Back in the 1980’s, when Louis Smuts was growing up in Johannesburg, South Africa, his family couldn’t go outside together without risking arrest. “My mother would always walk behind [my father] wherever they went,” he recalls
Back in the 1980’s, when Louis Smuts was growing up in Johannesburg, South Africa, his family couldn’t go outside together without risking arrest. “My mother would always walk behind [my father] wherever they went,” he recalls. And in the car, she would sit in the back and pretend to be the family maid. At the time, Smuts didn’t understand that only white people could move freely in the city, while black South Africans were pushed to the outskirts. The country’s white-ruled government called this system by the Afrikaans word “apartheid,” meaning “separateness.” Under apartheid, white people had access to the best schools, jobs and healthcare.
Smuts’ father was white and his mother was colored—a South African term for people of mixed race. They had gotten married in neighboring Swaziland, but back home their marriage was illegal.
Apartheid leaders claimed that segregated cities were better for everyone, and apartheid was strictly enforced. Police would patrol neighborhoods to make sure that white people and black people weren’t living together. But the system was never airtight, and people found creative ways to slip through the cracks.
“If you lived in a high rise building with five or six hundred flats in it,” explains Smuts, “they weren’t going to go through each and every flat to come look for any illegal persons.” And over the years, many interracial families like the Smuts disappeared into one high rise apartment building in particular—a tower called Ponte City. “I don’t think there’s anybody in Johannesburg that doesn’t know Ponte,” Smuts says. “They might not have been there. But everybody knows Ponte.”
Looking at Johannesburg’s skyline, the 54-story tower is hard to miss—it is the tallest apartment building on the African continent. It is also distinctively shaped, a massive cylinder with an empty central core. The billboard wrapping its top like a crown also helps it stand out. For many, the building symbolizes Johannesburg—because over the past four decades, its fortunes have reflected the changing city around it.
“Because of its scale, size, its checkered history, its toughness, and roughness, [Ponte speaks] to a very Johannesburg condition,” says architectural historian Melinda Silverman. “It has spoken to a city which goes very rapidly through cycles of decline and prosperity and decline and prosperity.” Ponte has always been a kind of vertical waiting room for admission to South African society. But it’s also been a laboratory, a place where the city seems to try out new versions of itself.
Before Ponte became a hideaway for interracial families like the Smuts, the building attracted a much different kind of clientele.
At the start of the 1960’s, the apartheid system had been firmly in place for more than ten years and South Africa’s economy was a rising star in the world. It had just given birth to a new currency, the Rand, which was already stronger than the US Dollar. Its success was largely driven by its access to cheap black labor and the high value of gold.
Over the next decade, foreign investment in South Africa doubled, but skilled workers were in short supply. Because the government had denied the majority of the black population a decent education, it had to fill the gap by recruiting single white men from all over Europe. The country’s white population increased by over 50% between 1963 and 1972. They were attracted in part, explains Silverman, by “a level of privilege that you probably couldn’t have found in any other part of the world. If you’re a middle class person, living in England or America, you probably had to wash your own dishes, and make your own beds, whereas if you were a middle class person living in South Africa, you probably had at least two people doing that for you.”
One particular square mile of central Johannesburg—the future site of Ponte City—served as a regular landing place for incoming European migrants. It was home to bars and live music joints, a place where specialty stores hawked French magazines, Italian shoes and American rock-and-roll. It had a shiny, vibrant, bohemian edge that people compared to New York’s Greenwich Village and London’s Soho District.
At the same time, it felt almost like a foreign country. As with most of Johannesburg’s nicest neighborhoods, this area was zoned exclusively for white people. Black South Africans could work there, but unless they were live-in servants they had to be out by nightfall each evening.
Developers could hardly satisfy the demand for high rise apartments in this part of the city. Buildings kept getting bigger and taller, monuments to a thriving economy. “This was white people wanting to make their mark on the landscape,” says Silverman, to show that “South Africa is a modern, progressive, impressive place.”
Of course, South Africa was neither truly modern nor progressive at this time. Across the continent, change was underway; this was the era of African independence. Old colonies were falling like dominoes and by the mid 1960s, most African countries were black-ruled. To much of the world, South Africa’s white government began to look pretty backward. And it didn’t help that the country had recently thrown several of the anti-apartheid movement’s most powerful leaders in jail for life, including a young lawyer named Nelson Mandela.
Nonetheless, Johannesburg kept developing, and in the middle of it all rose Ponte, a great