Nelson Mandela turned 88 yesterday, and here's a piece about his hometown, Johannesburg (my hometown, too, before I moved to NYC)

Johannesburg Rises Above Its Apartheid Past
By MICHAEL WINES

TAKE the M1 freeway south, past the spas and high-end restaurants of Melrose Arch, through the leafy suburb of Houghton and past the nearby clubs and galleries of Melville. Go past all that, and past downtown’s concrete towers and the booming Newtown cultural district, and get off at Rissik Street. Just a block away, in the shadow of the elevated freeway’s pillars, there awaits the finest selection of porcupine skin and baboon entrails in all Africa.

And you thought there was no reason to come to Johannesburg.

Actually, most people think there is little reason to come to Johannesburg. South Africa seems to pack more exotic beauty per square mile than any other place on earth, from Cape Town ’s gasp-inducing mountains to the Karoo’s desert vistas to the pristine beaches just about everywhere. Johannesburg, on the other hand, is set on a featureless plain 5,700 feet above sea level — the famous Highveld. Downtown is best described as faceless, its sprawl and traffic reminiscent of Los Angeles. Its defining feature is the huge yellow hillocks of toxic gold tailings that pock the landscape below downtown. Its selling point is the weather: cloudless 75-degree days punctuated by brief, titanic thunderstorms on summer afternoons.

Yet many South Africans insist that it is the one city that no visitor should miss. At more than six million people, it is the biggest city in South Africa and the most transformed. Twenty years ago, much of Johannesburg was the preserve of South Africa’s white minority. Today, it is a stewpot of colors and languages, the fruit not only of liberation but also of a huge influx of immigrants and refugees. Johannesburg is a place where purveyors of muti — the porcupine skins, ground herbs and baboon entrails touted as cure-alls for everything from flatulence to flagging love affairs — hawk their wares a few blocks from skyscrapers.

Still greater transformations are imminent. As the principal host for the 2010 World Cup, Johannesburg is embarking on a binge of reconstruction and civic boosterism, hoping to erase the urban-jungle image of the 1990’s, when crime skyrocketed and the center city became all but a ghost town. Among other investments, leaders plan a $3 billion high-speed train to link Johannesburg and Pretoria; a refurbished sports stadium; and a $400 million public square.

Johannesburg is “the heart and soul of the country,” said Thabo Molubi, an information-technology executive by day and a sangoma, or traditional healer, in the off hours. “Nobody is from Johannesburg, except those of us who are young and were born here. But it’s where our roots are.”

It’s where everyone’s roots are. In the city’s western exurbs, the national government is busily building a major tourist attraction around a warren of caves where archaeologists have found fossils of some of man’s earliest known ancestors. The Cradle of Humankind, www.cradleofhumankind.co.za, a United Nations World Heritage Site, is being outfitted with an interpretation center, restaurants and a conference center.

By comparison, the rest of Johannesburg seems impermanent, mostly because it is. Little but tallgrass and trees existed here before 1886, when an Australian prospector named George Harrison struck gold on a farm about five miles west of today’s downtown. He had found the Witwatersrand (or white water reef) gold field, the richest in history. Within weeks, thousands of prospectors’ tents carpeted the area. Oppression followed greed as the government forced blacks into what were essentially labor camps. Near Harrison’s strike rose Sophiatown, a center of black art and literature; the apartheid government razed it in the 1950’s. Nearby, Soweto — short for “South West Townships” — began as a shantytown for black migrant labor.

As apartheid crumbled in the 1980’s, white residents and businesses fled north. The city’s finest hotels and restaurants now rest in bland, suburban nodes surrounded by walls and electric fences. One could spend days in the great white north, visiting such creations as Montecasino, a gaudy, ersatz Tuscan villa housing a mall, a hotel, a casino and an aviary, or Melrose Arch, a gated mix of condos, galleries and restaurants, and never see a hint of Africa beyond the artisans peddling elongated giraffes and sheet-metal cranes beside highways. A more realistic encounter with Johannesburg’s reviving soul may be found in the south, in the black neighborhoods that the mines spawned. The best way to get to them is to hire a guide and car for the day.

A proper place to begin is the Apartheid Museum (www.apartheidmuseum.org), near Soweto, a powerful series of exhibits and multimedia presentations documenting the last century’s oppression. Visitors begin the journey with a pass arbitrarily labeling them white or nonwhite; inside, the concrete-and-steel space, with nooses hung from the ceiling and exhibits caged in wire or trapped behind bars, brings home apartheid’s brutality with unusual force.

Soweto, a city of more than a million people, is rife with reminders of that brutality. The Hector Pieterson memorial and museum in the Orlando West neighborhood recounts the 1976 Soweto riots, the event that sounded apartheid’s death knell. Orlando West is also the world’s only neighborhood that housed two Nobel Peace Prize winners, Nelson Mandela and the Anglican bishop Desmond Tutu.

Mr. Mandela shared his Ngakane Street house with his former wife Winnie during the years of underground plotting against apartheid that led to his arrest in 1962; now a rather shabby family museum, it is stuffed with artifacts like honorary degrees and gifts from fellow celebrities.

Soweto itself has largely shed its reputation for violence. Increasingly, neighborhoods like Orlando West are havens for middle-class blacks. Clubs like the Rock and the Back Room, which cater to a more affluent clientele, have become hot spots for jazz and kwaito, a Soweto-born adoption of hip-hop, and not just for blacks: thousands of white tourists visit the city each year.

Away from Soweto, Johannesburg visitors can find authentic tastes of city life in places like Alexandra, a century-old township just blocks from the glitzy northern suburb of Sandton, or in the cheek-by-jowl tarpaper shacks of an immigrant-thick shantytown like Diepsloot, in the city’s far north.

In Alexandra, as in Soweto, a handful of bed-and-breakfasts offer overnight stays for those who seek a fuller experience. Unlike Soweto, Alexandra is compact and largely impoverished, its tiny block houses and apartments knit by a common history. Visitors should go to either locale with a guide for security, but should not be deterred: there are few more sobering experiences than seeing how one-third of South Africa’s 45 million citizens cope daily with poverty.

Out of that poverty has come an astonishingly rich culture. In the space of a few years, Johannesburg has become a hot spot for African arts, primarily in downtown’s Newtown cultural district, a historic brick-making area that is being outfitted with a new science museum and a new home for the Johannesburg Art Gallery to complement the theater, dance and musical centers already there. The carefully restored brick facades and architectural touches lend the district the slightly antiseptic feel of an urban renewal island amid urban decay, which it is; even the original Kippie’s, a famous jazz bar that fostered greats like Hugh Masakela, has fallen to the wrecking ball. But the construction of some 2,000 apartments in the area promises to foster more of a sense of community.

In any case, a rising number of private exhibitors like Melville’s Goodman Gallery (www.goodman-gallery.com) showcase top regional artists and sculptors, and sites like Amatuli Fine Arts in the northern suburbs, market a continent’s worth of native crafts, from Ethiopian Coptic crosses to intricately carved doors from West Africa.

True Johannesburgers accept their city’s rough edges, said William Kentridge, whose charcoal sketches and films, which draw on the brutal past, have gained him international fame. They accept the uncertainty loosed by the end of apartheid, as the ticket for living in a place that is changing at warp speed. The rest move to the northern suburbs.

“North of Empire Road, it’s very Western,” Mr. Kentridge said. “South of that, it’s kind of wild. Sometimes it feels out of control; certainly in terms of city planning, it’s out of control. But if there’s any hope for the city, it’s going to come from there.”

VISITOR INFORMATION
GETTING THERE
South African Airways (www.flysaa.com) has daily nonstop flights to Johannesburg from New York and Washington. The starting fare for a round-trip economy ticket from either city in early July was $1,100.

WHERE TO STAY
The Melrose Arch Hotel, 1 Melrose Square, www.africanpridehotels.com , is a slick boutique hotel in the Melrose Arch complex of the city’s near northern suburbs, accenting hip décor and fillips like a poolside bar set in ankle-deep water and a sound room filled with top-end audiovisual gear. A double starts at 1,190 South African rands, or $168 at 7.40 rands to $1.
A Room With a View, 1 Tolip Street, Melville, (27-11) 482-5435, www.aroomwithaview.co.za , is a gem of an Italianate guesthouse set high above the city’s dining and clubbing center. Some of the 14 rooms have their own conservatories; the owner boasts of a 40-mile view from the balconies. Doubles range from 350 to 650 rands.

WHERE TO EAT
Moyo, 129 Bree Street, Newtown, (27-11) 838-1715, and Melrose Square, (27-11) 684-1477, www.moyo.co.za, specializes in high-end African cuisine from across the continent, from exotic breads to game to stews rich in African spices. The Newtown restaurant is downtown, in the reviving cultural district; the Melrose Square branch is its swank offspring. Meal for two with wine, about 650 rands.
Wombles, 17 Third Avenue, Parktown North, (27-11) 880-2470, www.wombles.co.za , a local institution, offers oversized slabs of beef — up to a kilogram, or 2.2 pounds — in a hunting-lodge atmosphere. The owners are transplanted Zimbabweans. A meal for two with wine can cost about 500 rands.