Johannesburg: Egoli to some, Jozi to others. Once a mining town, now the most important commercial city in Africa. It’s been home to renegades and rogues, colonialists and capitalists, the dispossessed and the newly enriched. Today it’s populated by those who call themselves Africans or Afrikaners, by blacks, whites and every shade in between, and by immigrants from all over. There are suburbs where the daily rituals of Jewish culture rival New York’s; elsewhere, the tone is more Lagos than laid-back. Remnants of the colonial era stand alongside contemporary steel and glass. In a town that prides itself on the pursuit of fortune, it’s a challenge to preserve heritage, and it is against this background that Hidden Johannesburg offers a snapshot of 28 notable buildings. From the stately mansions of the Randlords to their downtown headquarters, the clubs where they socialised and the churches where they worshipped, the architecture of early Johannesburg lives on in sandstone, granite, marble and slate. But this is a city that constantly reinvents itself, and where the old is all-too-readily demolished to make way for the next ‘big thing’. Some buildings will survive, others will be consigned to memory. Hidden Johannesburg reveals fragments of the history of this vibrant city but, perhaps, the book also tells us something about our future, for if we allow our heritage to be swept away in the name of progress, are we advancing at all?

Features 28 of Johannesburg's culturally and historically relevant buildings. The book reveals something of the history of the city and the need to preserve the past if we want to protect the future.

The Hidden History of South Africa's Book and Reading Cultures shows how the common practice of reading can illuminate the social and political history of a culture. This ground-breaking study reveals resistance strategies in the reading and writing practices of South Africans; strategies that have been hidden until now for political reasons relating to the country's liberation struggles. By looking to records from a slave lodge, women's associations, army education units, universities, courts, libraries, prison departments, and political groups, Archie Dick exposes the key works of fiction and non-fiction, magazines, and newspapers that were read and discussed by political activists and prisoners. Uncovering the book and library schemes that elites used to regulate reading, Dick exposes incidences of intellectual fraud, book theft, censorship, and book burning. Through this innovative methodology, Dick aptly shows how South African readers used reading and books to resist unjust regimes and build community across South Africa's class and racial barriers.

Despite their peaceful, bucolic appearance, the tree-lined streets of South African suburbia were no refuge from the racial tensions and indignities of apartheid’s most repressive years. In At Home with Apartheid, Rebecca Ginsburg provides an intimate examination of the cultural landscapes of Johannesburg’s middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods during the height of apartheid (c. 1960–1975) and incorporates recent scholarship on gender, the home, and family. More subtly but no less significantly than factory floors, squatter camps, prisons, and courtrooms, the homes of white South Africans were sites of important contests between white privilege and black aspiration. Subtle negotiations within the domestic sphere between white, mostly female, householders and their black domestic workers, also primarily women, played out over and around this space. These seemingly mundane, private conflicts were part of larger contemporary struggles between whites and blacks over territory and power. Ginsburg gives special attention to the distinct social and racial geographies produced by the workers’ detached living quarters, designed by builders and architects as landscape complements to the main houses. Ranch houses, Italianate villas, modernist cubes, and Victorian bungalows filled Johannesburg’s suburbs. What distinguished these neighborhoods from their precedents in the United States or the United Kingdom was the presence of the ubiquitous back rooms and of the African women who inhabited them in these otherwise exclusively white areas. The author conducted more than seventy-five personal interviews for this book, an approach that sets it apart from other architectural histories. In addition to these oral accounts, Ginsburg draws from plans, drawings, and onsite analysis of the physical properties themselves. While the issues addressed span the disciplines of South African and architectural history, feminist studies, material culture studies, and psychology, the book’s strong narrative, powerful oral histories, and compelling subject matter bring the neighborhoods and residents it examines vividly to life.

Despite being South Africa’s capital city, Pretoria has often played a supporting role to bold and brash Johannesburg and Cape Town’s cosmopolitan charms. However, when it comes to architectural heritage, the Jacaranda City is well-endowed. From the skyline-dominating Union Buildings and Voortrekker Monument, to the imposing edifices of its administrative precincts, Pretoria might be deserving of a second moniker: the city of sandstone, brick and granite. But when you look beyond the impressive façades, soaring columns and linear planes of buildings that were intended to convey power and authority, you’ll find light-filled interiors embellished with decorative touches that are only hinted at from the outside. Murals, mosaics, domes, galleries, stained-glass windows, gleaming brass and impressive woodwork are often hidden from view behind doors that are closed to the public. And even those museums, buildings and places of worship that are open to all have noteworthy architectural and design features that are easily overlooked. The history of the city, and of the country, has been played out in many of the buildings featured in Hidden Pretoria. This book captures facets of our diverse heritage, historic and contemporary, so that a new generation might recognise the need to embrace the past in order to build our common future.

A unique look ‘inside’ 30 of Cape Town’s most notable buildings. If you have ever wondered what lies behind an interesting façade, or wished you could peek behind a closed door, Hidden Cape Town is the book for you. The author and photographer have collaborated to reveal the architectural secrets and artworks that lie behind the doors of some well-known, and lesser known, landmark buildings in and around the ‘Mother City’. These buildings are part of our collective heritage, reflecting the myriad cultural influences that have shaped our country.

Far from the crowds and the usual clichés, Johannesburg is filled with hidden treasures revealed only to residents and visitors who leave the beaten track behind.An indispensable guide for all those who thought they knew the city well or would like to discover its other facets.