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About Jozi Joburg: multi-coloured city of gold
About Jozi Joburg: multi-coloured city of gold
Official host city for the 2010 FIFA World CupTM
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| Joburg: multi-coloured city of gold |
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| Written by Lorraine Kearney | |
| Friday, 18 April 2008 | |
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Joburg is the warm and pumping heart of Africa, the economic engine of Southern Africa and the trendsetter of South Africa. It is a melting pot laced with all the flavours of Africa and beyond
BORN as a squalling gold-rush village on the hot and dusty Witwatersrand reef in 1886, Johannesburg still has the wild energy and “can do” attitude brought here by the thousands of fortune-seekers and other hangers-on lured by the promise of quick wealth. 
One of the city's museums: The Old Fort on Constitution Hill
But more than that, Johannesburg has become a truly African city, melding disparate people from across the continent with the descendents of the original Tswana and Ndebele inhabitants and the European, Indian and Chinese settlers. You can visit Little Lagos, home to a vast number of Nigerians, in Hillbrow. Ghanaian and Senegalese tailors mend clothes alongside formal and informal traders from Zimbabwe, Malawi and Somalia in the inner city flatlands of Berea, Hillbrow and Yeoville. Congolese keep a watchful eye on parked cars across the city, and the Portuguese heard in Troyeville now comes from Mozambique. It is one of the very few major cities in the world that was not built on water - the massive gold deposits were more attractive than a river to the early white settlers. And indeed it was the gold-hunters that began Joburg’s cosmopolitan nature. Today descendents of immigrants from around the world call themselves Joburgers and they are added to daily by a continual stream of migrants, keen to have some of the city’s shine rub off on them. People English is the language of business, and everyone speaks it. However, dozens of other languages are heard on Joburg’s streets - from the indigenous Setswana and Sepedi to the warrior isiZulu; from the colonial English to the farmer Afrikaans; from the six additional official South African languages to the many other local languages. And then there are the foreign tongues - you will hear the varied voices of Africa on the streets: Congolese, French, Senegalese, Somalian and Swahili compete with the languages of Malawi, Nigeria, Burundi, Rwanda and Mozambique, and more besides. Out of necessity, comes invention, and the mines gave rise to their own language, Fanakolo, a mix of all languages spoken on the reef, although it is generally seen as derogatory. From the townships came other street languages and social groups, with their own styles of dressing and dancing; there is Tsotsitaal, in which numbers often replace words; Mapantsula; and Scamto, which was born alongside modern kwaito music. There is a strong Chinese community, which in recent years has moved from the lower end of Commissioner Street in the CBD to the eastern suburb of Cyrildene. There is also a large Portuguese community, living mainly around Troyeville, Kensington and Bez Valley, again on the eastern edge of the city. There is a small French community, enough to support a French school and cultural organisations, as well as a small German group, again with its own school and cultural organisations. The Italian presence is strong enough to ensure that there are many restaurants throughout the city offering traditional pizza and pasta. The Muslim community is growing, and the call of the muezzin is reaching further north, to Greenside and Emmarentia, from the traditional Muslim areas of Vrededorp and Fietas. The Jewish community is thinning out, however, as more young Jews immigrate to Israel, the US and Australia. And all of these people have brought their languages, culture, traditions, cuisine and style - Joburg is truly a new world city, a melting pot of dozens of tribes. History It is a relatively young city, although its roots go deep : an Iron Age furnace in Melville Koppies , now a national monument, dates back to 1060AD. There are several other such furnaces - one in Northcliff, just down the road from Melville, others in Honeydew and Lonehill in the far north, and near Bruma Lake in the east.
Paying tribute to the city's heritage
It is believed that Bantu peoples settled at the Soutpansberg mountains in Limpopo, 400km north of Johannesburg, around 350AD. These peoples originated from central Africa, eastern Nigeria and Cameroon in particular, and from about 1000BC they started migrating south to Angola and east to the Great Lakes, in a succession of migratory waves. In a later wave of migration, Bantu peoples crossed the Limpopo again and settled just north of the Soutpansberg about 1 000 years ago. These Venda are the first black South Africans. They trace their ancestry back to the establishment of the first indigenous capital on two hills, Bambandyanalo and Mapungubwe, near a small town called Pontdrift, almost on the border of South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana, some 100km west of Musina in Limpopo. The Mapungubwe kingdom is directly related to the Shona of Zimbabwe, the Tswana of Botswana and the Venda, Tswana and Sotho of South Africa. These peoples probably moved down from East Africa, and moved further south when that region experienced drier conditions. They would have moved down with cattle and iron. But around 1300AD both Mapungubwe and Bambandyanalo declined, and the settlements disappeared. Groups of people started moving south and reached the Soutpansberg again in about 1300AD and spread further into the Magaliesberg, in about 1400AD. These settlements grew southwards to the Witwatersrand. Evidence of their scattered villages is seen in aerial photographs showing the rings made by their kraals, usually situated on koppies. Aerial photographs of Klipriviersberg Nature Reserve, just south of the city, reveal 19 stone-walled Iron Age settlements dating from about 1500AD. By 1800AD stone walling was widespread. These Tswana peoples lived peacefully on the koppies, in settlements stretching from Northcliff and Lonehill in the north, through Melville in the west, Bruma in the east, to Klipriviersberg in the south. But then, in 1823 the warrior Mzilikazi, who was ousted from KwaZulu-Natal by the powerful Zulu king Shaka and his impis, settled in the area. Mzilikazi consolidated his army, which by 1829 was between 6 000 and 8 000 strong, from defeated tribes. And then the Voortrekkers moved into the area and, as a result, in 1837 Mzilikazi was forced to move further north, into Zimbabwe. The Voortrekkers took large tracts of land, farming peacefully alongside the sparse remnants of Mzilikazi's people, the Ndebele. But all that changed in 1886 when gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand . Culture Yes, it is a brash upstart, filled with glitz, glamour and gold, but Joburg is also a cultural city . It has world-class art galleries and theatres , restaurants serving up every cuisine you care to name, shops filled with produce from all corners of the globe, cutting-edge fashion, music and ballet too. 
Joburg is a cultural city
Newtown has become the city’s cultural capital, ending the arc that starts in Braamfontein at Constitutional Hill , passing the Civic Theatre complex, and crossing the magnificent Nelson Mandela Bridge. Entertainment is varied, with something for everyone - cinemas, casinos, museums, parks and the Johannesburg Zoo; there are nightclubs pumping out everything from house music to kwaito, jazz and blues, and a host of underground alternative clubs. And, of course, there is Soweto, the largest township in the country and the spark that lit the flame of freedom. It boasts the only street in the world where two Nobel Peace Prize laureates have homes - Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. They say that if you haven’t partied in Soweto, you simply haven’t partied.
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Joburg speaks out
Jozi residents talk about their city, the 2010 build-up, their favourite places.
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