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Crime, poverty, anarchy: the centre of Johannesburg has long been a no-go area for wealthy South Africans. Yet, behind the derelict façades, a pulsating arts scene has grown. The Goethe-Institut is right at the heart of it with GoetheonMain. By Claudia Bröll

They are images of despair and speechlessness. Visitors to GoetheonMain in Johannesburg look through the camera viewfinder with Kabelo Mofokeng, a photographer from Soweto. Their eyes fall on a girl standing stunned in a hastily buttoned orange-coloured coat. A woman has dropped into an armchair in the middle of the street, surrounded by towers of cushions, heating devices and suitcases. A man in uniform looks like a military sniper – but his helmet and clothing are red. Next to him, like a mockery, stand a laundry rack and a flowerpot with a red rose.

Only minutes before the photographs were taken, the flowerpot was still inside the Monis Mansion apartment building in downtown Johannesburg. The woman had probably been making herself up for the day, the girl just pulled on her jacket to leave for school. Now, they are standing on the street, forcefully removed from their lodgings and with no idea what to do.

Photo gallery: Aspects of a city we no longer know

“Through the viewfinder, I see myself in the many faces calling for justice,” comments Mofokeng, “Who do these buildings belong to? How many people will suffer the same fate? Did anyone think to help them? All of these questions hang in the air as I click at the faces of misery.”

The black South African and his colleague Moshe Sekete photographed the eviction of the residents of Monis Mansion in March 2007. The photography exhibition was one of the first projects by the GoetheonMain project space opened by the Johannesburg Goethe-Institut that year where artists could portray their views of everyday life in Johannesburg on 273 square metres and incite a cultural dialogue on the transformation of the city.

Artistic fair trade

“We want to give artists the production means they need to be able to express themselves in a country with very low budgets for artistic promotion. In development policy, we would call it fair trade. We do not wish to intervene or guide, but leave them as much freedom as possible,” explains Peter Anders, head of the Goethe-Institut’s cultural programmes in southern Africa.

The photography exhibition shows one of Johannesburg’s most pestering problems: the large number of office buildings and blocks of flats that were abandoned by their former inhabitants and are now left to decay and neglect. Often, criminal gangs call the shots. They lease single square metres to the many people stranded in Johannesburg; mainly refugees from other African countries. Therefore, measures as that at Monis Mansion occur regularly. The red-uniformed employees of a private security firm commissioned with the evictions call themselves the Red Ants. Downtown, every child knows and fears their name.

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Johannesburg is a prime example for the rapid change that big cities are going through today. This once pulsating economic and cultural centre of Africa that emerged from the gold and diamond rushes of the 19th century has become within only one decade a city to which white South Africans and tourists no longer dare to go. The downtown is dominated by poverty, overpopulation and largely anarchist conditions. Due to its high crime rate Johannesburg is often described as the most dangerous city in the world outside war zones.

“Not an island for the select few”

The downfall is the cause and the result of a mass outward migration of recent years. Companies, banks, consulates and small businesses left the city and moved to the suburbs, particularly to wealthy Sandton. Fifteen years after the end of apartheid, the population groups in Johannesburg once again are segregated, even if this time it is more their income than the colour of their skin that decides it: the poor blacks live in the Central Business District (CBD), as the city centre is still called, and the whites and moneyed blacks in the suburbs.

With the GoetheonMain project space, the Goethe-Institut intends to contribute to overcoming this segregation. “We want to be where change and where culture happen. Cultural dialogue may not be allowed to be limited to the suburbs, where only a small percentage of the population lives. We do not want to be an island for the select few. We want to take the people in Johannesburg’s centre seriously and go to them rather than expect them to come to us,” explains Anders. The Germans were among the first to leave downtown. “So we see social responsibility in this to commit ourselves there.”

GoetheonMain is therefore located in the middle of the CBD, on Main Street in an abandoned factory. A small art and cultural centre is growing there with galleries, studios, a bookshop and a café. You quickly forget that you are in Johannesburg or even in Africa.

Nonetheless, the closeness to everyday life in the city is very important for the organizers. For example, one of the GoetheonMain projects was dedicated to the “trolley pushers” who carry luggage from one taxi to the next for a few cents every day. At another event, the residents of the nearby men’s hostel Mai Mai performed traditional music and dance that is still regularly practiced in the hostels.

Reality up close

Yet another exhibition was held on domestic violence, which is widespread in South Africa. An independent jury – with members such as the prominent theatrical director Paul Grootboom and the singer Sibongile Khumalo – decides on the proposals submitted by artists.

The Johannesburg clientele interested in the arts thus experience an aspect of their city that they no longer know through the photographers’ lenses, the poets’ verses or the men’s songs. Not far from the whitewashed hall, reality can be seen up close. Two years later, Monis Mansion, for instance, still looks just as derelict as on Mofokeng’s shots. The incomplete name on the façade still implies that it was a residential building, but the door is boarded up and secured with a number of thick chains.

Photo gallery: Chronology of an Eviction

As if it had been stage managed, the girl who then wore the orange-coloured coat is sitting in front of it. She sells sweets, biscuits and single cigarettes. After the eviction, she and her mother found a place to stay in the southern suburb of Mayfair, the now 15-year-old tells us. Her sister is living with an uncle. Her mother still comes to the “mansion” every day to sell her wares.

She can still remember every detail of the day that the Red Ants came. “This was my home; I was born here. And suddenly they threw us out, just like that, at 6:30 in the morning.” When asked if she would like to live here again, she only shrugs. The inhabitants of downtown Johannesburg have learned to get used to changes. What counts is surviving day to day.