Explore the best of Jozi's street art on foot with a graffiti walking tour

Johannesburg is a polarising city. Some avoid it like the plague, but those who love it speak of an irresistible magnetism. “Electric” is the word Jo Buitendach uses as we sit at a socially acceptable distance, sipping coffee in a square in Marshalltown.

Buitendach offers private, customisable tours around Joburg through her company Past Experiences. Before the pandemic, she was busy every day with her CBD shopping tours, art tours and tours of Soweto. But it's her knowledge of the graffitied walls of Braamfontein that intrigues me most.

Her graffiti tours are a passion project that she says she fell into after meeting the artist who runs Grayscale, an urban art and street apparel store on De Korte Street. She points it out at the start of our tour.

On the corner of Juta and Eendracht streets is a beautiful wall, talent swimming in every line. Seven different art works adorn the length of the wall in what is referred to as a “masterpiece”, painted as part of the City of Gold Urban Art Festival in 2018, each piece done by a local artist.

“People love that stuff and they hate this stuff,” Buitendach says, pointing to a tag on a stop sign — those scribbles most suburbanites regard with contempt. “But you can't get one without the other.”

As she describes the different kinds of graffiti, she tells me about the artists and the legality and illegality of the practice. These kinds of tours normally take about two hours but enthusiasts can spend a whole day looking at street art.

I now know that the noodle boxes doodled around the city are done by a guy called Main. They are what you call a throwup, painted quickly and illegally using two colours. Apparently, graffiti is all about names and every tag, throwup and masterpiece will have either a name or a brand attached to it.

“It's a whole dialogue happening and everybody knows everybody else,” Buitendach says.

After Braamfontein, she asks Kgabo Masoga, her driver and friend of 10 years, to take us to the city's first Chinatown on Commissioner Street. The city has a public arts programme and the sculptures here are good examples.

“I'm a big believer in art outside,” says Buitendach. “Art should be for everybody. I love that if you put art on a street, it's the way it should be. It's not elitist.”

We admire the walls of the magistrate's court parking lot on Fox Street and stop at Chancellor House, an exterior museum and national heritage site that housed Nelson Mandela's office in the 1950s.

When Buitendach started her tours 11 years ago, this was an inner-city slum with hundreds of people living in it. “When I started, people laughed at me. They would say, 'Why would you want to do a tour in Joburg? It's so ugly, so crime-ridden.'

“The people who lived in this building, a lot of them are still car guards here and they never laughed at me. They were so kind, so I have a lot more alliance to people in the inner city than to anyone else because they accept you, which is amazing.”

It is clear she loves the city but harbours no illusions. “You can say it's amazing and then someone will walk past you and try to find their meal in a dustbin. I don't want to have poverty porn on tours. I'm not trying to create this slum-tourism business.” Instead, it's her mission to support small businesses on her tours and in her personal capacity.

Buitendach also only offers tours in places with visible security. “I have a responsibility to the people on the tours and I don't want anyone to be traumatised.”

She clearly has a relationship with many of the people we pass, asking about them and their families.

Round the corner from Chancellor House, Buitendach points to a building with an elevator shaft. Apparently, Walter Sisulu once got stuck in the lift — one of many titbits she has picked up in her years here, uncovering history that's not in the books.

Driving across Nelson Mandela Bridge, I have one last question, one that's always tugged at me having spotted a particularly prolific graffiti tag around the city: “Who is Tapz?”

“But what is Tapz? Is it a group? Is it a person?” she asks, a twinkle in her eye.

• Oberholzer was a guest of Past Experiences. See pastexperiences.co.za or e-mail past.experiences@hotmail.com.