October 10, 2005
LAST Tuesday, 4 October, was Johannesburg's 119th birthday.
In his book Early Johannesburg, Hannes Meiring records that while Captain Carl von Brandis read out the proclamation of the Witwatersrand goldfields on 20 September 1886, "Randjeslaagte was to become a public diggings on 4 October 1886, the date which has ever since come to be regarded as the birthday of Johannesburg."
We are rather a young city in comparison with many "world cities", but have experienced as much controversy in our relatively short life as have most cities five times our age, and more.
More than a century on and, while we now have much to celebrate and look forward to, there is also much to mourn.
The overwhelming majority of our 119 years have consisted of periods of imperialism, colonialism and apartheid, with their respective dogmas and ideologies imposed and stamped on the city.
Greedy beginnings
In 1953 F Addington Symonds somewhat dramatically described the beginnings of "The Johannesburg Story" as he saw it then, as "grotesque, incredible - a melodrama acted by characters too unreal for real life, too fantastic for fiction ... In a wild greedy rush they came - those who were to be the polyglot founders of this fantastic metropolis - four thousand of them in the first mad stampede.
"Came on foot, on bicycles, on mules, in carts and coaches, even in a hansom cab and all dressed ready for the circus - in top hats and rags, in prospector's red shirts and corduroys, in blankets and skins. Came to scratch and to search for the dust that has blinded men's eyes all down the centuries, the gold that 'Oom Paul' said 'would yet have to be weighed up in rivers of tears'.
"Men known and unknown, shrewd financiers and shabby adventurers, artful dodgers from the four corners of the earth, crossing oceans and continents and the eternal veld in response to that beckoning, golden finger, whilst Midas watched them with his twisted grin and gave or withheld his prize with the cynical detachment of Chance."
Keith Beavon, 50 years later in his preface to Johannesburg, the Making and the Shaping of the City, wrote somewhat more pragmatically, "for most of its short life the city has been characterised by greed and opportunism of the worst kind.
"Those vices account for a large measure of the inequality and brashness that have manifested themselves in the social and economic geography that underlies Johannesburg's townscape at any stage of its evolution from segregation, through apartheid, to post-apartheid city."
Unique city
Yet a unique city exists today, even though its beginnings were ignominious and its character flawed by continuing greed and opportunism.
It is unique in that we are one of the few, if not the only major world city, with no river flowing through it nor established on the edge of a sea or lake - in fact with absolutely no redeeming feature of natural beauty.
We are unique in that the reason for the existence of the city, "the dust that has blinded men's eyes all down the centuries" has long gone, yet the city did not disappear as have most "gold rush" towns. Instead, it has continued to grow and re-invent itself.
Our growth itself is unique - from "the four thousand in the first mad stampede" to 26 000 residents, four theatres, three social clubs, many sports clubs and 312 bars and hotels within four years.
Six years later the population had quadrupled to 102 500 and the number of bars to 552. By 1928 the population had quadrupled again to 442 000 and eight years later, at 620 000, the population exceeded the combined populations of the much older cities of Cape Town, Pretoria and Durban.
The buildings that housed this explosive growth are unique collectively in that they reflect the cosmopolitan nature of the city, using imported styles from every city in the world and every architectural period, but with very little home grown, original African.
Much of this physical inheritance has been lost as buildings have constantly been destroyed, to be replaced by bigger and supposedly better structures - often through the greed and opportunism that Keith Beavon highlights and to which I would add, ego.
Cosmopolitan melting pot
But where we are truly unique is in our people - the huge cosmopolitan melting pot of those descended from the peoples who were already here but about whom we know very little; those "from the four corners of the earth, crossing oceans and continents and the eternal veld" about whom much is known; and, finally, those who came (and continue to come) temporarily and intermittently from all over their native Africa: Jozi, city of migrants and immigrants.
The challenges we face in righting the wrongs of the past as we deal with the future of the city are also unique. It is an opportunity that must be grasped and must transcend the greed, opportunism and ego that has dominated its history.
I have been thrilled and stimulated by many aspects of many cities all over the world, but this 119-year-old has a uniqueness that isn't to be found elsewhere.
Happy birthday, babe!
Neil
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