Descriptive Essay About Johannesburg

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The Johannesburg I grew up in was in the white, middle class, English speaking suburbs. My childhood was Friday afternoons at my grandmother’s house with my cousins when it smelled like grass stains and swimming pool water on hot bricks. My protected life included private school education, a house full of books and an appreciation for wooden dining room tables. It was only in high school that the realisation of a gigantic, real Johannesburg occurred to me, and strangely, appealed to me.

Firstly, it was religion that changed. The catholic school I went to influenced me greatly. At first, I was very religious. I drank in every word they said to us, I believed God Herself had Her finger pointed at me. Slowly, however, I began to question. By the end of high school I was a firm believer that there was no God. I had the Vatican’s slimy “organising” of humanity all figured out. They edited the Bible, they married the church for monetary reasons, they killed millions at the hands of God. As Karl Marx so aptly put; “Religion is the Opium of the people.” [4] But Johannesburg questioned me. Driving into town on Sundays on the highways that pass over the mine dump and seeing the Zionest congregations clustered in their white robes with green cloth, a seemingly fragile fight for beauty in the otherwise barren landscape, I began to doubt myself again. Ivan Vladislavic writes, “Where would his congregation meet? In a clearing in the veldt near the municipal dump near Elandsfontein?” [1]

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