A week in Johannesburg
My first impression was: Johannesburg doesn’t look anything like it does in the movie. After all, there’s no giant spaceship hovering overhead:
You don’t have to drive very far out of town, though, to find something that looks like a giant spaceship:
That’s Soccer City, located on the seam between southwestern Johannesburg and the former township of Soweto. This will be the largest venue for World Cup soccer next winter, hosting the title game itself.
The stadium will hold an unbelievable 94,700 fans. It’s huge.
We drove out there last Tuesday morning in hopes of a tour. Unfortunately, we didn’t get one.
No matter, though. We saw the stadium close up and all beautified. It’s supposed to represent a food basket, I’m told, called a calabash. The textural paint blocks on the side are just beautiful.
The food basket also represents the “melting pot” of cultures here in South Africa. Truly, an inspired choice for a decorative scheme.
The crews are working feverishly to try to finish in the next few weeks. The entire area is littered with cool tractors and machines and things that dig in the dirt.
I don’t know what kind of hole that guy was building. But he was building it awfully fast.
And in the background were these vast mounds of much, much older dirt:
That is the material removed from the gold mines upon which this part of Johannesburg is built. The mines here are among some of the deepest in the world, I’m told. These mounds several of which lie between Soweto and Johannesburg are where all that dirt went.
I was surprised to find what appeared to be a cooling tower for a nuclear power plant also near the stadium. It wasn’t, of course — there’s only one nuke plant in the country and it’s in Cape Town — but it appeared to be an excuse to paint a huge Coca-Cola ad right where thousands of soccer fans will see it:
My companions for this brief tour Tuesday morning — two fabulous folks from Cape Town who were in town training people on systems issues, Magriet and Sybrandus — decided that since we couldn’t see the stadium, we ought to drive over the rest of the way to Soweto and take in the newly-restored Nelson Mandela house.
The location wasn’t exactly easy to find. If there’s one thing I’d advise local tourism folks to spend money on, that would be promotional signage. They’re very good here at plastering ads everywhere but not so great at saying “Turn here for the Mandela historical home site.”
The cost was right, though. I paid slightly more than eight dollars to get in.
The house itself is quite modest — as were nearly all Soweto homes in the 1950s and 1960s. Other than the signage, the security wall and the visitors center, the house itself was restored to nearly the condition it had been in when Mandela himself lived there.
A tour guide reverently told us of the history of Mandela and his family and walked us through the property. Here, he specifies what of the current structure is original and what has been rebuilt:
The renovation project was completed in March. I’d say these folks did an excellent job, too.
The whole place is stunningly small. Very modest. And please recall: Mandela was a very successful lawyer in the 1960s.
But he was a black lawyer. And under apartheid, all blacks — even lawyers — were limited in what they could earn and what kind of home they could afford.
They called these “matchbox houses.” And for good reason.
During the decades Mandela was incarcerated, his wife, Winnie, came under persecution as well. See those holes to the right of the historical marker?
You guessed it: Those are bullet holes. From a police assault on the house in 1972.
The wall bearing these scars is the one protecting the children’s bedrooms. Once these attacks began, the tour guide told us, Winnie moved the children to the back of the house to sleep.
Because the house went a while with no walls and ceiling, labels etched in the floor told us where each room started and stopped.
Winnie moved the children to the kitchen and slept, herself, in the pantry.
This is the original Mandela bedroom. Only the wall hangings are somewhat unauthentic, I’m told:
Mandela lived in this house from the time he bought it in 1946 until he was imprisoned in 1962 — the year I was born. He returned here upon his release in 1990, but stayed only 11 days. Locals would throw rocks onto the tin roof in order to wake up Mandela and force him outside to face his admirers, the tour guide told us.
Here’s the back of the house, which now faces the visitors’ center:
An LCD screen constantly plays a loop of historical footage, as my colleagues Sybrandus and Magriet watch here:
Bricks inset in the wall of the visitors’s center serve as a timeline of the history of Mandela’s life:
That one struck a chord with me. So the great man had a eldest daughter who died. This makes me feel even closer to him.
The only negative thing I’d point out about the entire site is the gaudy structure across the street. This restaurant is owned by Mandela’s ex-wife, Winnie, we were told:
It was exceedingly ugly. And, therefore, it reminded me of so many American “tourist traps.”
I resisted the temptation to go inside. I’m proud that I didn’t. However, I’m burning with curiosity to see what’s in there. Sigh.
This was the view of Soweto from the front of the Mandela property. Note the power station cooling towers and the gold mine waste mounds in the far distance:
Yes, even those cooling towers provide a canvas for advertisements. South Africans, it seems, can put an ad on just about anything.
In the U.S., we’d never dream of plastering an ad on a cooling tower. Can you imagine the publicity these companies would get if there were some sort of accident or environmental catastrophe?
I suppose it’s never, ever happened here. If it does, I imagine, these ads will disappear soon enough.
Soweto — once a slum but now a growing, thriving middle-class neighborhood — is huge. A lot larger than I would have thought.
It just goes on and on.
And while, yes, much of it is growing under the weight of newly-found middle-class incomes, there are parts that are still agonizingly poor:
Here, squatters occupy dorms once built for foreign mine workers:
We drove back through downtown Johannesburg. I have yet to find a good angle from which to shoot the skyline of the city. But I was fascinated to find high-rise skyscrapers shrouded in ads:
Even at street-level, drivers are distracted by tons upon tons of hand-lettered signs, advertising all numbers of products and services:
It’s OK for companies and corporations to try to make money on the streets of downtown. But no, the little guys — the mom-and-pop operations who try to sell their wares from folding tables beneath umbrellas — they’re simply not welcome here:
How fascinating.
The last major landmark we passed on our way back to our hotel was this giant 54-story skyscraper, called the Ponte building.
Built in 1975, the Ponte building is basically hollow — there’s a huge curved atrium in the center. After the end of apartheid, the building — like much of downtown Jo’burg — fell on hard times. At one point in the late 1990s; it was suggested the building be converted into a prison. New owners took over in 2007 and are renovating the place, I’m told.
Either way, atop Ponte is a huge, neon logo for the local cell phone company: Vodacom. The same logo appears on several of they area sports teams. Vodacom is such a huge company that I’d be hard- pressed — on my fifth week here in South Africa — to name a single competitor.
One wonders why they spend so much money on advertising. Or perhaps this is only because they spend so much.
So after our jaunt over to Soweto on Tuesday, the weekend paper artist — Anton — and I took a field trip north on Wednesday to what they call the Cradle of Humankind, a huge museum devoted to the vast area in which archeological digs are performed.
The region — northwest of Johannesburg — seems desolate and barren.
Yet, among these hills — and in caves beneath them — lie some of the most significant archeological finds ever made.
Our entry fee of R95 — about $13 — bought us entry into a cone-shaped, underground visitors center nearly 45 minutes northwest of downtown:
The first thing you do on the inside is mount a floating Disney-style raft that floats you through an audio-visual presentation that helps set the mood for their prehistoric tale. Here, colored lights and sound effects reproduce the effect of molten lava, flowing at the dawn of the planet:
The amusement park-style ride is entertaining but not scientifically illuminating. And, in fact, part of a faux ice-age cave smacked me on the head. Four days later, I still have a bleeding scab from the collision.
Once the ride is over, though, the real science begins. Here’s an exhibit of reproductions of fossils of ancient humans and human ancestors, dug up from around the world:
This one here is known as Mrs. Ples — uncovered in a cave near here in 1947:
More recently, however, researchers have concluded the skull is, in fact, from a male ancestor and not a female.
We made plenty of photos of Mrs. Ples, probably one of the more famous artifacts found here:
That’s Anton, taking a photo he eventually used for his Sunday graphic.
We used the heck out of this one, too — a giant map that shows where, in the surrounding area, key fossils have been found:
Forget apes — the museum takes the argument that humans, apes and most other modern-day species are all derived from ancient simple life forms:
It’s all explained so well and so simply that even a child can understand it. Which is the point, I’d imagine.
Sprinkled throughout the museum are these witty yet illuminating quotes from famous scientists, philosophers and educators:
Truly wonderful infographics — some of them crafted in 3D like this one — make various points about humankind and evolution:
And while some of the exhibits were more informative than others, a few were notable mostly for their visual flair or their unintentional comedy.
For example, there was this one that explains the evolutional advantages omnivores have over herbivores.
Posters explained how diet affects the evolution of teeth. But the visual point was made by dozens upon dozens of sets if teeth, all biting at thin air:
Any scientific point was lost by the surreality of the display. All these teeth opened and closed in unison:
It seemed less like a display of evolutionary science and more like something the Joker would set up in a Batman movie.
Very, very odd. I regret, now, not owning a video camera. You’d have to see this to believe it.
The exit struck a nice note with this faux sticky note quote.
You have to love a museum that quotes Marshall McLuhan.
This little trip paid off with a nice graphic in the Sunday paper:
Anton built the map that showed the area outside of Johannesburg called the Cradle of Humankind and the most famous finds there. I supplied a timeline that ran across the top of the page, putting into perspective the finds made locally. I showed eleven of the most famous humanoid fossils ever found (click most of these graphics for a larger view):
I built my piece in English and the paper’s copy desk converted the whole thing into Afrikaans. Not bad.
Also in the Sunday paper, I had this nice business piece that showed the huge difference between the demand for low-cost housing in this country and the supply developers have been able to fill:
The huge bar chart runs down the left side of the page. The segment paired with the photo explains which income bracket qualifies for these houses and is feeling the pinch. the chart at the lower right shows how demand was being met until the finance crisis hit here, last year.
It all seems quite complex. But, in fact, it’s only three simple bar charts, tied together cleverly with text. I’m hoping this piece will prove that good graphics don’t always have to be complicated.
Our hotel went several days without internet access. Bored, cut off from communications and feeling, frankly, too down to do any sightseeing this weekend, I drove over to the paper on Saturday to see if I could at least pull in my e-mail.
I found my pal Anton working on a graphic that explained an enormous alleged payoff to a public official, in which the official supposedly received 1,000 bills in 2,000-Rand notes in an envelope.
Anton drew the diagram…
…while I supplied the Rand note art:
It was a simple matter of finding a R200 scan online and then using Adobe Illustrator’s live trace feature, on a fairly low resolution:
It doesn’t take much to simulate the look of money. Even complicated bills like they use here in South Africa.
So those are the three pieces I worked on for the Sunday paper — two of them bylined. As frustrating as the week was, in so many ways, it was still productive in so many others.
I’m over the big part of my hay fever, yet I’m still coughing like crazy. I bought some “Wet cough expectorant,” but it doesn’t seem to have any effect. I’ve coughed so much today that my lungs are sore. I’m hoping I get over this soon.
I have a few presentations set for this week, but most of the week will be spent working in expectation of larger issues. I have a number of friends who have flown into town this weekend. It should be an interesting week.
I’m hoping my internet issues have been solved. My connection here at the paper has been off-and-on. And, like I said, the connection at the hotel was a complete loss. It’s difficult to blog, keep up with correspondence and to talk with my wife and daughter back home when I can get no connection.
I’ll try to make it to a couple of museums next weekend and tell you all about it.