Joburg isn’t a place as much as a shared hallucination

“They are trying to make Johannesburg respectable. They are trying to make snobs out of us, making us forget who our ancestors were. They are trying to make us lose our sense of pride in the fact that our forebears were a lot of roughnecks who knew nothing about culture and who came here to look for gold. We who are of Johannesburg know this spirit that is inside of us, and we don’t resent the efforts which are being made to put a collar and time on this city.”
—Herman Charles Bosman (1957)

It is a city of unbridled squander and unfathomable squalor

Ambrose Pratt
South Africa was quite a violent place. It was like Lord of the Flies

Elon Musk
Dreams come here to die

Lesgo Rampolokeng
But Johannesburg reminds me / Of the Paris I’ve never known

Rui Knopfli
I say this as I get lost in a street in Johannesburg. I have my domestic America

Nelson Saúte
... welcome to our Hillbrow of milk and honey and bile

Phaswane Mpe
The inner city is divided into United Nations-esque chunks—little Lagos, Beijing, Karachi, Kinshasa, Dakar, Mogadishu—and pockets of hip-hop loving township hawkers with their stew of Soweto-meets-the-Bronx slang

Bongani Madondo
... the fear of the great city where boys were killed crossing the street

Alan Paton
Jo’burg stinks of pain, money, sex and drugs

Ayanda Ngema, poem in They Raped Me: So, Now What? (2019)
That bastard city on the ridge doesn't deal much in happy endings

Joburg Zen
The gold fields are wonderful in every way. In 7 or 8 years they built up, in a desert, a city of a hundred thousand inhabitants, counting white and black together; and not the ordinary mining city of wooden shanties, but a city made out of lasting material

Mark Twain (1897)
Second to the dust, the main characteristic of Johannesburg is the inhabitants' great struggle for sudden wealth

Howard Hillegas
For elsewhere, and since the dawn of civilisation, Intellect has always become Master, Captain and King over Ignorance, but at Johannesburg it is Asinine Ignorance which rules Intellect

Henry M. Stanley
[Joburg] is so long and sprawling that the bare ribs have pushed aside their covering. An extended brickfield is the first impression: a prosperous powder-factory is the last

John Buchan