First in my Roadhouses of Gauteng series. Browse all of my roadhouse posts or view a map of the roadhouses I’ve visited.
I’ve been planning to blog about South African roadhouses – the equivalent of American fast-food drive-ins – since 2015, when I ate lunch at the Casbah Roadhouse in Brakpan during a Joburg Photowalkers outing.
In the middle of 2020, I started seeing social media posts about the fence outside St. James Presbyterian Church in Bedford Gardens. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the staff at St. James were tying one white ribbon to the church’s palisade fence for every person in South Africa who died of covid-19.
It’s Monday, January 11th, 2021. It’s dark and rainy in Joburg and the holidays are officially over. South Africa is suffering through a second wave of covid-19 – worse than the first wave, as many experts predicted, and likely to worsen further as millions of South Africans return to work in the big cities after celebrating the holidays at home. We’re back in Level 3 lockdown, with a strict curfew and alcohol sales banned again.
Two days ago, on December 16th, I went with Thorsten of Dagwood sandwich fame to visit the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria.
I’ve been thinking hard over the past 48 hours about how to frame this post. The Voortrekker Monument is controversial, to put it mildly, and it’s more controversial on December 16th than on any other day. December 16th is the Day of Reconciliation, a public holiday that used to be called “The Day of the Vow” during the apartheid era. On this day in 1838, the Voortrekkers (white Afrikaans settlers who migrated from the Cape Colony to South Africa’s interior during the Great Trek) defeated the Zulus at the Battle of Blood River.
I recently spent a Friday walking around downtown Joburg with Gerald Garner. Gerald needed a few photos taken for his new book, Johannesburg 2020 and Ahead. So we walked the city from end to end – nearly nine kilometers total, with a couple of Uber rides mixed in – chatting about recent developments in town as Gerald pointed out the different buildings and scenes he needed me to shoot.