Luring the sceptics back into the city
Joburg used to be great in the old days — if you were white. Gerald Garner is determined to banish this misplaced nostalgia and is the main driving force behind the first Johannesburg City Festival, which kicks off today. reports
FOR a generation of Joburgers, the inner city has always been a place of rumour, urban legend and nostalgia. It is a place you heard more about than ever actually spent time in and where, everyone assured you, should you dare to venture, something bad would inevitably happen.
Parents and their parents would bemoan the mutation of a once thriving, safe, city centre full of New York-style department stores, cinemas and theatres into a dirty, chaotic, crime-ridden Sodom and Gomorrah. But once you ignored everyone’s doomsday prophecies and naysaying and ventured into this forbidden land, what you found was nothing like what was described around suburban dinner tables.
Over the past decade, the inner city has experienced a burst of regeneration, renewed investment and faith in its potential by both the private sector and municipal development institutions such as the Johannesburg Development Agency.
Sitting outside Cramer’s Coffee Shop at the top of the Main Street walkway in 2013, you would be forgiven for thinking you were in a major US or European city as a red City Sightseeing open-top bus full of tourists drives by on its way to the Carlton Centre.
Opposite me, Gerald Garner is emphatic that “the greatest thing about this city is that it collapsed because of the apartheid legacy, because of PW Botha’s Rubicon speech, because of disinvestment. In the end the city collapsed and we should be happy. The one thing that upsets me is nostalgia for the ’70s. People forget that when it was fantastic and you could shop in Commissioner Street and go to the theatres, there was a f***ing whites-only bench around the corner. They pretend it was so wonderful — and it was not wonderful. It was an artificial city and it had to die, and what is being created today is far more inspirational and exciting, and I think that’s fantastic.”
Garner, who is the author of two books celebrating the diversity of Johannesburg, has run walking tours in the city for the past three years and serves as a member of the Johannesburg City Tourism Agency. He is organising the first Johannesburg City Festival, which starts
The greatest thing about this city is that it collapsed because of the apartheid legacy, because of PW Botha’s Rubicon speech and disinvestment. And we should be happy
today and runs until August 31. It aims to introduce Joburgers to a very different idea of their city and its potential.
He is an enthusiastic optimist who believes that “Johannesburg is actually the most interesting destination in South Africa that you can visit as a tourist, and we want people to know that. So we came up with the festival as the mechanism to start changing perceptions. We’re in this for the long term; all the businesses are in this for the long term. We don’t only want to create a week every year, but the week will help change people’s perceptions — expose them to what’s available in town so that they can come here all the time.”
It has been a bone of contention over the past few years that even though there have been pockets of development in the CBD, there is still a disconnect between areas and it is difficult to get people to spend time in the city after working hours. It is an issue the festival aims to address. Garner says that “part of the purpose of the festival is to put pressure on everyone in town to become more open to opening up at other hours and making the town come alive. This is a fantastic street, but only Capello’s is open at night. None of the others are open late. Some will be open for the festival, but what we want to start promoting is that we want to bring the city alive. There are a few hotels here and a few apartments, so now we need everything else and we hope it will become a catalyst to open people’s eyes to that potential.”
Festivalgoers will be able to use the convenient Rea Vaya and Gautrain transport systems — as well as a fleet of tuk-tuks — to move between Braamfontein, Newtown, the inner city and Maboneng. Events range from a craft-beer market at the Lamunu Hotel in Braamfontein and fashion shows in the district around Pritchard Street to walking tours, film screenings and gourmet dinners on the top of the National Bank building opposite the Library Gardens.
At the Reef Hotel in Frederick Street is the glitzy Reef Grill restaurant, and final preparations are being made for the hotel’s 16th-floor rooftop bar, which has spectacular views of the inner city’s rooftops and highways stretching to the south of the city. In the apartment in which television’s The Apprentice was filmed, one marvels at the views from a jacuzzi in the penthouse’s dome and dreams of the sunset panoramas promised from the balcony at cocktail hour.
Aside from a scrape with security guards who believe that taking pictures of public spaces is a practice they are supposed to prevent, there are no issues of safety. Garner quips that he always tells his walking tour parties that he feels safer in the city than in Craighall Park, where he lives. In fact, if tourists should be worried about anything, he says, it is “to be careful about where they step, because the biggest risk is that you might fall in a manhole . . . Immediately outside the Gautrain at Park Station there’s a massive manhole that I’ve been complaining about for seven months, and I’ve written a letter to everyone in the province saying that if a tourist falls in that manhole during the festival, you’re going to be responsible.”
After a walk down Main Street to see the almost miraculous transformation of Chancellor House, Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo’s old law office — which Garner thinks is “probably the most important heritage property in our city” — it is back to the corner of Marshall and Loveday streets, where Garner has his offices. Gandhi Square has not yet been transformed into the football field it will become for the first annual Jozi Street Ball Cham- pionship, and there are dozens of other venues that will be part of the festivities. Thanks to Garner’s enthusiasm, it is easy to see that even suburban sceptics are in for a surprise over the next few days, and there might even be a new optimism around those dinner table tales in the future.
The Joburg City Festival runs from August 25-31. For more information and the full programme visit joburgcity.net