Archives

Ponte City dominates the Johannesburg skyline. This unavoidable 54-storey apartment building on the Berea ridge has become an icon of the city it towers over.

The building has had a chequered history. Built for white sophisticates in the heyday of apartheid, it always held more appeal for young people and immigrants, for those on their way to somewhere else. During the South African transition in the early 1990s it became a refuge for black newcomers from the townships and rural areas, and then for immigrants from elsewhere in Africa. Then followed a calamitous decline, and by the turn of the century Ponte was the prime symbol of urban decay in Johannesburg, and the perceived epicentre of crime, prostitution and drug dealing.

In 2007, developers evicted half the tenants and gutted the empty apartments, but their scheme to refurbish the building soon ran aground. It was in this period that Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse began working at Ponte, getting to know the tenants who remained behind, taking their portraits and photographing the life of the half-occupied block.

In the winter of 2008, Subotzky and Waterhouse started collecting documents and other debris in the abandoned apartments. Over the following five years, they returned repeatedly to document aspects of the block, photographing every door and the view from every window. When they knocked on doors to ask permission to do this work, they were often invited in. Sitting in apartments where the televisions were tuned to South African soap operas, Congolese sitcoms, Hollywood romances and Nollywood melodramas, it sometimes felt to them that all the stories of violence and seduction they had heard about Ponte were not in the building itself but on the screens. Thus the television screens of Ponte became a third typology of apertures alongside the doors and windows: three grids arranged exactly in the sequence given by the building’s structure.

This body of images is presented here in counterpoint with items from the found archive and historical documents, including plans and photographs. The visual narrative is integrated with a sustained sequence of essays, stories and documentary texts presented in 17 booklets. With one exception, the essays and stories were written specially for this book.

Perceptions of Ponte have always been extreme, its joys and ills exaggerated equally. It has been hailed as the next big thing in urban living and derided as a suicide centre and a rubbish dump. The commentary here does not discount these myths but positions them in relation to the many other historical accounts of the building. It is an attempt to understand the unique place of the building in Johannesburg and in the popular imagination.

Today life in Ponte goes on, as ordinary and extraordinary as life anywhere else. But the building is still enveloped in contending projections. It remains a focal point of the city’s dreams and nightmares, seen as refuge or monstrosity, dreamland or dystopia, a lightning rod for a society’s hopes and fears, and always a beacon to navigate by.

Between 2008 and 2011, Patrick Waterhouse and Mikhael Subotzky took a photograph out of every window in Ponte City, of every internal door, and of every television screen. This formed a part of their broader investigation of this giant residential tower block, a building that has come to symbolize the best and the worst of Johannesburg’s past, present and future. The resulting archive of over 2000 images has found form in three distinct triptych works – as lightboxes, as multi-channel projections, and as individual photographic prints.

These photographs were found by Patrick Waterhouse and Mikhael Subotzky in abandoned Ponte city apartments in 2008. They were placed over photographs of the rooms in which they were found or in the space they depict.

Photos taken across the core of Ponte city (With Mikhael Subotzky)

Photos taken in the lifts of Ponte City. (With Mikhael Subotzky)

These documents and photographs were found by Patrick Waterhouse
and Mikhael Subotzky in abandoned Ponte city apartments, 2008

Flat 3607

The Ponte evictions began in mid-2007 and went on into the following year. When Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse first visited the block early in 2008, they found that the vacated flats had been ransacked. Among the broken furniture and abandoned possessions, carelessly scattered and trampled underfoot, they found an extraordinary array of papers: identity documents, CVs, certificates, time sheets, affidavits, refugee visa application forms, hospital reports, drafts of letters on pages torn from exercise books, rental statements, notebooks, photographs, posters, maps. It was only after many visits, in the winter months of 2008, that they began to collect and preserve these documents.

This paper trail shows that there were at least two people living in Flat 3607: Jerome Matondo Kabangu and Promise Ilunga Kinkela. * Most of the papers belonged to Kabangu.

Kabangu was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1981 and grew up on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. As he tells it, his life was disrupted by the war in the late 1990s, with the murder of his father and the persecution of his family. After hiding in the bush for some time, he made his way to Lubumbashi, where he finished his schooling in 2001 and also did a diploma in pharmacology. To avoid being forced into the army, he joined up with some cousins, including Kinkela, and fled the country. They went from Manono to Pweto, and then across the border into Zambia, where they received help at the Roman Catholic mission. After ten days, they crossed into Zimbabwe and went straight on to South Africa, entering the country illegally in April 2003.

Like many migrants before and since, they headed for Johannesburg. The city has always been a magnet for people who want to make a new start. There is usually work to be had and you can put a roof over your head. But it is not easy, as the new arrivalsalso discover. Johannesburg has a way of chewing people up and spitting them out.

For the first few years, Kabangu lived in a flat in Olivia Road, before moving a few blocks away to Flat 3607 in Ponte. He found work in a Wimpy and trained as a waiter and bartender at a hotel school in Bree Street. In the CV that reflects this qualification, he described himself as a presentable, clean-living and punctual young man: ‘I am honest and reliable, and get on well with my Fellowmen.’ Later he received a certificate from the Yebo Nonke Security Services and Training Academy and became a security guard.

In one of many statements about his arrival in South Africa, Kabangu says he acquired refugee status within weeks. The abandoned documents show that the Department of Home Affairs granted a request for asylum in 2005, issuing him with a certificate of exemption that would have to be renewed upon expiry. He later received a refugee ID document.

Kabangu never seems to have settled down in his new home. In June 2003, within months of arriving in Johannesburg, he filled out an application form for permanent residence in Canada, in which he described the circumstances that had turned him into a refugee. If this application was ever submitted, it must have been rejected. In July the following year, he filled out an application for an Australian offshore humanitarian visa, presumably with the same negative result.

In September 2006, Kabangu was working as a security guard at a complex in Honeydew. When he refused access to a white couple who had no business in the complex, the man began to hurl racial abuse at him. Incensed by the guard’s smiling response, the man drew a gun and fired a shot, which missed. Kabangu laid a charge of attempted murder at the Honeydew Police Station and filled out an official complaint form addressed to the South African Human Rights Commission. A follow-up letter from the Commission shows that he submitted the complaint, but he may not have taken the matter further. Around the same time, he wrote to the commander of the Honeydew Police Station to thank him for his handling of the case, which had led to the arrest of the accused.

Promise Ilunga Kinkela lived sometimes in Flat 3607 and some- times in another flat along the corridor. He seems to have been Kabangu’s cousin and to have followed the same route into South Africa. He certainly tried to cut the same paths out of the country, although at different times. In January 2004, his application for migration to Australia as a refugee was rejected by the High Commission in Pretoria. As late as November 2006, a letter on the subject of the immigration medical examination shows that he was trying to get to Canada.

The stories scattered among the papers left in Flat 3607 are fragmentary and uncertain. Kabangu and Kinkela filled out various application forms, but there is no sign that they were ever submitted. To complicate things, the forms of the two cousins are jumbled together with those of several other relatives, all offering similar answers to certain questions. Disentangling the applicants provides little assurance: these are people desperate to prove that they are deserving of refugee status or humanitarian assistance. Reconstructing their stories accurately and checking their veracity would be a complex task for an historian or a psychologist – perhaps even a detective – and is far beyond the scope of this note.

At a glance, however, the papers reveal some fascinating things. One of the most striking is the instability of Jerome Matondo Kabangu’s name. He uses a dozen different versions, varying the order of the three main elements, occasionally adding a new one and often changing a spelling. His first name becomes his surname, his middle name becomes his first name. The name Jerome morphs into John, used as both first name and surname. His middle name Matondo becomes Mande and then a more recognisably South African Mandla. His surname goes from Kabangu to Kanda. His initials turn on themselves like a palindrome: he is JMK and KMJ. His name, an open-ended play on variants, is an index of his efforts to fashion a new identity.

The papers are full of telling repetitions. The key sections of the application forms, especially those that tell the story of leaving the DRC and make a case for not returning there, are written and rewritten many times. There are divergent versions of the same events in the same hand. If these are not fictions, they are certainly elaborations. In variations on a theme, someone is trying to perfect a story, to get it straight or make the most of it.

Among the papers are several letters addressed to the South African Consulate in Lubumbashi in support of visa applications by Congolese citizens wishing to travel to South Africa. In one sequence, a handwritten document becomes a sworn statement on an official form (unsigned and uncertified) and then a typewritten letter. These successive drafts, searching for clarity and formality, trace an approach to the bureaucracy, an attempt to meet its requirements and crack its codes.

Nearly all the letters, even the formal ones, are stained and tattered. The occasional dusty shoeprint is easily explained by the circumstances in which the papers were found, but the signs of wear tell other stories. The value of these papers lay in their use. They were carried in pockets or folded into wallets. Some of them are faded to the point of illegibility. The refugee identity papers issued by Home Affairs literally fall apart in your hands when you open them. Their ruined state is a sign of how close they were kept.

Why then were they left behind? It may be that the tenants of Flat 3607 had to leave in a hurry with no chance to sort and pack. Or it may be that the documents had outlived their usefulness. Perhaps it was simply time for Jerome Matondo Kabangu to give his name another twist and move on to a new address.

* Not their real names

First published by Steidl 2014, Ponte City is a hardcover, clothbound book in a screen-printed cardboard box with 17 separate staple-bound booklets, with texts edited by Ivan Vladislavić. Essays by Lindsay Bremner, Melinda Silverman, Harry Kalmer, Sean O’Toole, Kgebetli Moele, Percy Zvomuya, Ivan Vladislavić and Denis Hirson. It was designed with Ramon Pez