Why is Randburg so depressing?

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.