The Chaos Precinct: Johannesburg as a port city ★★★★
Tanya Zack
Jacana Media
I attempt to refrain from including myself when writing for an audience, but I do feel the following is relevant:
I’m sitting in Johannesburg City Library which, after five years of being closed to the public, reopened its doors on Women’s Day; its tranquil environment contrasting the incessant bleating of minibus taxis visible through the library's grand Italianate windows.
Opposite the library is a “wholesale reatail” [sic], "[ ]Adibas Store”; the retracted M reminiscent of the “Nadibas” building — named for Madiba, yet renamed owing to trademark trouble — which Tanya Zack references in her enthralling, insightful, and — at times — deeply personal narrative, The Chaos Precinct: Johannesburg as a port city.
The focal point of Zack’s text explores how migrant Ethiopian workers shaped a terrestrial trading post in Joburg’s CBD: walk 800m from where I’m seated and you’ll find yourself in its epicentre — Jeppe.
Jeppe has moods, Zack writes. It is oppressively sullen on days when the roller shutters are clamped down and the boom boxes silent. But at month’s end, when the sun dazzles the windows of the mothballed Johannesburg Sun and Towers hotel, when no police raid is expected, and the touts are out in their flamboyant drag, with false breasts, dresses and wigs, dancing on the doorsteps of the new malls — then Jeppe is Africa’s shopping mecca ... It’s a complex and tough environment. This is the dark side of the so-called Chaos Precinct. The chaos serves the extortion and exploitation that abounds in Jeppe. It is a veil for the exploitation of migrant workers who service the trade, for the distribution of counterfeit clothing and for untaxed cash transactions. It serves a clandestine economy and serves extortion within this economy. It is a place to make fast money. And to hide it. Gaps in protection of migrant rights and in effective policing create pathways of criminality and vulnerability.
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An urban developer by profession, Zack’s 15 years of observing and traversing Jeppe and its surrounds by foot is transformed into a narrative as factual as it is personal. As with her 2022 title, Wake Up, This is Joburg, The Chaos Precinct has Zack’s words brought to visual life by Joburg-based photographer Mark Lewis. Real. Raw. Thought-provoking: Lewis’s images emulate Zack’s urban chronicle of how a people — owing to poverty, political upheaval and displacement — are forced to exchange their homeland for the City of Gold.
Equipped with a camera and notebook, Zack walks the streets of Jeppe, a dynamic ecosystem of informal traders, spazas, pedestrians, counterfeit fast fashion selling for “Sorry R10, R10. Sorry, sorry” — her presence, at times, met with suspicion.
Wariness aside, Zack develops a rapport with her interviewees: the observer turns confidante, her empirical research honestly and empathetically depicting the plight — and perseverance — of migrant Ethiopians’ pasts and presents, and the pivotal role they played in the creation of Johannesburg as a port city.
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Interspersed with childhood memories of the city centre, Zack reflects on how her introduction to Jeppe and its community changed the course of her working life: I’d been shocked, devastated, overjoyed and vulnerable on these streets ... It was the place that sparked in me the will to explore and to write differently about my city.
The urban planner’s narrative dexterity rivals that of her research abilities — her reference notes span 11 pages — which, at times, are detrimental to the book as the inundation of facts, place names, monetary figures and statistics distract from a seamless read. Nonetheless, her compassionate and perceptive portrayal of people attempting to make ends meet in a reality far from the country they left behind, evens out the data-heavy content.
What could have read as an homage depicting Jeppe and its Ethiopian Quarter as a vibrant, welcoming, homogeneous and humane society created by traders of the same descent, would have been an injustice to its inhabitants: traders are subjected to xenophobia, forced into breaking the law, suffer corrupt landlords and extorting officers of law, and are vulnerable to raids and trafficking.
Yet persist, they do.
In The Chaos Precinct, Zack familiarises the reader with a people and their livelihoods whose lived experience echoes that of the inner-city entrepôt they created.
Chaotic? Perhaps.
But a chaos of resilience, aspiration, grit and mettle? Indisputable.
