One of the best works of creative non-fiction to emerge from the country
in years. Quite simply brilliant.’ – NIREN TOLSI
Amid evictions, raids, killings, the drug trade, and fire, inner-city Johannesburg
residents seek safety and a home. A grandmother struggles to keep her
granddaughter as she is torn away from her. A mother seeks healing in the
wake of her son’s murder. And displaced by a city’s drive for urban
regeneration, a group of blind migrants try to carve out an existence.
The Blinded City 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 national, live in these buildings in dire
conditions. This book tells the story of these sites, and the court cases around
them, ones that strike at the centre of who has the right to occupy the city.
In February 2010, while Johannesburg prepared for the FIFA World Cup, the
South Gauteng High Court ordered the eviction of the unlawful occupiers of an
abandoned carpet factory on Saratoga Avenue and that the city’s Metropolitan
Municipality provide temporary emergency accommodation for the evicted. The
case, which became known as Blue Moonlight and went to the Constitutional
Court, catalysed a decade of struggles over housing and eviction in
Johannesburg.
The Blinded City chronicles this case, among others, and its aftermath – a
tumultuous period in the city characterised by recurrent dispossessions, police
and immigration operations, outbursts of xenophobic violence and political and
legal change. All through the decade there is the backdrop of successive
mayors and their attempts to ‘clean up’ the city, and the struggles of residents
and urban housing activists for homes and a better life. The interwoven
narratives present a compelling mosaic of life in post-apartheid Johannesburg,
one of the globe’s most infamous and vital cities.
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