#Africa

On Saturday and Sunday I participated in the 2018 #JoziWalks weekend. Sponsored by the Johannesburg Development Agency, #JoziWalks invites people/groups from all over Joburg to organize walking tours in their communities. (Read about last year’s #JoziWalks.)

Diepsloot is one of those places, like a lot of other Joburg places, where people are afraid to go.

Diepsloot, which means “deep ditch” in Afrikaans, is a huge informal settlement in the far northern outskirts of Joburg; in fact, it is so far north that it’s just as close to Pretoria as it is to Joburg. It emerged from nothing on an abandoned farm in the 1990s, as migrants poured into Joburg from rural South Africa and the rest of Africa and had nowhere else to go.

Last week I got an incredible opportunity to visit the Sentech Tower, a.k.a. the Brixton Tower.

A picture I took a few years ago of the Sentech Tower at sunset.

Last week I was invited to try out a co-working space called Basecamp, which is in Linden.

A co-working space is basically an office for people like me – people who don’t exactly have jobs. I’d been wanting to try one for a while, hoping that working in a quasi-office-like environment would help me to be more productive.

As I’ve said before, I consider myself to be an unfashionable person. But the longer I live in South Africa, the more fashionable I feel. I find the fashion in South Africa – and Africa in general – more fun than fashion in the United States. (No offense, American fashion designers: It’s not you, it’s me.)