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Transport project in Johannesburg digs into wounds of the past – AFR


Away from Johannesburg’s main street, surrounded by skyscrapers, heavy machinery has excavated one of the city’s original wounds – a deep wound inflicted by the gold rush of the 1880s.

The entire city center is built over tunnels dug by generations of miners who extracted gold from the richest deposits the world has ever discovered.

The city of around six million people grew around cavernous pits and mountainous garbage dumps that eventually became physical barriers of racial segregation.

Now the more poetic challenge of healing both social and geological wounds has fallen to property developers who are turning this symbol of division into a bus station linking the city and region.

“This is a gateway site,” said Richard Bennett, director of marketing for iProp, the company hired to clean up the site.

“It will provide the South African population in and around Johannesburg with easy access to public or effective transport.”

– Links –

In the 1880s, the mine was one of the first places prospectors used pickaxes and eventually dynamite to dig, dragging the gold 40 meters (130 feet) back to the ground.

After exhausting the simplest finds, this crevice in the rock, which looks like a canyon in the middle of the city, was simply filled in with sand and used as a parking lot.

The sand has now been removed and the pit prepared for backfilling with a cement-like material to support the construction of a new, large bus station.

The gold once mined there has led to both fabulous wealth and deep social divisions that continue to this day.

But the city’s future depends on connecting people with better transit and more walkable streets, said David van Niekerk, CEO of the Johannesburg Inner City Partnership, a group working to revitalize the city center after decades of official neglect.

“Mixing is an important concept for the future of this city, and mixing in the broadest sense,” said van Niekerk.

“The vision I certainly have for this city is to turn it into a walkable city,” he added.

“A walkable city is a city that works for everyone, and I’m talking about the homeless to the big international corporate investor and everyone in between.”

This is a major challenge in a deeply divided country.

A World Bank study last year found that the top 1 percent of South Africans own 55 percent of the nation’s wealth.

The wealth of the poorest half of the country is even negative, their debts outweigh their assets.

The top 0.01 percent, or about 3,500 people, own more than the bottom 90 percent, which equals 32 million people.

– suffering of the miners –

Much of this inequality stems from the early days of mining, which took a huge and largely uncounted toll on the mostly black miners, while a few owners – wealthy whites – reaped the bulk of the profits.

“These early mines were very chaotic and very hasty. There weren’t any real plans and a lot of people died… from falling rocks and stuff,” said author Fred Khumalo.

His novel The Longest March was about black miners in early Johannesburg living in camps where “the conditions were really appalling,” he said.

“People slept on cement blocks. There were no pillows, no mattress at all. The blankets they provided were thin and Johannesburg winters can be cold. People got sick and some of them died from the exposure.”

In 1899, as the city prepared for war between British and white African settlers, the mines were closed and food supplies cut off, causing riots.

– demarcation –

In later decades, black miners who were building homes nearby were forcibly removed as gold mining expanded.

When apartheid took full hold, blacks were pushed into designated areas on the outskirts of the city with poor transport links – and required a “passport book” to even enter the city.

Nearly three decades after the end of white rule, transportation remains patchy and black township residents who can afford it drive cars into the city, congesting its streets.

A new transport hub could help relieve some of that traffic, as thousands of commuters would replace the migrant workers who once toiled there.

“In a way, it’s a philosophical level that pays tribute to the creation of these spaces,” Khumalo said.

“The prosperity of this country has a lot to do with what happened back then.”

#Transport #project #Johannesburg #digs #wounds

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