damp, there is mold, it is dirty. There are artworks, literally, lying around on the floor, where a haphazard attempt at repair is being made in one of the rooms. It left me heavy with the reality of our situation.

And then I came home to my corner of peace and respite, and I wondered, what should our response be? What can be done? And also, shamefully, I understood why people don’t want to venture beyond the shiny-new parts of Joburg. At the end of yesterday I felt like I never wanted to leave my house again. And what does that mean about living here? That can’t be good.

I woke up this morning, still with a heavy heart, and opened my favourite cookbook by Joburg chef Andrea Burgener, Lampedusa Pie. Her restaurants and shops and recipes have always been a perfectly curated version of the Joburg I love. Eclectic, rough around the edges and delicious. Drawing ingredients from the shops in our many little cultural enclaves and throwing them together to create something familiar to the Joburg palate.

In her introduction she writes, “The recipes in this book are all over the road in terms of style, history, everything. They are partly, I guess, the result of my upbringing in the fractured, shifting city of Johannesburg, where I have lived all my life… I am a magpie cook. I am fickle and disloyal to many dishes. But not to all: the dishes that spring from nostalgia I am foolishly attached to. If you’re the nostalgic sort, Johannesburg is an especially weird city in which to grow up. You are forever watching your favourite places disappear. There is of course no innocence in nostalgia, in a country with a history such as ours (indeed, many argue that nostalgia is always a very dodgy and reactionary state).”

So perhaps, letting go of nostalgia, which might have always been a fictional reality, is the way to live in this city. To be a magpie, a scavenger, following what is shiny and brings joy, no matter how ephemeral, is the Joburg way.

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[1] https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2023-05-31-a-departing-joburg-councillors-cry-for-his-beloved-broken-city/