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Johannesburg: The slow death of a city that may have outlived its purpose

Ismail Lagardien
By Ismail Lagardien
12 Mar 2025
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It’s fair to say that Johannesburg’s heyday has long passed, or moved to Sandton and Soweto, and the city may become somewhat of a relic — sooner rather than later.

Johannesburg is in an advanced state of decay, destruction, ruin, crime, waste, and all of it seems, sometimes, like a mirror image of South African society. We grieve over the once-great city in a veritable cult of grief.

But we are too afraid to look in the mirror because our vanity overwhelms our misery — we are, after all, a great people, and a great people we have to remain…

In and around the city, the families and communities in its suburbs and on the periphery are struggling to live full lives. As days and weeks go by, the denizens are losing reason to value their surroundings. The taps run dry frequently, energy supply is interrupted regularly, flagship institutions, and all those little things like roads, pavements, pedestrian crossings, traffic signs, road signs and robots are bleeding like wounds that will not heal on a body in terminal decline.

The city is depleted, and lacking in the nutrients and the energy necessary to bring it back to full functionality.

We can point, as we may, to mismanagement, maladministration, lack of planning, a lack of foresight and vision. We can, also, consider Johannesburg as a city that has reached the end of its natural life and is approaching the end of its purpose.

Johannesburg, as we came to know it, was established by European settler colonists in about 1886 for the sole purpose of exploiting the gold buried in the rocks below. Those gold deposits are finite. If it’s not entirely finite, mining it is becoming more expensive, while demand may well increase.

For now, gold remains in demand for use in electronics, in the medical industry, notably dentistry, and in car manufacturing. An estimated 90% of gold is used for jewellery. What’s to say that (other than jewellery) alternative materials cannot be manufactured to replace gold that is currently vital in, say, aerospace, or in the semiconductors that rule our world.

Maybe the world will someday not need gold for industrial uses. It’s worth a guess, at least. Nonetheless, gold remains the world’s most useful metal, according to geologists.

It is not too far a stretch to say that Johannesburg attracted prospectors and workers because of gold and very little else. Let’s face it, nobody in their right mind would build a city on a geological ridge far from a natural body of water. That’s just one aspect of this great city.

The city is dead. Long live the city.


My colleague Ferial Haffajee’s reports on the apparent death of the city (see here, here, here, here, and here) have carried me ever closer to understanding the desperately malnourished Johannesburg and what little life remains. The city is “collapsing in front of everyone’s eyes”. The world has now sat up, and is watching the inner city collapse, as the BBC has reported.

“The centre of Johannesburg was once an economic hub with abundant green spaces. But over the last two decades, the South African city centre has become known for crime, dumped waste, broken infrastructure and restrictions on water and electricity. A surging population has played its part,” France24 explained.

On 6 March 2025, a commentary in the Sowetan brought a loud echo of these statements about Johannesburg’s slow death: “Johannesburg’s inner city is under siege — not just from decay. Criminal syndicates brazenly loot critical infrastructure. Cable theft and sabotage has reached alarming levels, with City Power warning in January of an unprecedented surge in attacks. Traffic lights are not working, endangering motorists and pedestrians alike… What’s worse, our streets are filthy, potholes are multiplying, and sewage overflows into communities and contaminates water systems unchecked. Years of neglect have turned once-thriving areas into symbols of dysfunction as we watch powerlessly.” 

The city is dying, and it is feeding on itself. Another city may rise upon its waste. Let us indulge in a generous thought to make us forget extant conditions. It requires great imagination, but the possible death of Johannesburg may well be placed among the many cities that have died and upon which others have been built across history.

Who’s to say that in a few hundred years (if, mind you, we’re still on Earth) Johannesburg will not be found below the surface, like Çatalhöyük (or Derinkuyu) in Turkey where settlements have been built one on top of the other. I apologise, all of that is more than a mite over the top.

What we cannot say, with certainty, is whether the city has been forced into its current state, whether it fell, accidentally, into its current state, began to lose some of its key functions, and started to feed on its own body.

It’s fair to say, never mind all of that, that Johannesburg’s heyday has long passed, or moved to Sandton and Soweto, and the city may become something of a relic, sooner rather than later. Whatever beauty or bounties it may once have had are now wasting away, as memories.

That’s certainly how I feel about the place where I was born — the old Malay Camp, renamed Pageview (in 1894), and which we referred to as Fietas on the edge of Johannesburg. After 1948 it was declared a white area, and that was when the forced removals and demolitions began. Fietas was killed. It has been placed in a museum, and is alive only in faded childhood memories.

For now, though, residents refer to living in Johannesburg as “hell”. To be clear, it’s been described this way for a couple of decades.

Johannesburg city hellscape


What then of the people of Johannesburg? Here things become complicated, because life in the “suburbs” has always been different from life in the “townships”, to which we may now add life in the “inner city”, including places like Joubert Park, Hillbrow, Berea, Yeoville, Doornfontein, Fordsburg, Mayfair, Crosby, Brixton etc.

There seems to be no way back from the slow death of Johannesburg. It is difficult to imagine that institutions in the Central Business District would be revamped, and return to their glory days.

For instance, besides the fact that it was, for many decades, an exclusive institution, the Johannesburg Library will probably never return to its best days. At the other end of town, the Johannesburg Art Gallery seems to be coming apart at the seams. Iconic buildings, like the once-grand Carlton Hotel have been empty for a quarter of a century!

Almost two years after a gas explosion caused significant damage to Lilian Ngoyi Street, only about 15% of the repair work has been completed. The destruction has also caused disruption of local businesses, with criminal activity rising sharply. Criminals have also stolen the actual equipment used in the repair of Lilian Ngoyi Street. The city is feeding on its dying body.

Derrick Kumalo, who is employed in the inner city, told Daily Maverick’s Bheki C. Simelane: “The sooner they fix the street, the better. These corrugated iron and covers around the street have created ideal hunting corridors, and criminals are having a field day, mugging people at will. Lately, I completely avoid that side, even though it means I have to walk a much longer distance to work.”

Lindelwa Mbhamali, who lives near the construction site, told Simelane: “I stay here with my cousin. It’s hell.”

Near death


So, let’s return to speculation at the top. Has the city been wilfully driven into decay and dilapidation, or has it simply been allowed to drift into the current state (of near death)?

After all, very many of the most exceptional places were built during the colonial and settler-colonial and apartheid era, and erasure of the legacies of those periods has become a populist pastime. The Carlton Hotel/Centre complex was built by South African Breweries and Anglo American in the late 1960s. The Johannesburg Art Gallery was built in 1914. The Johannesburg public library was established in 1890, and its current housing, an Italianate building, opened its doors in 1935.

We can’t say what caused it all, because we just don’t know. What we do know is that the taps are running dry and the electricity supply is interrupted frequently. We praise it as an achievement when the lights are kept on.

Buildings are being hijacked, and those who are behind the hijackings then charge homeless people for living in hellish conditions. Crime is driving people out of the city, and there seems to be little chance of the metro leaders and bureaucrats getting the runaway destruction back under control any time soon.

Johannesburg will probably outlive all of us. Should we come back for a visit, a hundred years from now, we may not recognise Johannesburg, and Johannesburg probably won’t remember us, much less care. The city has gone from being beloved to a city best left behind, forgotten and left to die.

From Lenasia and Orange Farm and Eldorado Park in the city’s deep south, to Hillbrow, Berea and Yeoville — skipping over the hellscape of the inner city — Johannesburg is being kept alive by the hope and despair of its denizens.

As for the great gold rush that gave birth to the city; well, the zama zamas are mining, now, with great losses of life underground.

As the BBC reported: “The underground life is ruthless. Many do not make it out alive” said a 52-year-old, (a man identified only as Ndumiso) who spoke to the BBC on condition that his real name was not used as he feared reprisals. “In one level of the shaft there are bodies and skeletons. We call that the zama-zama graveyard,” he said.

So, above ground the city is dying, and below ground zama zama graveyards are created that add new definition and meaning to the catacombs found around the world.

Maybe Johannesburg is a grim reminder of where or who we are, but we cannot let that be, because we are a perfect people.

What was it that Prince Tancredi Falconeri said in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard? “The Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect… Their vanity is stronger than their misery.”

He could have been talking about Johannesburg, and South Africans. DM

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