I am Johannesburg-born and bred but if there’s one place I avoid like the plague, it’s downtown Jozi.
The big, bad city of Johannesburg has always invoked feelings of fear and anxiety whenever I’ve had to venture through it.
When I found out that the tourist walks and drives to which Gauteng Tourism Authority CEO Dawn Robertson had invited us involved exploring the city centre’s mean streets, I wanted to jump off the bus and hightail it back to the safety of the Parktonian Hotel and wait for everyone else to return.
Boy, am I glad I didn’t!
The tour started with a history lesson like no other by guide Gerald Garner, author of JoburgPlaces.
Before its many skyscraping buildings and man-made subtropical forests (the largest in the world), Johannesburg consisted of farms and grassland where eland roamed free.
One hundred and twenty-seven years later, the city has seen its fair share of eventful occurrences: The gold rush that began in 1886, the Anglo-Boer War, apartheid, democracy in 1994, the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa. And now, in 2014, Jozi is still expanding.
Johannesburg is still a go-to destination for fortune-seekers far and wide, and has become Africa’s very own New York.
The city has many hidden gems waiting to be explored:
- Take yourself way back and grab a few LPs and cassettes at the Kohinoor World of Music
- Sit on the laps of Walter and Albertina Sisulu at the intersection of Diagonal, Ntemi Piliso and Market Streets. Just across the street, walk into Minty’s fabric store and buy metres of shweshwe and African print fabrics
- If your tummy starts growling, make your way to Dahleas in Braamfontein for delicious bowls of pasta, or beef sliders with a tasty mushroom sauce
We did all of this – and more – and the day wasn’t over yet.
From Gandhi Square, we made our way through the mining district and deeper into Johannesburg’s gold mining past.
Our tour ended off in the heart of the CBD at Chancellor House, one of the city’s most important sites. It was from there that Mandela & Tambo Attorneys operated in the 1950s.
Across the street from Chancellor House is Shadow Boxer, a majestic sculpture of the late Nelson Mandela as a boxing amateur. More intrigued by the science of the sport than the violence, he used boxing as a way to take his mind off the struggle.
A visit to the exhibition titled The Rise and Fall of Apartheid, at Museum Africa, perfectly ended off the tour of Jozi’s rise, fall and regeneration.
I saw another side to Jozi that made me fall madly in love with all of it, and now I can’t wait to explore the rest of the beautiful City of Gold.
