STACKS OF LIFE OP-ED: Joburg: A city that’s terrible to visit but wonderful to call home

Sometimes it feels that the bar for us to gush about Joburg, as Joburgers, is really low. Anything at all can go well and we’re thrilled. We’re like the parent beaming at their child for a participation certificate.

I’m hesitant to write this, because I know there are a million reasons to lament our city’s current state of dilapidation, as Anna Cox and others at Daily Maverick have shown us.

I’ve always said to people new to Joburg that it is a terrible city to visit but a wonderful city to live in. It holds its cards close to its chest. You need to make an effort to get to know it.

But if you love Joburg, it will love you back. This was proven again when a trip to the Standard Bank Art Gallery’s Homecoming exhibition on Thursday, 28 May turned into a personalised tour of the city library’s underground stacks.

A friend and I drove into town, parked at Standard Bank and made our way around the gallery. We finished and said to each other, we’ve been meaning to go to the reopened Johannesburg City Library for some time, let’s just walk there now – so we did. The skies were blue, the streets were clean, and the people friendly.

We made our way down Simmonds, past the premier’s office, which is opposite the gutted Clegg House, and left into Market at Beyers Naudé Square, which faces the back of our City Hall.

The library gardens, once filled with foreboding barbed wire, are open and clean, people sitting in the Highveld winter sun.

As we entered the library I was filled with nostalgia. Not for this library, but for every library I have ever been in.

I wrote my entire PhD thesis in the William Cullen library at Wits, I grew up as a child of the Bellville Public Library where my mom worked, I remember studying for exams in the carrels of the Rhodes University library.

I think one of the many side-effects of consumer culture is that people have forgotten how to use places that are free. Sure, these spaces are used by students and schoolkids, but what about those of us who work from home or coffee shops? Wouldn’t it be nice to go somewhere quiet to do some work that didn’t cost anything? Guess what? It exists!

The reference section, on the immediate right to the entrance, is a huge hall surrounded by books, with many available desks, high ceilings and free Wi-Fi.

The reference librarian saw us poking around and sensed our curiosity. He asked us if we had ever been down into the archives. You know Substack, the all-the-rage blogging site? Well, it gets its name from the original stacks (aka shelves) in the library. And underground there are the magical