Editor’s Note
Creative eccentric Watkin “Waddy” Tudor Jones has reinvented himself almost as many times as the city of Johannesburg has tried on a new face for size. My favourite Jones incarnation is as the front man of the group Max Normal (he’d later become Ninja in the group Die Antwoord) — Jones in a pale grey suit, white shirt and striped tie riffing off the Max Headroom video of the mid-’80s pop hit Paranoimia in a moving geometric background. There’s a number my brother and I loved from the album Songs from the Mall. The song is Hazel’s Joint and features the lyrics “On our, mountain bikes, cuz we live like that... Rollin’ through the burbs feelin’ the opposite of shitty. Joburg is such a pretty city.”
This last line often got us arguing. Is Joburg a pretty city? Capetonians might disagree. “The most beautiful in the world” — in my brother’s opinion. “There’s such an honest grittiness to it,” he’d say, and so many different faces, especially the view overlooking town from the M1. In the foreground, the big red roofs of the Market Theatre complex and in the middle ground the Diamond Building on Diagonal Street, which always makes me think of the opening theme of Dallas (maybe because it showed the Dallas skyline with its own collection of glass skyscrapers).
Our Joburg glass monolith was, in fact, built by a famous American architect, Helmut Jahn — who didn’t build the two shining look-alikes in Dallas, but did design plenty of other sparkling obelisks across the US and Germany. The Diagonal Street client was De Beers, hence the shape of the building — that and the idea that it could be seen from all over the city, resembling a diamond from every angle and reflecting Johannesburg back to itself in a kind of homage.
Over the years, there’ve been many attempts to “fix” the Joburg CBD, disconnected as it’s become from the economic hubs of Sandton and Rosebank. Constitution Hill, Nelson Mandela Bridge and the upgrades of Newtown around Mary Fitzgerald Square were some — Maboneng, Braamfontein’s revival and The Sheds in Fox Street others. We keep reinventing our look, layer upon layer, and I keep driving over the M1 thinking to myself, “Joburg, you’re such a pretty city.” For comments, criticism or praise, write to nagela@sundaytimes.co.za