Johannesburg - If you’ve ever wondered and thought about the going ons in the Johannesburg inner-city, you may want to pick up Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon’s “The Blinded City”.
The book explores various human stories and pays attention to the plight of people living in the inner city. Although the book’s narrative is based on the experiences of people living in Johannesburg – but the stories could be the experiences of any displaced people in any city in South Africa or the world, struggling for survival.
Amid evictions, raids, killings, the drug trade, and fire, inner-city Johannesburg residents are struggling to find safety and a home.
There is a grandmother struggling to keep her granddaughter as she is torn away from her. And a mother seeking healing in the wake of her son’s murder. And not to be left out as they are displaced by the city’s drive for urban regeneration, a group of blind migrants try to carve out an existence.
These are just some of the explorations the reader will come across.
The book recounts the history of inner-city Johannesburg from 2010 to 2019, primarily from the perspectives of the unlawful occupiers of spaces known as hijacked buildings, bad buildings or dark buildings.
Tens of thousands of residents, both South African and foreign nationals, live in these buildings in dire conditions. This book tells the story of these sites and the court cases around them, which strike at the centre of who has the right to occupy the city.
For Wilhelm-Solomon though, it didn’t start out as an idea for a book, but rather as a newspaper article he wrote for the Mail & Guardian in 2010 on a project run by the international humanitarian medical non-governmental organisation, Doctors Without Borders. They estimated that 50 000 to 60 000 people in the inner city were living in conditions below international standards for refugee camps.
“Having grown up in Johannesburg, this was shocking to me, so for that story I visited one of the buildings called Chambers in Doornfontein which is subsequent to my doctoral research,” he said.
When he came back after doing his doctoral research in Uganda on displaced communities, he decided to continue with the Doctors Without Borders project, doing research on unlawful occupations and what is called hijacked buildings, and it seemed to him at the time that these buildings were misread and interpreted through a lens of criminality.
“There were homes for both foreign nationals and South Africans who couldn’t afford housing in the inner-city. So you had spaces that were treated as criminal spaces.”
The book does a good job of raising the voices of those who may not otherwise have had a platform. “The Blinded City” is a tribute to those who struggle for connection against all odds.
In 21 chapters, it chronicles the eviction of unlawful occupiers of an abandoned carpet factory on Saratoga Avenue, Johannesburg, the case, among others and the aftermath of the eviction.
“The Blinded City” is published by Picador Africa and is available at all major bookstores.