Jo-Burg

Last week, I spent an hour on the Internet looking up quotes about Johannesburg in preparation for our trip there. The winner:

“No second Johannesburg is needed on the earth. One is enough.” –Alan Paton, Cry, The Beloved Country

Needless to say, it set up certain expectations for our trip. I got on the plane expecting to land up in some metropolitan hole of despair, or at least be dogged by evidence of great hardship at every turn. And I can’t say that I was entirely wrong. Johannesburg is ringed by yellow hills that have been turned over and drained of gold, and now just stand there barren; and you’d also have to determinedly and purposefully set your mind against seeing the stark contrast between the rich, leafy green suburbs and the streets of Soweto. Johannesburg is a far cry from an ideal city. But while I was anticipating an opportunity to lament the fallen state of the world, what I actually got was a lesson in remembering and rebuilding.

So: we start out at the Voortrekker Monument, a stone colossus commemorating the Dutch Boers’ journey across the country away from the oppressive British settlers. At face value it’s just another memorial, but when you stop to look at the engravings on the wall, there are depictions of valiant colonists gunning down Zulu warriors while wielding Bibles. It also houses a tomb marking their struggle to win over the land they believed rightfully belonged to them. When the Nationalist Party came to power in 1948 and established apartheid, the Voortrekker Monument was where the Afrikaners celebrated their victory. In light of apartheid, the entire thing is repulsive and offensive, and there was actually a movement in the late 1990’s to tear it down. But they’ve kept it standing. Why?

But then we went to the Constitutional Court. And South Africa’s highest court, its ultimate seat of justice, is built right on top of the old prison complex that housed political prisoners like Winnie Mandela and Mohandas Gandhi. The Awaiting Trial Block (self-explanatory) has been torn down and its bricks have been used to make the walls of the courtroom (two of its stairwells form the corners). There’s one long walkway that separates the old prison cells of Number Four from the institution that upholds the most progressive constitution in the world.

And the more we saw of Johannesburg—the Regina Mundi church in Soweto, riddled with bullet holes from police attacks during the student uprising in 1976; the Hector Pieterson Museum, commemorating the children killed that summer; the executive seat, built by white supremacists and handed over to Nelson Mandela in 1994; the Apartheid Museum, a powerful place of memory which deserves an entire blog entry to itself—the more that this sort of pattern came up. Johannesburg has an awful history, but they’re not erasing the way it’s been told in the past or pretending it didn’t happen. They’re letting its witness stand and building up their future not despite it, but through it. It’s beyond bittersweet; it’s heartbreaking and heartening at the same time.

So Alan Paton is probably right: no second Johannesburg is needed on the earth. But the one that exists isn’t beyond repair. And maybe the way that it’s coming to terms with its history deserves to be emulated elsewhere.