History's strange kinks and characters have given Joburg some weird heritage - like a zoo formed from one man's personal menagerie and a gift of land from a dead man's friends.
It was in 1903, 10 years after the death of German-born British mining giant and banker Hermann Eckstein, that his business partners decided to present a gift of land in his memory to the people of Johannesburg. It would include a portion of the Sachsenwald forest (today's Saxonwold). The 80ha of freehold ground today make up the Joburg Zoo, Zoo Lake and the grounds of the South African National Museum of Military History.
At about the same time Percy FitzPatrick, politician and author of Jock of the Bushveld, cast his gaze from his mansion Hohenheim (where Charlotte Maxeke Hospital now stands) upon the valley of trees, imagining a zoo as an ideal way to home his bulging animal collections. FitzPatrick was a keen hunter, but often bought live animals back from his expeditions, too.A year later FitzPatrick got his wish and Johannesburg got its first zoo. Along with animals from FitzPatrick's menagerie was an animal inventory that included a male lion, a male baboon, a female leopard, a pair of Indian apes (today's rhesus monkeys), two male sable antelopes, one insimba cat (today's genet), a pair of porcupines, a female giraffe and a golden eagle.
Today there are around 2,000 animals and more than 300 species in the Joburg Zoo, visited by more than 540,000 people a year. At 114 years, the zoo is one of the city's oldest institutions. It is also one that has to fight hard to argue its relevance in modern times.
Reflecting on history, though, can hold clues to wiser future choices.
Among the zoo's old-growth trees and surviving structures and monuments are imprints of love and loss in times of war, the reality of access based on class and race, change with the dawn of a new conservation consciousness, the pressures of corporatisation and commercialism, and the question of balancing competing needs in a rapidly urbanising and enlarging metropolis.
"The zoo came into being quite by chance with the donations of land and the animal collection happening at the same time," says Janet Hughes, a guide with the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation (JHF).JHF conducted tours at the zoo to celebrate its 114th birthday last month. This created an institution flawed when viewed through a modern lens but prevailing in the childhood memories of many Joburgers.
Amid weeds and the remnants of someone's lunch are the pillars and gates of the original entrance. Nearby is a shady patch ringed by a stout iron fence. It once encircled a tree planted in 1948 in honour of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, who, in 1900, had sent a warship to South Africa to help a besieged Paul Kruger, then president of the Transvaal Republic.
A few dozen metres away the Old Elephant House survives and is today a conference centre. Also standing are the original bear pits and the unforgivably tiny lion enclosures.
The bear pits have been repurposed for smaller creatures and the lion enclosure is an artefact. It's open for the public to wonder through or read from display boards about the unlikely friendship between a lion and a dog, Samson and Delilah. They lived together in the zoo in the 1920s until a public outcry demanded they be separated. The mutual pining of the furry friends is a recollection of heartbreak.
The scars of war are everywhere in the zoo's memorials and monuments. There's the Edwin Lutyens-designed Rand Regiments Memorial, an imposing 20m tall, four-arched structure with a bronze angel gazing over Joburg. Controversial in its one-sided memorialisation, it was finally re-dedicated in 1999 to "the memory of the men, women and children of all races and all nations who lost their lives in the Anglo Boer War, 1899-1902". Now, it's widely known as the Angel of Peace.Outside the zoo's education centre is a 6-inch howitzer, one of six bought back from France and Flanders. In the first column of the plaque remembering the fallen is the name of Major Percy Nugent FitzPatrick - the son of the man who helped establish the zoo. Major FitzPatrick was killed in December 1917 in the Battle of Cambrai.
The zoo's bandstand, built in 1910, is a reminder of what genteel afternoon recreation for the well-heeled looked like in early Joburg. The zoo and Zoo Lake were technically open to all races, exempt from the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act of 1953 because the land was a "deed of gift". But the zoo's policy of free access was ditched by the 1960s.
The zoo's more modern history also reflects the grittiness of the Joburg story. In 1997 Max the gorilla made headlines when a fleeing criminal jumped into Max's enclosure and shot him. The thug was arrested and Max had to receive treatment at Milpark Hospital. He made a full recovery, to die of old age in 2004.
For the Joburg Zoo to ensure its own longevity will take an act of re-invention. Modern-day values and ethics have little tolerance for putting creatures in cages and enclosures.
Advances such as virtual reality, augmented reality and immersion technologies could make zoos redundant.
Many zoos are phasing out their big mammal exhibitions. In the US, the Florida Orca Protection Bill, once it is passed, will ban orca breeding and entertainment programmes. In 2016 the 140-year-old Buenos Aires Zoo announced plans to relocate its 2,500 animals to natural reserves. The zoo intends becoming an eco-park, focusing on homing rescued or trafficked animals.
The Joburg Zoo's last polar bear died in 2014, and its snow leopard in 2011. It's unlikely, says Louise Gordon of Joburg City Parks, that either species will be replaced."None of our animals come from the wild," she says, adding that the placement of animals in accredited zoos across the world is regulated by international studbooks.
The studbooks register every animal and are a tool for scientifically managing zoo populations, taking into account everything from genetic diversity to the size of enclosures and the capacity to look after the animals.
Gordon says she believes the Joburg Zoo has shown areas of excellence in conservation and modern zoo management. She points to its wattled-crane breeding programme and the Pickersgill frog conservation programme, as well as its long-established reed-bed wetlands system and educational outreach, especially to underprivileged children.
They're steps in the direction of necessary re-invention, because even if it may not be the end of the road for zoos just yet, archaic thinking has reached its expiry date.
FAST ZOO FACTS
700 million people worldwide visit zoos each year.
27 endangered species are housed at the Johannesburg Zoo.
The zoo successfully bred Siberian tiger cubs in April 2016
The global tiger population has declined dramatically to fewer than 4,000 in the wild.
There are probably only 1,500 ground hornbills in South Africa. Groups consist of two to nine birds. In each group there is usually only one breeding female.
An average of one chick is raised to adulthood every nine years. The zoo is involved in hand-rearing a second hatched chick which would have ordinarily been abandoned once the first egg hatched.
• For more informations visit www.jhbzoo.org.za..