On Thursday last week, I asked the driver of the car we were using to take us around the Johannesburg CBD to see the state of the city. Having lived just across the city, in Braamfontein, from January 1983 to December 1984 and having enjoyed many walks into the CBD and its surroundings, nothing could have prepared me for the shock. The Johannesburg CBD is no more. It’s been destroyed.
I asked our driver to drive through the CBD’s famous streets, such as Commissioner, Eloff, Bree, Rissik, Jeppe, and others. Every street we drove through confronted me with a dystopian nightmare – except in this case, it was all real. The CBD was a heaving, suffering, mortally wounded animal, breathing its last as violent humans further violated what remained of…