By Tanya Zack
“Wake Up, This is Joburg” is a collaboration between photographer Mark Lewis and urban planner and writer Tanya Zack.
Striking images and beautiful texts follow 10 stories the team discovered in urban Johannesburg, South Africa.
Each chapter captures many overlapping stories that come together around a character, a place or an activity.
The book is an ethnographic portrait of one of Africa’s most vibrant and intriguing cities.
We asked for the stories behind some of its images.
1. Chopping s’kop
The most marginal of the activities and spaces the stories explore is the informal butchers who chop up cow heads in a disused parking garage in the heart of the inner city.
The condemned building is next to formal structures and within view of banking head offices.
The cow heads, or s’kop, are bought for R10 each by nearby formal butcheries and delivered to them in shopping trolleys.
Every part is sold in this marginal economy.
Flesh is stripped off the skull, bones are taken to be crushed for bone meal, and skins enter a unique processing operation in invisible spaces in the city and transformed into an edible form.
Breakfast on the run
Competition within the informal economy is tight.
At the minibus taxi binding point Zola, micro-entrepreneurs offer barber services and sell food, snacks, socks, window wipers, cellphone accessories and bumper stickers.
Stallholder Monica Chauke, originally from Limpopo is unperturbed by the competition for the appetites of the 600 taxi drivers.
She knows that by midday, she would have sold out of her offering and made her R300 daily profit.
Tony dreams in yellow and blue
Tony Martins built his first house in Madeira, Portugal, in his early twenties – because his wife’s mother “wouldn’t let me take her until I had a house to live in”.
About 30 years later, he’s transforming his modest home in Johannesburg’s “old south” into a veritable castle – using objects he finds at waste dumps. Tony is an outsider artist.
He admits he cannot stop himself. “I sleep for two or three hours, and then I wake and think what else I can do. Then I have to do them in the day.”
Tanya Zack is visiting researcher, University of the Witwatersrand
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