While there’s still some gold in those mines in Johannesburg, it is no longer the City of Gold of its origins. It’s still a frontier city, in many ways, full of promise and possibility, but gold has given way to green.
Johannesburg is today the financial services capital of the country, the entrepreneurial hub of the country, and the place where where hustle is properly rewarded. This is where you come to if you want to make cash, proper cash, not that Cape Town kinda cash counted in wads. Joburg counts money in briefcases.
The thing is that Cape Town is old money. It’s an old city, at least in South African terms, at a little under 400 years old. Joburg is not even at 150 years of age yet. That Cape Town money is doing all the work now on its own. In Joburg, it’s the people doing the hustle.
Which makes for a far more engaging city.
The hustle means networking, creating, building, sharing, connecting. Joburg is a city that wants to connect, that goes out of its way to connect.
Cape Town is an old pussy cat, happy if it never sees another soul. It’s not easy in Cape Town to organically connect with people. In Joburg organic connectivity is currency, everything is geared towards it. Walk into any shop and the shopkeeper will say Hi, how are you doing? Make eye contact with someone on the street and they’ll say Hi how are you doing. Joburg is deceptively friendly, which is not what people expect. It’s a lot like Nairobi in that way.
All that hustle means that Joburg does operate at a frenetic pace, but that doesn’t mean that you as a visitor have to get swept up in that. Joburg doesn’t demand that you get caught up in its conveyor belt, in fact it loves a little push back. It’s part of what fuels creativity in this metropolis.
The key to enjoying Joburg is attitude. An open mind, engaging without prejudice, a desire to let Johannesburg reveal itself. From food to art to music to design to innovation and literature, it’s all happening in this city.
