Atop Ponte Tower
In a trip full of surprises both good and bad, Johannesburg has been the best one. I expected so little of this infamous city – a city often dubbed the world’s most dangerous; a city with startlingly high levels of poverty; a city that’s frequently passed over by travelers in favor of South Africa’s more obvious charms. Yet the four days we spent here were incredibly stimulating, stirring, and satisfying.
Of the many places we’ve been in this city – from Joziburg Lane to 44 Stanley to the Apartheid Museum – perhaps the most interesting of all was Ponte Tower, Africa's tallest residential skyscraper and Johannesburg’s most notorious building. After decades of anarchy, security at Ponte is now incredibly tight. Residents scan their fingerprints to enter, there’s a curfew, and no visitors can be in the building before 11am or after 9pm. There are just three ways in – live there, know someone who does, or take the weekly tour offered by Dlala Nje, a community center and consciousness-building organization run by Ponte residents. We went with option #3.
As someone who has always been a fan of outer boroughs, of remote arrondisements, and of neighborhoods less traveled, the simultaneous ubiquity and mystery of Ponte held huge appeal for me. Its Vodacom sign is visible from across the city, it appears frequently in post-apocalyptic films, and its hollow, open-air center has long fascinated architecture buffs. And yet, very few people have an opportunity to go inside it. Even my husband and I wavered about taking the tour, debating whether or not it’s possible to discover this place without devolving into disaster tourism.
On one hand, I’ve always been curious about places like Ponte and think it’s important to see how people really live if you hope to truly understand a culture or country. No number of tourist traps in New York will acquaint you with the city like time spent in Bed-Stuy; no number of temples in Thailand will teach you what a walk through Bangkok’s warren of streets will; and no number of Bourbon Street cocktails will enrich you like a trip to New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward. On the other hand, there’s a fine line between exploration and exploitation, and I never want to be guilty of gaping at or reveling in the miseries of others.
To further complicate things, I’m conscious – now more than ever – that my mere presence is political here. This is a place where a white person showing up in a black neighborhood once portended bad things. It’s a city where legal segregation has been replaced by economic segregation, making me something of a novelty in places such as Soweto or Hillbrow. And this is also a country where I was robbed recently, challenging my normally laissez-faire attitude towards my own personal safety.
Yet, despite all that, we still took the tour. Ponte was built in the 70s as an upscale “whites only” building – and still has the remains of a swimming pool and tennis court to prove it. While it succeeded in attracting wealthy white renters, those renters also happened to be liberal, and so Ponte was never lilywhite in practice. Instead, it became something of a melting pot, a place where people of different races came together in apartheid-era South Africa.
Unsurprisingly, Johannesburg administrators hated this, and they mounted a campaign to make life in Ponte and its surrounding Hillbrow and Yeoville neighborhoods as difficult as possible. They instituted blackouts, turned off the building’s utilities, and even shuttered local police stations, successfully making the entire area uninhabitable. People fled, and the building became a ghost town until the mid-80s when “building hijackers” moved in.
According to the Ponte residents giving our tour, these hijackers took over the building and began illegally charging rent to poor and desperate tenants. Ponte descended into chaos – dozens of people were packed into each apartment; guns, drugs, and prostitution drew criminals from across the city; and residents without access to garbage removal resorted to throwing their trash into the building’s cavernous core. Most shocking of all, Ponte became known as “Suicide Central” for the number of people who flung themselves from its uppermost stories into that same hollow core. Some would die on impact; others would suffocate in a sea of garbage that rose 14 stories high.
Today, public outcry, new ownership, and a partial renovation are changing Ponte for the better. It’s still impoverished and a bit forbidding, but it’s undergoing a major turnaround. For the first time in decades, there’s a waiting list for (legal!) occupancy. Dlala Nje already runs a children’s center and is petitioning to add social spaces and an exterior rock wall to bolster the building’s appeal. Now, looking down into the building’s core or out across Johannesburg from a 50th floor apartment doesn’t feel dangerous or desolate – it felt strangely invigorating. And in that way, the story of Ponte’s comeback mirrors the story of South Africa. It’s one building symbolic of so many.
