I don’t know about you, but I find Randburg profoundly depressing. I am not entirely sure why, though I suspect that the reasons are rooted in my childhood. Here’s a thing about Joburg geography. If, like me, you grew up in Sandton (and, even worse, Bryanston, with its intellectually flaccid, waspish assumptions about its own superiority), you will have formed a very particular impression of the city. North good, east, west and south bad.
Anything further south than Rosebank Mall was unthinkable (except for school trips to the zoo, and even then, that was pushing it). The east was (and still is) a place you drove through to get to the airport, or Dullstroom, or Hoedspruit, south the place you drove through to get to Plett. As for the west — well, the west simply did not exist.
The world ended beyond the highway (whether the highway in question is the N3 or the M1 is open to debate; the purists insist on the M1). There be dragons. Even today, our inner Garmins start issuing stern instructions the moment we venture too far from the William Nicol.
I’ve noticed that people who here from elsewhere, have also taken on these warped perceptions of geography. I have encountered people who tolerate god-awful places like Sunninghill and Fourways (which isn’t the real Sandton in my opinion because it’s north of the highway, and north of the highway should horses and plots, not Summercon rabbit warrens) and think that Parktown and Parkhurst are way too far south.
And then we get to Randburg. If you look at a map of Joburg, you will see that, north of the CBD, the area nestled within the broad arc of the N1/N3 is roughly divided in two. To the right, Sandton, to the left, Randburg.
Randburg is Sandton’s fraternal twin, the Broeder mirror to Sandton’s seditious mix of Jewish flash and English-speaking Prog voters. In the 1980s, if you were successful and Afrikaans, you lived in Ferndale or Northcliff. Your children attended Hoërskool Randburg. You shopped at Cresta or the Sanlam Centre. Your roads were named after Hendrik Verwoerd and Hans Strydom and DF Malan.
(On that point, did you know that William Nicol Drive was named after a Nazi sympathiser? Bet you didn’t.)
As a child I found Randburg frightening, a constant reminder of the ever-present possibility of failure (failure features prominently in my list of issues). I knew it well because my optometrist was based in the Sanlam Centre and my mother often shopped there. Randburg was redolent with the subtle scent of mediocrity, of not being quite good enough. Bordeaux and Blairgowrie: those were the sort of suburbs we Brittens should have been living in, but didn’t.
Some time in the early 1990s — I forget precisely when — Bryanston was brutally cleaved in two by the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen. Half stayed in Sandton; the half to the left of William Nicol became Randburg. I was appalled. Grateful that my parents got to stay in the right half of Bryanston — what is still referred to as “Bryanston proper” — but distressed that what I had always been told was the world’s biggest suburb had now been stripped of its prestige.
Randburg is no longer a broederbonder’s wet dream. Perhaps because it is close to Sandton, but not quite as expensive, it has become a poster child for LSM 6-and-up social mobility. The townhouses and apartments that have sprung up over the past decade and a half or so are home to people who had they moved in during the apartheid years would have been inviting a knock on the door in the middle of the night.
Windsor, once a suburb that offered refuge to unmarried Afrikaner mothers, has now become Little Lagos, its pavements and tenements crowded with what locals dismiss as makwerekwere. Ferndale’s apartment complexes are the preferred destination of Indians who’ve moved up from Durban (a friend of mine — who is Indian — calls them orange piels … look at an old map of South Africa and figure out the reference for yourself). If you’re shooting an ad set in Accra or Kampala, you could always save on travel costs by filming at Sanlam Centre, which has undergone a truly extraordinary demographic transformation over the last 15 years.
The middle classes of all shades have fled to Brightwater Commons, formerly Randburg Waterfront, favoured haunt of drug dealers, and now rebranded as suitably family-friendly. Even Piekfyn, the tuisnywerheid outlet that held on to its spot just beyond the parking garage despite the white flight around it, has moved to the new Ferndale Village centre, which also boasts suburban essentials like a Woolworths Foodmarket and a Mugg & Bean. (Interestingly enough, I’ve spent several mornings at that Mugg & Bean and in all my time there I have never heard Afrikaans spoken. Not once.)
Of course, Sandton has also changed; the centre of gravity in Joburg has long since moved north. The shift is qualitatively different from that witnessed in Randburg though, because now Sandton has even more of the money and the bling than it did back then, and Randburg, as cousins go, is even poorer.
Then there’s Bryanston, my childhood home, once a suburb of one-acre gardens with bungalows and big dogs. Development has brought apartment complexes, offices and franchise restaurants along with Georgian clusters and four-metre boundary walls. A Saturday morning at the Bryanston Shopping Centre — one of the oldest suburban shopping centres in Johannesburg, developed by Anglo, and, like Sandton City, a catalyst for development — makes it abundantly clear who lives in Bryanston now, and who has the money.
Such a lot has changed. But some things offer glimpses into an older world. Perhaps it’s appropriate that The Baron on Main, straddling as it does the divide between Randburg and Sandton, should remind me so strongly of a past for which many white South Africans still long, if they would admit it to themselves. Venture into the bar area, and you’ll find it heaving with okes and ageing execs, chicks and milfs and cougars, the air thick with cigarette smoke and overweening entitlement.
In this day and age, it’s astonishing to see so many white people in one place, though I suppose I say that because I’ve never been to a Kurt Darren concert. Still, it’s strange not to see at least token blacks and Indians hanging around. The place is tribal — tribal in a way that English-speaking South Africans never imagine themselves to be, because tribalism is for Dutchmen and blacks, right? Here it’s all SUVs and schools called Saint this or that, shouting about work or the importance of not letting your buddies pork a grunt (you have to shout because it’s so loud in there that a passing knowledge of sign language should be mandatory for entry). Anyone who looks or sounds different will be ever so subtly excluded.
It isn’t necessary to talk about who fucked up the country because, hey, everyone knows who fucked up the country.
So, on reflection, Randburg is depressing. But, in many ways, so is Sandton. Because the truth is, what makes a place depressing isn’t so much, well, the place. It’s the people who live in it.
I reckon there is a collective vibe associated with these suburbs, i.e. an etheric association with the type of individual who chooses to populate a certain locale. I find Bryanston (and Sandton as a whole) to be an excruciatingly depressing place yet feel connected in places like Parkview, Parkwood, Craighall Park, Melville and the surrounds. I think most of Joburg, north from (and including) Hyde Park Corner should be nuked.
Beautifully written Sarah you racist!
On the other hand, when I were a lad Bryanston was considered a rural area governed by something called a Peri Urban Affairs Board, or somesuch. My parents said the people were thought to be a little eccentric for living so far out. Rosebank was as far NORTH as one might want to venture. The intersection of Witkoppen and William Nicol had two-pump filling stations and corner kafee-type things. My maternal grandfather, a policeman, patrolled what’s now Randburg and Sandton on horseback (in the ’30s and ’40s). Apparently, in those days there was little difference between the small-time crooks hanging out on small holdings either side of those hills. What really changed is that some of them stayed small-time crooks, others learned how to make money at it and look down their noses . . . No prizes for guessing which side of the hill went in what direction . . .
My fisrt time to see Randburg and Sandton was in 1985.A lot of new life.My uncle was a sales rep for a British hair products company,his sister,my mother a domestic worker near what was called Nedbank Corner in Jan Smuts and Hendrik Verwoed.In Randburg those years apartheid was not as sore as it was in my small hometown back in the Eastern Cape.I overlooked a lot of things because of age and life was good even in the backyards of my mother’s employers when I visited during school holidays.But my curious mind was always wondering as to why like in my home town are whites having it better in those big,well cared and well resourced places?My uncle had to stay for a while at my mother’s employer’s backyard before he moved to Pimville in Soweto.That man found it difficult to stay in those places,but I was so fascinated to be in the middle of whites only area free of teargas and police harrasment.Sandton City was a place to be for shopping,Sanlam Center was equaly good to a country boy like me and Cresta and all centers were a good treat after hours or over the weekends,so yes I know what you are talking about Ms Britten
I was transferred from N. JHB +- 30 years ago to a sauna town on the coast, thank goodness. See that no matter where you live in JHB/Gauteng on meeting someone new the first three questions asked are: where do you live, what do you drive and who do you work for, never any interesting or significiant queries? Must be soooooo tiring always keeping up with the neighbours.
Brent
Sarah; you have GOT to stop hanging out in these places.
Pretoria is more depressing with its fong kong
karate schools,fong kong christian schools claiming
to teach according to “christian principles”.
How can Afrikaaners brought up on apartheid
principals fully understand what christian principles are????
“Still, it’s strange not to see at least token blacks and Indians hanging around.”
Why is it strange? Do you still not believe that most SAn whites still buy into the false belief of racial superiority?
It truly is a depressing spectacle to see these pathetic, pretentious attitudes in the waning days of the white privilege. I bet they would certainly emigrate if they could. These days however, there are fewer places to run to – somehow Canada, with all its whiteness does not sound too alluring with its long brutal winters.
“everyone knows who fucked up the country”
Yes, two very different in SA perspectives depending mainly on your skin color. To the rest of the world though it was blatantly obvious for centuries.
Interesting & nostalgic Sarah.
However, even when I came to SA 36 years ago, Randburg ‘Town’ was a depressing, ‘tinny’ place, with its echoes of pre-war eastern bloc European architecture (‘boere baroque’) like the ghastly old Magistrates Court.
Since then it has just got dirtier, more sordid and seems mainly to be a centre for taxis & short term loan shacks. It never had it anyway.
As an outsider, the occasional lunch I have to endure at that establishment will be made all the more bearable now that I know the word ‘overweening’. Thank you. Although I don’t agree about being “subtly excluded.” There is nothing subtle about those people.
I noticed parts of Randburg during a drive last night – with very wide )singl) lane roads…it made me think…having grown up in Natal…that this must be a fairly old part of JHB….Mostly though I drove wthrough Randburg with my doors firmly locked and my foot close to accelerate mode on the pedal…its gone to the dogs in my opinion…..drunken taxi drivers!
Me I like Randburg for possessing what others don’t. The Mnet and Multichoice. I always thought that TV corporations make or rather popularise a town. I’m from Mafikeng and during the days of the homelands we realy prided ourselves with our Bop TV and Mmabatho TV with our Radio Bop/Mmabatho which other homelands didn’t have. Now Mmabatho has produced many TV stars due to being used to TV production which made Mmabatho/Mafikeng popular these day.
I’m just saying. Randburg even poorer than its cousin Sandton. They have the most expensive TVs and they are popular for that.
Randburg barely existed when I was a child, but Morningside in the early 60s was a wonderful, wild barren place. The properties were huuuuuuuuuuuge and surrounded by dirt roads. The local landmark? the Jewish Club.
In the mod-80s I drove out to the airport one night to fetch someone off a midnight flight and wondered how anyone could live so far out of town. A few years later I moved to Edenvale. What a pleasure! Bright people avoid the ‘in’ suburbs.
When I moved to Durban, I was told that living in the north was essential. I promptly moved south. We call it Umbilo; the maps call it Carrington Heights and we have Glenwood phone numbers. My idea of heaven!
Hey
I found your article more depressing than I’ve ever found Randburg. I would be more excited about this site (yes, I’m not just picking on you
if the majority of contributors didn’t just moan and complain about everything they can think of.
Let’s get original people – let’s offer a solution or an opinion which helps improve things… The more I hang around perpetual complainers, the more I complain – I think that’s happened, sadly, with people on here.
Here’s my suggestion (leading by exampling in not just complaining) -> write something inspiring and uplifting… step out of your comfort zone maybe, and find something beautiful and decide to write one article that will inspire people to see something differently.
I believe this can be intellectually done and not left to american talk show hosts… who accepts this challenge?
B
Some fairly sharp observations about the assumptions northeners in Jhb make about other parts of the city. However, I don’t think having lived on the “Randburg” side of Bryanston and making the odd visit to the Sanlam Centre really qualifies you to paint the whole of Randburg with the same brush.I lived in Blairgowrie from 1988-2003 (moved there from Parkmore), and it was a great place to grow up. I’m glad I was spared the money-obsessed atmosphere of Sandton, and besides all my friends being within (safe) walking or riding distance, we had the Blairgowrie Music Centre and Delta Park nearby.
The decay of the Sanlam Centre and the surrounding area is a shame, and shows short-sightedness on the part of those responsible for managing them.
I had a good giggle reading this and I am sending the link to my entire address book. Loved it!