The following article on “the Johannesburg aesthetic” by Chris Thurman, author of Guy Butler: Reassessing a South African Literary Life, first appeared in The Weekender:
There are many facets to the Joburg aesthetic. There’s the ‘minedumps and highways’ cliché that out-of-towners hold so dear when they deride SA’s biggest city. There’s the capitalist/consumerist synthesis expressed in corporate palaces, coffee shops and couture boutiques. There’s the leafy suburban street, complete with high walls and grassy pavements.
Driving along the roads of this heavily-treed metropolis and listening to the mild inanities of afternoon talk radio has its own particular appeal. But after hearing yet another show in which the host bemoans the lack of village cricket in Parkhurst, solicits ice-cream recipes, promotes the delights of Jacaranda blossom viewing from the Westcliff Hotel or panders in some other way to the petit- and haute-bourgeois ambitions of Gauteng’s denizens, one begins to think: surely there are other (more interesting) ways of representing Johannesburg, of exploring its multiple contradictions, of experiencing the city?
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