Very little about veld-bitten Woodmead Drive suggests water. It is true that the road crosses the Jukskei River, but overgrown banks and creeping business-park perimeter fences all but obscure the water on approach. Water has been privatised, occluded.
Motorists and pedestrians face estate walls, dealership flags and large billboards: Classic Monday Burger; Granite Warehouse; Fragrance Sale — the ugly inertia of pre-Google consumer capitalism. Most messages fail to catch even the corner of the eye but one, promising the impossible, compels a double take: EXCLUSIVE BEACH LIVING, the words printed above a poor artist impression of a large, sand-fringed pool, topped with red kayaks.
The housing estate is named Munyaka — crystal in Venda. I do no speak Venda, so why do I know that? A memory stirs, of a press release I was sent in early 2020, announcing the “launch” of the development. I pull over next to an advertising trailer, and find it in my Gmail: “We’ve been absolutely inundated by interested buyers over the past four days… sales totalling R850m since opening, with a record 555 apartments sold to date,” commented Steve Brookes, founder and CEO of Balwin Properties. The selling point? “The largest crystalline lagoon in the southern hemisphere with Crystal Lagoons® technology at approx. 7 rugby fields.”
That an island-style amenity of unprecedented proportions will soon shimmer in a flinty crease of the rand … well, it’s truly incredible. But I am not surprised. Why not? For some time now I have been walking Johannesburg’s filthy rivers, to better understand the city’s relationship with water. I’ve spent months in Johannesburg City library, reading for water. But all this time I have been missing something — the ocean.
What can one say about Johannesburg’s relationship with the sea? Why does the development of a Seychellois lagoon alongside a river that is little more than an open sewer seem like a characteristic juxtaposition? Then and there, I decide to drive the city in search of answers. First, I want to know more about Crystal Lagoons®, a US-based business founded by Chilean biochemist and real estate developer Fernando Fischmann.
In the late ’90s — according to an official company history on YouTube — Fischmann needed a selling point for a residential development on the inhospitable shoreline of Chile’s Central Coast. He had a vast pool dug at the foot of the development, large enough to accommodate a variety of water activities. When the water turned green, Fishman searched the world for a management solution, and finding none developed the proprietary technologies that have made Crystal Lagoons® into a billion-dollar company.
The recent rains have thrown the chemistry out. The pool is off-blue, a little milky. 'First time this has happened since we opened,' he says
Munyaka is some months away from completion, but after buying an exclusive Crystal Lagoons® licence in 2018, Balwin chose The Blyde housing development outside Tshwane as the location for the first of five planned lagoons. The estate’s website carries an uppercase warning: NO DAY VISITORS, and in fact the housing estate recently caught flak on social media for imposing a R250 fee per guest of any resident.
At the Blyde’s entrance boom I ask for “lagoon manager” Ian Nel. I like him immediately, with his soft manners and former-player-turned-coach looks. “We opened on March 1 2018 after a one-year build,” he says, walking directly to the pool, a thing less impressive in reality than it looks in the pictures.
Nel has an explanation – the recent rains, he says, have thrown the chemistry out. The pool is off-blue, a little milky. “First time this has happened since we opened,” he says.
We walk over to a young man in lifeguard attire, holding an oversized control device in his hands. “Our pool drone operator,” says Nel, his eyes on a large dark shape beneath the surface. “Formally called a bottom cleaner, or suction cart.” We walk over to a panel Nel calls the pick-up point. “Dosing is done from a centre based in Chile, using telemetry, with tweaks done in this physical space by me and my team,” he says. Chlorine, turbidity, manganese and iron levels are all controlled in this way. “We use 10 times less chlorine than the average home pool. At home you throw in tablets and pray. We have a bit more insight.”
Keeping the lagoon in pristine condition is a seven-day-a-week job. “If you’re not thinking about your wife, you’re thinking about the pool. The guys call her Thandi.” The pool drone operator laughs and shouts back: “Thandi’s not happy today.”
By Crystal Lagoons standards this pool is a tiddler, 1.5ha or about the area of two rugby fields. The biggest is in Egypt, the 12.5ha Sharm el Sheikh development. Still, for a water-stressed part of the world, 1.5ha at an average depth of 2.5m equals 35-million litres of water. “I probably shouldn’t have told you that,” says Nel, switching back to safer facts: “21m visibility … 28 degrees on average in summer … gravity-fed filtration … lifeguards on duty all the time.” He has exhausted the spiel before the end of our slow walk around the perimeter.
Apartment balconies lean over us, and Nel confirms that poolside residences cost much more than the properties in the tenements marching down the gently sloping terrain, each service road bearing a nautical name. Through a gap between the buildings, a large security fence guards an area of orange excavated soil, stark against a bright blue sky. “Crystal Lagoons seems made for the highveld,” I say. Nel lifts his eyes and squints. “High evaporation rate, but ja, almal wil ’n huisie by die see hê,” he says, referencing the plaintive Koos Kombuis song about South African middle-class fantasies of a better future, symbolised by ownership of a cottage by the sea, and a 4x4 in the driveway.
The Crystal Lagoons technology might be original but the idea that ocean-inspired amenities can boost business profits is not new. Ask anyone living between Fourways and Rustenburg the way to the nearest beach and they will point you in the direction of the Valley of the Waves, a water park in the Sun City hotel complex two hours north of Johannesburg.
The Roaring Lagoon — a wave pool that sends down 2m swells every 90 seconds — lies at the heart of a compound of hotels and casinos that are clad in temples and animal statuary. It is a proudly South African hyperreality, supposedly inspired by Sir Henry Rider Haggard’s 1885 imperial romance novel King Solomon’s Mines, although Kukuanaland is a place of the interior, it has no ocean. If Sun City answers a psychological need (other than for excitement and uncertainty, amply delivered in the casinos), could that need be some hankering, felt by the landlocked, for the ocean? And if so, then whose, exactly?
Anthropologist David McDermott Hughes has suggested that in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), white settlers, being “children of the glaciers … appreciated a well-watered, Wordsworthian topography [and] lusted for seas and breaking waves”. Their need for water, Hughes suggests, was satisfied by the development of a hydroelectric dam across the Zambezi river — Lake Kariba. “Concrete … did the job of ice sheets and gave Rhodesians an inland sea.”
Does the same facet of Euro-African psychology underpin Munyaka, The Blyde and The Roaring Lagoon? For guidance I call author and University of Pretoria researcher Jonathan Cane, who in 2019 helped to organise Holding Water, “A programme of workshops, reading groups, film screenings and artist presentations that think the oceanic from landlocked Johannesburg.”
“Johannesburg is littered with oceanic allusions,” says Cane. “There’s the ruined Three Ships restaurant at the Carlton Hotel, the palm trees lining the boulevards at Monte Casino — you don’t have to look hard to find the connections. With Holding Water we were asking ourselves, how do we think the ocean from this dry city, and how do we think the city oceanically?” Holding Water was a collaboration between Johannesburg arts organisation POOL and The Oceanic Humanities for the Global South at Wits. The fact that The Oceanic Humanities is based at 6,000 feet, and 567km from the ocean, suggests an assumption that oceans are so central to everything now, that the location from which one “reads” the ocean hardly matters.
When it comes to thinking about the ocean in Johannesburg, the place Cane is most interested in is Wemmer Pan, 5km south of the city centre.
“I think it’s for two main reasons. The one is Santarama Miniland, with its full-scale replica of Jan van Riebeeck’s ship, the Dromedarus, and then on the other side what remains of the headquarters of that shady group of paramilitary, the South African Institute for Maritime Research, whose commodore Keith Maxwell used to appear at special occasions dressed as an 18th-century admiral, and claimed to have had a hand in the 1961 plane crash that killed UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld. It’s interesting to think about the intersection of those two things, the weird ocean-themed park and the inland paramilitary group with a nautical name.”
Growing up in Johannesburg in the ’80s, Wemmer Pan — a quarry flooded to provide water to the City Deep Mine — was the only large-ish body of water I knew. It was also the site of my first brush with the ocean, in the form of a full-scale replica of Jan van Riebeeck’s ship, the Dromedarus, belonging to a theme park called Santarama Miniland. Like Hughes’ Kariba, Wemmer was a space that was “coded white”. My father was a member of Viking Rowing Club, and on long regatta days Santarama provided some stimulation for children.
I return for the first time in 30 years on Good Friday. Several JMPD policemen guard the entrance to Pioneers’ Park, to prevent social gatherings in this time of Covid-19. We connect over shared memories of school visits to the theme park across the water. “The ship is now gone. It has sailed,” quips one. In an e-mail Luyanada Mzangwe, IT and assets manager for SANTA, the TB organisation that developed the theme park in the ’70s, explained: “Unfortunately, the Dromedarus perished in 2013 due to a fire started by vagrants that live in the veld.”
I walk around to the theme park’s entrance, which is still guarded by a gigantic Van Riebeeck, and, on the inside, by a snarling King Kong. The remaining scale models of notable buildings and locations from around SA, including a “port” in which 1:25 container ships float, are decaying. Gulls swarm around the pond, and waves of sacred ibis take flight, with one simply flopping around hideously in the water, regurgitating an orange substance.
Wemmer’s oceanic allusions are fading, seemingly tied to (white) capital flight and the steady decrease over time in the popularity of water sports such as rowing and sailing. In the grounds of the Wemmer Pan rowing club boatsheds are locked and silent, and kayaks, skiffs and sculls lie mouldering behind chicken wire. As it was when I was a child, particles of polystyrene frost the shoreline. I am happy to see that a swinging chain still hangs from the giant poplar by the Vikings boatshed.
Continuing southwards from the city’s original white ocean, I go looking for Johannesburg’s original black sea: a former theme park called Shareworld. In their extraordinary meditation on the meanings of Johannesburg, Not No Place, Bettina Malcomess and Dorothee Kreutzfeldt describe Shareworld as having an artificial sea as a centrepiece, “with concrete islands, a 2,000-foot sand beach and wave-making machines powerful enough to accommodate Africa’s first-ever inland surfing competition”.
Opened in 1988, Shareworld was 60% owned by a total of 880 black investors. A Los Angeles Times article by David Crary quotes Reuel Khoza, then Shareworld’s executive director, as saying: “There’s no question that Soweto is something of a recreational desert. This place came in as an oasis.” The theme park was heralded as a milestone of both the de-segregation of leisure activities, and BEE, with City Press describing the opening as “a victory for all those South Africans who still believe that there is hope in SA”.
Two years later, the dream was dead, and today the only remnant I can find, swaying against the backdrop of Soccer City, is a single palm tree. “It was probably ahead of its time,” journalist Carolyn Raphaely is quoted as saying in a Wits Justice Project blog post. “Given the absence of swimming pools in Soweto, few black children could swim and I think the entrance fees were too expensive for locals. In addition, few whites seemed willing to bridge the Sandton-Soweto divide, perhaps because of distance but possibly because of prejudice?”
In seeking to bring a divided people together, the developers chose to create an ocean amid the mine dumps. Did they address the right collective yearning? I am reminded of German photographer Jürgen Schadeberg’s iconic 1953 photo shoot with jazz singer Dolly Rathebe. Wanting a beach scene on a beachless highveld (and with many of the beaches on the coast segregated by law), Schaderberg photographed a bikini-clad Rathebe atop a gold-mine dump overlooking Soweto. The two were spotted and duly arrested under the Immorality Act, which forbade intercourse between blacks and whites.
Under apartheid black South Africans were forbidden access to my next stop — Power Park Dam — but this body of water in the heart of Soweto is today better known as the former site of the Soweto Beach Party, which took place annually between 2006 and 2016.
Pulling off Chris Hani road I open my reference, a copy of GG Alcock’s memoir, Third World Child. “Six chimneys rise from the top of the power station giving the impression of a huge ship rising out of the dam alongside it.” This must be the place. A poster on a pole advertises the Soweto Canoe and Kayak Club. Off to the left, bulrushes enclose a body of water about a third as large as Wemmer. “It started with a chance remark from a client,” writes Alcock. “‘We want to launch [Captain Morgan Spiced Gold] into Soweto … we need something monumental, something to capture people’s imagination.”
In 2006 Alcock, with business partner Billy Chaka, delivered an ocean. “Four hundred tons of beach sand were laid down, twenty-six foot yachts were launched and a host of Caribbean-style bars were built along the ‘seashore’. The Soweto surf report was broadcast on local radio stations and the best babes in Soweto, in their Captain Morgan-branded mini bikinis wowed the crowds in taverns and shebeens.” Sowetans were disbelieving at first, but by year four the venue was filled to capacity by 7pm, and not long afterwards 10,000 surplus revellers broke down the fences and surged in past security guards who used plastic chairs as riot shields.
“At midnight when the customary fireworks went off, the explosions mixed with the sound of shotgun blasts from the riot police outside, while the smell of fireworks accompanied the faint smell of teargas. Never before had a party attracted so much passion among the people of Soweto.” In an e-mail Alcock explained that the Beach Party died from the opposite of too little interest: “It got too big for the venue and we could not find a space where we could run it. It did spawn a large number of copycat events everywhere from the Vaal to Polokwane, with varying degrees of success.”
The beachsand is long gone but approaching the dam on foot I see a couple of jet skis and a powerboat on the muddy shoreline, alongside an inflatable doughnut and water snake. A laminated page cable-tied to a fence of sticks carries the words Miami in Soweto. A man called Elias explains that the business is new, and all of them — himself and the two men lounging among life jackets under a gazebo — are newly arrived in Soweto, having been poached from Sun City, where they had worked at the water sports dam, not far from The Roaring Lagoon. “People just stopped coming,” he says. “You remember how it was, parasailing on the dam all day long. Now it is quiet. Even the crocodile park has closed.”
Miami in Soweto is not faring much better. “We have been trying on social media, but nothing so far.” Who are they targeting? “Everyone, but mainly tourists.” I walk over to the water, which smells strongly of sewage. Elias recommends a jet-ski ride but, fearful of the water quality, I pay for a rip in the power boat.
After we push off from the shoreline the boat fails to start, and drifts into the rushes. The most thematically cool member of the team — white Oakleys, tattoos, long braids — comes around with the jet ski, and tows us out. The motor fires, and we are off, the G’s sending me to the bottom of the boat, sending my medical mask floating out over the water.
We go around 3.5 times and then the sensation of stopping and sinking back in the water. Out of fuel. Elias, mortified, waves the distress flag. Sitting there, hypertrophic gunk below the water’s surface, iconic painted cooling towers above (one a gigantic advert for Vodacom), I have one thought — that it is here in this high, dry place, that we have beached. And for better or worse, this is how we beach.
