Johannesburg tours reintroduce residents to the city they grew up in

Guide James Manguza takes people out of their 'bubble' to neighborhoods that have long been considered no-go zones for the Sout African city’s tourists and suburbanites alike.

|
Ryan Lenora Brown
James Manguza (second right) and Junior Mungomeni (fourth from right) discuss the history of downtown Johannesburg with visitors on a culinary tour of Yeoville, an immigrant-heavy inner-city neighborhood.

On a ridge high above downtown Johannesburg, tour guide James Manguza turns his back to the jumble of modernist skyscrapers below and begins teaching his crash course in the history of the inner city.

It’s a tale of starry-eyed gold prospectors and roving gangsters, of the testosterone-fueled cosmopolitanism of a 19th-century frontier town, where men of all races were united by a single ambition: money.

But as the story winds through the last century, it grows darker. Mr. Manguza describes the rise of apartheid and the sharp racial lines it drew across a once mixed city, with black families evicted to distant, segregated suburbs, far from the city’s economic heart.  

In front of Mr. Manguza, his charges, all of whom are white, begin to nod solemnly. This part of the story, they remember.

Manguza is describing the Johannesburg where they grew up, a city where race dictated everything from the park bench you sat on to the hospital where you were born and the neighborhoods in which you were allowed to live.

That’s a history that still courses through Johannesburg’s present. And it means that although everyone on this tour has lived in the city most of their lives, none of them have been to this part of town in nearly 30 years, since it began its slow drift from a mostly-white residential suburb to a nearly entirely black one.

“South Africans live in a bubble,” Manguza says later, as he leads the group down a busy artery, where Ethiopian restaurants jostle up against bars thumping Congolese pop music and tiny corner shops selling highlighter-red palm oil and gnarled West African yams.

The tour they’re on focuses on the culinary offerings of this immigrant-heavy neighborhood, Yeoville. “Because of the crime, people live with the paranoia that everyone is out to get them,” he says. “What we’re trying to do is get people out, show them their neighbors.”

Manguza, a Congolese immigrant who has lived in this part of Johannesburg since he was 8, works for a company called Dlala Nje, which offers walking tours of two inner-city Johannesburg neighborhoods – Yeoville and Hillbrow – that have long been considered no-go zones for the city’s tourists and suburbanites alike.

Over the past few years, the number of “alternative” city tours in Johannesburg like this one has mushroomed, giving both locals and tourists the chance to tour everything from graffiti to urban swimming pools to Africa’s tallest apartment building.

Entering 'forbidden' places

Below their diverse surfaces, these tours have a common theme, says Heather Mason, a Johannesburg-based travel writer and blogger. They give people permission to step into places in this deeply divided city that history, custom, and paranoia have long dictated they stay far away from.

“There’s a specific appeal to these tours in Johannesburg because it’s a city with so many places people still perceive as forbidden,” Ms. Mason says.

Those perceptions are beginning to shift.

In the run-up to the 2010 World Cup, the city began pouring money into the “renewal” of the inner city – and private developers followed, transforming swaths of real estate from derelict warehouses to blocks of coffee shops and artists’ lofts.

Johannesburg – long cast in guidebooks as gritty and unsafe, a necessary but unfortunate stopover en route to safari parks and beach vacations – began to earn bewildered accolades from the travel sections of papers like The New York Times, who called it “one of Africa’s most thrilling metropolises” in a 2012 piece.

But if those changes have been appealing to international visitors, they’ve had a decidedly mixed impact on Johannesburg residents – a fact Sifiso Ntuli never fails to highlight on his tours of the western corridor of the city. The streets may be safer, he says, but for whom – the black people who walk them, or the white people who have long been too afraid to?

'Apartheid isn't a museum'

Mr. Ntuli, an engineer and restaurateur, spent a decade in exile from the apartheid government, and his tour is unflinching in its critiques of both the country’s past and present.

“People who come to this city often visit our apartheid museum – but apartheid isn’t a museum. It’s alive, it’s well,” he says, referring to South Africa’s gaping levels of inequality, which are among the highest in the world.

For Salma Patel, too, the purpose of taking people on tours of the city is to excavate its painful history, not bury it. Her own tour zig-zags across Fietas, a once racially mixed neighborhood west of the city center that was blighted in the 1970s by one of South Africa’s infamous “forced removals,” which took aim at mixed areas of the city by marking them as slums and scattering their residents to distant, segregated peripheries.

Her own family fought the removal, and today she lives in a house wedged between open lots piled with rubble – sites where homes were destroyed and simply never rebuilt.

“I don’t think of myself as just a tour guide,” she says. “This is my own life. It’s my own journey.”

Back in Yeoville, the tour group ambles toward its last stop – a Cameroonian restaurant serving up grilled fish and heaps of hot fried plantains. One of the men remarks that the atmosphere reminds him of other African cities he’s visited – a frenetic, lively hustle that seems to continue around the clock.

But then he sees the old colonial buildings and the street names he remembers from childhood, he says, and he realizes with surprise that he’s not far from home.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Johannesburg tours reintroduce residents to the city they grew up in
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/2016/0725/Johannesburg-tours-reintroduce-residents-to-the-city-they-grew-up-in
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe