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Cape Town versus Johannesburg

23rd May 2014

By: Terry Mackenzie-hoy

  

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I was brought up in Craighall, Johannes- burg. At the time, Craighall was the limit of the Johannesburg municipality. Beyond, to the north, lay an area of plots and smallholdings.

It was a bit of a failure to be in Craighall, sort of. Real families lived in Parktown, on the ridge, preferably with the view north. If you were not quite U, you lived south in the southern suburbs, like Booysens or Malvern. Living in the southern suburbs was, as far as my mother made us aware, the end of the line. To speak with the “dreadful southern suburbs accent” was to be near to, if not at, the bottom of the human feeding chain.

Even while I was young, I had an engi- neering eye. The Johannesburg municipality had guessed (correctly) that housing expansion would make its way to the north and so had to extend sewerage, water and elec- tricity in that direction. My brother and I went to St Peter’s School, in Rivonia. To begin with, the road over which we travelled each day was part dust, part tarred. Then it became tarred and it became, in a few years, the William Nichol highway.

All along Jan Smuts drive and the Nichol highway, the municipality dug trenches for water pipes and planted power line poles. All earthworks was done with vast labour gangs of up to 200 black men. They were driven by a ‘caller’ who would call out the cadence of the digging as the men dug with picks. The picks would rise and fall, all in time. The trenches advanced by several kilometres a week.

Then, suddenly, the area of plots and smallholdings to the north became devel- oped. Housing developments sprang up. Where my brother and I rode horses (badly) became tarred and the Balalaika Hotel stopped being the only hotel for miles around. St Peter’s School switched from using diesel generators to being connected to the mains power supply. The number of snakes in the veld around reduced signi- ficantly. My brother and I moved to high school.

For the next years, Sandton, the area to the north, grew rapidly. They tore down and built and built again. It was interesting to see the scale of new development. Then I finished school and went to university at Wits. I arrived just in time for the big riots of the 70s.

Then I moved on to the University of Cape Town and stayed in Cape Town for a few years. I saw the difference between Cape Town and Johannesburg immediately. Simply put, there were ten buildings going up in Johannesburg for each one being refurbished in Cape Town. Things were dreadfully slow. There seemed to be a sort of permanent ‘go slow’ strike going on in Cape Town. Nothing much happened quickly. I watched the progress of services installation in excavated trenches along one of the main roads. It took a year. A Joburg labour gang would have cracked it in a week. No doubt, Cape Town was different, less driven, less urgent. Some said more peaceful, some said more boring.

Now I’m back in Joburg and again the contrast amazes me. The city centre has moved to Sandton, all in the space of 40 years. The building and engineering devel- opment is vast. The Gautrain is here and works. What drives Joburg which does not drive Cape Town? Cape Town has vast export facilities, is stable, has labour, and so on. Why is it that it does not crack along like Johannesburg? Why is the area north of Cape Town not sprouting factories and houses and development at a rapid rate?

The dyed-in-the-wool Capetonian will say, well, we like it peaceful here. But it is not that – there is something else; it is a sort of lassitude. I sincerely believe that this should be studied in depth. One city, a huge port, stable, well serviced, no lack of labour . . . just drifts on. The other, build in the middle of the veld, 800 km from the coast, leaps on and on. Why? True, Joburg got its start from the mines. But Cape Town got its start long before that. It is an interesting contrast.

Edited by Martin Zhuwakinyu
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

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