Johannesburg

There’s a ritual to entering Johannesburg by road: as soon as Ponte City or Hillbrow towers and the Carlton Centre can be discerned, I pop the album End Beginnings into my CD player and pump out Johannesburg. In the song, the poet Lesego Rampolokeng’s words brood over the music of the Kalahari Surfers, capturing this straining, muscular, constantly jostling, forever hustling city of paradoxes.

His words conjure adrenaline, excitement, curiosity, the promise of engagement with friends, art, music, fashion, politics, ideas and the thrill of walking on the (cutting) edge. Rampolokeng’s words are a provocation to join what he terms the “walk of uncertainty” which so typifies this elusive metropolis.

Johannesburg is where things happen in South Africa. It’s also my favourite city in the world. Nothing beats watching the sun rise persimmon and purple over a coffee from my home in the Ansteys Building. The first parp of a minibus taxi searching out commuters is the urban riposte to the crow of the cockerel, as the smell of amagwinya, the deep-fried dough balls which sustain workers, wafts up from a street stall.

From my balcony, I see the Nelson Mandela Bridge to the northwest, the towers outside the Constitutional Court jutting over Hillbrow to the north, the surrounding skyscrapers, while the urban sprawl towards Soweto unfolds to the south and west: South African history short-handed into one long sweeping pan.

Ansteys houses a community that cuts across race, class and ethnicity. Working-class Black South African families, queer people, an immigrant Senegalese network, artists and lawyers all call her home. In that sense of home, deep friendships emerge – that for me is the most enduring aspect of a city which can nourish with one breast and, paradoxically, suffocate with the other. The friendships she provides.

Niren Tolsi is an award-winning journalist. His first book, Writing Around the Wicket – Race, Class and History in South African Cricket, was published in 2024