Munro Drive

A few weeks ago I was privileged to be invited by Clive Chipkin to join his Joburg tour for a group of visiting American students from Brown University, USA. The group of 22 postgraduate students spent a week in Johannesburg at the Public Affairs Research Institute (PARI) in Parktown. Hats off to Brown for devising a study abroad programme on the complexities of South Africa beyond 1994 and its transition to democracy.

Clive Chipkin devised a personal tour to place Johannesburg in the context of its natural topography, the Witwatersrand. His tour reached across the grandest of hill top sites of the Witwatersrand. Evidence of Clive’s macro thinking has already been presented on the Heritage Portal in his 2015 heritage survey of the Corridors of Freedom, prepared for the City of Johannesburg (click here to view). Clive expresses conceptual thinking in visual diagrams about place and space. He seeks viable architectural solutions for future settlement patterns in the city. For this special Brown student tour Clive drew two maps. The first map set out our specific route with the starting point as the Gauteng Legislature (of course we still call it the Johannesburg City Hall) and ended at the Cottesloe hill. The route allowed for four stopping points on the high points of Johannesburg’s Witwatersrand ridges. The second map places Johannesburg in a geographical context relating Witwatersrand hills ridges and rivers within Gauteng.

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The topography of Johannesburg is distinctive with the rocky mountainous ridges and the line of koppies that runs from east to west. These are the quartzite ridges of the famous Witwatersrand. The geology is unique. Viljoen and Reimold (An Introduction to South Africa’s Geology and Mining Heritage) make the point that this is one of the few localities where the evolution of the granitic crust of Southern Africa has been preserved and can be viewed. There are several places in Johannesburg where approximately 500 million years of the Earth’s history is exposed and displayed. One needs a geological guide, but what one sees is a layering of hard quartzite rock and sediments of shale above the quartzite, within the Witwatersrand super group. To the south is the further layering of conglomerates with the gold bearing reefs, such as the Main Reef, Main Reef Leader, South Reef, Promise Reef, Kimberley Reefs etc.

Some of the best spots to see geological time exposed are on either side of the rock lined quartzite roads of the cuttings and passes of Johannesburg. Here we are looking at more recent history. It is some 130 years since gold was discovered and the city of Johannesburg was founded. People settled on the ridges and hills as well as in the valleys and dales. The residential properties located on the ridges are considered to be the most desirable for their views, their elevations and their well-established trees and gardens. The air seems fresher, cleaner, clearer...