Vice, a coffee shop next to CNR Café in Craighall Park, has become a semi-regular coffee hangout for me lately. I’ve held off on blogging about it because it’s a tricky place to describe.
Thorsten and I did another roadhouse mission last weekend. This time we headed west, journeying up Ondekkers Road to Uncle Harry’s Roadhouse in the West Rand mining town of Randfontein.
The Johnny Guitar Drive In, a roadhouse in downtown Alberton on Joburg’s East Rand, has a long and complex history. I’ll try to summarize what I know in a few sentences.
The big hill in the background is a mine dump.Another look from further down the street.
Like many Joburgers, I’ve always been both fascinated and appalled by these mountains of golden waste. Mine dumps are massive monuments to human greed, reminders of a time when insatiable hunger for gold drove powerful men to empty the earth beneath Johannesburg, pile it up where it didn’t belong, then leave that poisoned earth to blow dust into the lungs of former mine workers who – like the mine waste itself – got tossed away like garbage once they were no longer useful to the money-making machine.