Johannesburg from the Riverbanks: Navigating the Jukskei

It is often remarked that Johannesburg is exceptional as a major city in that it has no large body of water. While it may be true that the city does not boast commercial harbours, busy canals, or navigable rivers, spruits and wetlands saturate the city, and are home to many of its non-human inhabitants. These have largely been overlooked as participants in the urbanization of Johannesburg despite shaping, and being shaped by, the city’s development. This book’s focus on the Jukskei river—in which some of the first gold was found on the Witwatersrand—invites a re-centering of waterways as a device to organize how we think about this baffling city. The river, after all, runs past many notable features of Johannesburg’s landscape. Starting under Ellis Park (due to a lack of any environmental planning when the city was built), it first sees daylight in the poor urban neighborhood of Bertrams before flowing northwest to Hartbeespoort Dam, on the way passing through Alexandra township, Leeuwkop Prison, and the upscale gated estates of Waterfall, Dainfern, and Steyn City. This volume brings together a variety of activists, community members, journalists, artists, social scientists, and natural scientists to examine the relationship that Johannesburg has to the Jukskei. Centering the river as environmental, urban, socio-economic, political and cultural artefact from which to further understand Johannesburg offers an interdisciplinary approach to studying the human-environment interface. Such an exercise is crucial at a time when the urgency of climate change has made that interface especially volatile, and disciplinary distinctions untenable. Urban rivers like the Jukskei, even if not especially useful to industry, are important in our collective socio-ecological efforts to live better together, in cities and with nature. This will be the first volume to critically consider the role of the river in the cultural, social, political and scientific life of the city of Johannesburg. As the main economic hub in the country, and indeed one of the main economic hubs on the continent, Johannesburg rightly garners a lot of critical and scholarly attention. The Jukskei river, which not only runs through the city but emerges from beneath the weight of its concrete, is neglected not only by urban planning and the city’s inhabitants, but by critical theory and research. This book brings together a collection of writings from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, that navigate Johannesburg’s Jukskei.

Chapter 1 – Riparian Urbanism: Thinking Johannesburg with the Jukskei Mehita Iqani and Renugan Raidoo

Section A: Scientific Perspectives
Chapter 2 — The Historical Jukskei River Valley: A Botanical Benchmark
Antoinette Boostma

Chapter 3 — Macroplastic pollution within the Jukskei River: How much, what kind and why does it matter?
Kyle Van Heyde

Chapter 4 — Bacterial Contamination in the Jukskei River in Gauteng Province, South Africa Kousar Banu Hoorzook and Atheesha Singh

Chapter 5 — Upper Jukskei Catchment Management Plan
Stuart Dunsmore and Ernita van Wyk

Section B: Art and the River
Chapter 6 — For the One that Dances with Jiggling Brass Compositions for the Jukskei
Dunja Herzog

Chapter 7 — Where Water Once Stood, It Shall Stand Again: Stances on Fluvial Art Practice
Nina Barnett, Refiloe Namise and Abri de Swardt

Chapter 8 — Radiation and Rapture: Images of Healing and Pollution in the Jukskei River
Landi Raubenheimer

Chapter 9 — Community engagement at the Jukskei Source: A Photo Essay
Lungile Hlatswayo

Section C: River Politics
Chapter 10 — Joburg and the Sea: A Squalid Romance
Sean Christie

Chapter 11 — Dirty river: Whiteness, Pollution and the Jukskei
Nicky Falkof

Chapter 12 — Reporting on the Jukskei: Behind Three Headlines
Jamaine Krige

Chapter 13 — The Creaturely Life of the Jukskei, and Anxious Bewilderment of Faecal Discourse
Jessica Webster

Section D: River Living
Chapter 14 — On the Edge: Riverbank Living Along a Jukskei Tributary
Sarah Charlton

Chapter 15 — Mamlambo in Waterfall City
Ujithra Ponniah

Chapter 16 — The River Talks
Sibusiso Sangweni

Chapter 17 — What Elites Think with the Jukskei: Property, Race, and Blame in Totemic Thought
Renugan Raidoo

Section E: Urban River Management
Chapter 18 — The River is our Resource: Alex Water Warriors
Paul Maluleke

Chapter 19 — Temporary Or Permanent? The Built Environment and Living Conditions in Stjwetla Informal Settlement
Savory Chikomwe

Chapter 20 — Converging currents: Urban Ecological Design Strategies Towards a Resilient River System
Dieter Brandt

Chapter 21 — The River Deserves Love: Water for the Future
Romy Stander

Mehita Iqani was appointed as Chairholder of the South African Research Chair in Science Communication at Stellenbosch University from January 2022. Prior to this she was Professor in Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she taught, researched and collaborated for almost eleven years. She is the author and editor of several books on media, consumer culture, luxury, waste, and the global south, the most
recent of which include: African Luxury Branding: From Soft Power to Queer Futures (2023), Garbage in Popular Culture (2021), Consumption Media and the Global South (2016), Media Studies: Critical African and Decolonial Approaches (2019),African Luxury (2019). She has published widely in cultural studies journals and is currently leading the SARChI research programme under the theme, “science communication for social justice”.

Renugan Raidoo is a Lecturer in social anthropology at Stellenbosch University. His current monograph project concerns lifestyle estates in the Gauteng city region, their political economic origins, and their social and spatial consequences. Previous work focused on secrecy and homophobia in urban Sierra Leone. His research has been funded by awards from various sources at Harvard University (where he completed his
PhD), an Emslie Horniman Scholarship from the Royal Anthropological Institute/Sutasoma Award, and the Fulbright-Hays program. He holds an MPhil in social anthropology from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, as well as a BA in anthropology and a BS (with honours) in chemistry from the University of Iowa, and has previously taught at Harvard University and Brandeis University. His academic work can be found in the edited volume Anxious Joburg: The Inner Lives of a Global South City (Wits University Press, 2020) and in the journals GLQ and Africa.