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The skyline of Johannesburg, the largest city in South Africa, with the largest economy of any metropolitan region in Sub-Saharan Africa. The city is one of the 40 largest metropolitan areas in the world, and is also the worlds largest city not situated on a river, lake, or coastline. (Photo by Brooks Kraft LLC/Sygma via Getty Images)
Cities like Johannesburg, South Africa, are often presented as a site of trouble.
In so many instances, these spaces appear as nothing more than locations for the collective fears of the north.
Although fear is one way to describe this conition, anxiety may be a more useful description.
The writer supports Nosh Food Rescue, an NGO that helps Jozi’s soup kitchens, shelters and feeding schemes with food and produce “rescued” from the food chain. Please support them
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In Derrick Avenue or the Cyrildene Chinatown, there are not many people who are not Chinese. Both sides of the street are alive with Chinese supermarkets, fresh produce spilling onto the street where it becomes waste the further it ventures, massage places, restaurants, trucks bleeping to park, Mercs and busy Chinese men. Chinese women run across the street in pretty pumps. Hardly any hubbubs or conversations feature English.
Here I enjoy that. But it is a scary prospect when travelling to another country. About a decade ago I was offered a trip to China, to write about my choice of travel and food topics. That was pretty exciting and I thought up topics in no time but I put off contacting the tourism people and I kept putting it off. I felt dread under the thrill. When I identified the d
Bleak New Year looms for Joburg’s Chinese community The combined effects of lockdown and lingering prejudice and suspicion around the origins of the virus first detected in China mean it s been a tough year for this community. The entrance to Chinatown in Cyrildene, Johannesburg, in February 2021. Picture Abigail Javier/Eyewitness News
61 days ago
CYRILDENE - Businesses in Chinatown in Johannesburg say their financial troubles are piling up with the combined effect of lockdowns and lingering prejudice putting their livelihoods in jeopardy.
Today, exactly a year ago,
Eyewitness News visited the community of Cyrildene when they were facing discrimination weeks after the coronavirus broke out in Wuhan in China in December 2019.
It was simply known as the Durban Plague and in that late summer of 1904 it was expected to hit the city and cause death.
For the Durban Plague’s real name was the pneumonic plague, and 600 years earlier it had ripped through Europe, killing perhaps a third of the population.
The port city of Durban was hit first in 1904 and the expectation was that the plague would follow the railway lines up to the Witwatersrand.
The plague did arrive, but a month later in the Indian quarter of Joburg, near where Newtown is today.
To stop its spread, the authorities were brutal.