JENNIFER PLATT | Mining for answers about a city on stilts as I quake in my boots

Sometimes I think reading is bad for you. I said this to my sister on Sunday evening after the earthquake in Johannesburg. I’m not sure how tired you are of hearing where and what someone was doing during the incident, but here’s my story.

I was home alone. Gman was in Zambia and I was awake reading. I felt the entire quake, from the weird rumble in the distance to the shaking and swaying of the house from side to side. I live in a townhouse and our bedroom is on the third floor. I don’t know if this made the shaking worse, but I honestly thought, “This is it, this is when Joburg sinks.”

I had a mini panic attack. Quickly tumbled into my warmest clothes — snood hoodie, takkies, beanie — and went downstairs; had an inner debate on how much water I should drink (should I stay hydrated or risk needing the loo in another quake?), charged my phone, put power banks into my backpack with other necessities, placed the “go” bag at the door, which I kept open just in case I needed to dash out.

Images of Turkey. I wondered if the best place would be between the arches in our living room as those are load-bearing. Then I thought I would name my talk show Between Two Arches and laughed. I knew then that I was going off the deep end.

I realised this was a strange and quite heightened reaction. I’ve lived in Joburg for almost my entire life — born, bred, etcetera — so I have experienced bad tremors. When I was about 12, we had a terrible one in which my mother’s cabinet displaying the “guest” china toppled over. Nothing broke, amazingly, but I didn’t even register it. I took it for what it was, growing up in a dusty town located near a mine where blasting and tremors were “normal”.

But Sunday's quake happened after I read Wake Up, This is Joburg, with words by Tanya Zack and photography by Mark Lewis. It is a beautiful book detailing 10 perspectives of Johannesburg in a thoughtful, considerate and careful way. You can purchase it at Love Books in Joburg or Exclusive Books. Published by Duke University Press, limited copies are available.

Parts of it shook me. Scuse the pun. In the introduction, Zack writes: “The description in Undercity (chapter 10) of MaLetsatsi digging for gold under her shack evokes so much about unearthing, stability, precarity and a city eating itself. It is a city inked onto the world map by a metal incidentally deemed valuable, a metal still surfacing at ground level along roadsides and streams, and even under dwellings located along the top of the reef. It is a city whose insatiable appetite for that metal transformed the highveld into skyscrapers and highways, and introduced toxins into its air, its groundwater and its soil. But this robust city outlasted the gold. And there’s no reason to believe it will not prevail even after the earth on which it stands is gouged out and its water sources are contaminated. This image also speaks to the tug between the vertical and the horizontal in the city. Between those energies and people inhabiting the surface world and those literally and figuratively ‘below’ — figures, images and rumblings stirring our fears. The ceaseless extraction characterising this city poses threats of material decay. Possibly, most alarmingly, threats turn again to the underworld of the city. They are the reports that informal miners might blast the remaining pillars propping up a city built atop the cavities, recklessly gouged out of the earth by a hungry gold-mining industry.”

All I could picture during the quake was our house sitting atop these cavities, teetering, waiting to be swallowed into the earth.

Further in chapter 10, Zack writes: “The politically expedient thing to do in Johannesburg is to demonise the artisanal miners. Media reports indicate that R7 billion (US$448.9 million) is ‘lost’ to Zama Zamas annually. Apocalyptic articles claiming that these miners might cause entire neighbourhoods to collapse contain terms such as ‘scourge’ and ‘illegal foreigners’. A recent tweet by the City of Johannesburg declares that ‘an investigation has revealed that if illegal mining continues at disused mines, the entire Nasrec precinct, including the iconic FNB stadium, could go down in ruins’. I contact officials in the city to ask about the report. No one has heard of it. We have heard of a man in Krugersdorp who is an adviser to various Undercity 317 commissions on the environmental impacts of the Witwatersrand mining industry. The hefty Mike Harris has spent his life along this reef ... As manager of the railways’ regional high-voltage electricity cable, he walked the rail line along the entire stretch of the reef for years. It allowed him to indulge his love of the mining landscape. ‘You can’t show me a single mine dump that I haven’t had a braai on,’ he chuckles ... We ask him about the threat of catastrophic sinkholes. ‘The Zama Zamas use a pick-and-shovel method, much the same as the first artisanal miners of Johannesburg did,’ he explains. ‘The difference is that 140 years later they are not working virgin rock faces. They are working the regulatory rock pillars that were kept in place during mining. Those pillars act as scaffolding, literally to hold the earth up.’ A city left standing on stilts. He reserves special contempt for the reckless mining companies that performed no postmining remediation on this land and barely shut these shafts when they took their fortunes, bequeathing the Witwatersrand a legacy of uncountable costs in environmental damage. The amount of gold retrieved is minimal compared with the deadly waste it generates.”

Earlier this week, Council for Geoscience spokesperson Mahlatse Mononela told TimesLIVE it was difficult to say what the exact cause of the earthquake was. “But given its shallow depth, it might be mining-related seismicity or due to fluctuations in groundwater levels. This said, the CGS is investigating further.”

I panicked on Sunday because I read, and sometimes reading is bad. Especially if you do not comprehend what you are reading or are in the repetitive fake news bubble of crap. “Knowledge is power” is a cliché for a reason. So I went back to reread Wake Up, This is Joburg. One of its main seams is how resilient it is, the people and the city itself. As Zack said in the intro: “ ... This robust city outlasted the gold. And there’s no reason to believe it will not prevail even after the earth on which it stands is gouged out and its water sources are contaminated.”