Wake Up, This is Joburg

These photographs are part of the ten book series, Wake
Up, This is Joburg by Mark Lewis and Tanya Zack. Published by
Fourthwall Books, Johannesburg.
Mark Lewis, S’kop, 2014
Photograph
63.5 x 90 cm
Courtesy the artist
Mark Lewis, Zama Zamas, 2014
Photograph
63.5 x 90 cm
Courtesy the artist

Taxi Drivers
In the shadow of a motorway underpass at the
southern edge of inner-city Johannesburg is the Zola
binding point, a zone where 600 minibus taxi drivers
wait with their vehicles between the morning and
evening rush hours. In this unlikely place, a network
of traders and service providers has sprung up to
cater to the needs of the drivers. Food vendors,
mechanics, barbers, taxi washers, candy sellers
and hawkers pass through the zone daily, making
a meagre but steady living from one of the most
important and least regulated industries in thecity.

Waste Reclaimers
There are many survivalists in Johannesburg whose
labour forms part of a complex informal economy. Of
these, few toil harder than the reclaimers: men and
(some) women who drag makeshift trolleys across
the city in search of recyclable material. Long before
sunrise each day, they head to the affluent suburbs
to sort through household waste awaiting collection
on sidewalks. Then they haul their giant loads of
paper, plastic and glass many miles to the city’s
trash depots where they are paid by the kilogram.
The recyclers earn better than most in the informal
sector, but the work is brutally hard and exacts a high
price from these men and women who live on the
precarious edges of society.

Cow Heads
In the bowels of an obsolete inner-city parking
garage, men stand around huge chopping blocks
wielding axes with which they strip every shred of
flesh from hundreds of cow heads. The loosened
meat is transported to the taxi ranks and informal
markets of the city where it is cooked on open
braziers and sold to the passing trade as s’kop.
The skins, peeled off the heads and then singed
and scorched on blazing fires, are used in the dish
known as kwassa kwassa favoured by West Africans,
and the bones and teeth are sent off to ceramics
factories. The butchers form part of a vital but largely
undocumented network of informal food trade
in Johannesburg.

Illegal Miners
‘There is enough gold for all of us,’ says Philip
Pelembe, an informal miner who digs for gold on
a mine dump at the city’s edge. Like the other
zama zamas (illegal miners) who work the dumps
and abandoned shafts along the reef, his reward
after many days might be a pellet of gold dust
and mercury. In the shafts, rock is chiselled out by
hand and carried to the surface to be pulverised,
mixed with mercury and refined with a blowtorch.
This dangerous work is often undertaken by illegal
migrants from neighbouring countries. They descend
hundreds of metres into the unstable tunnels, and
upon emerging, sometimes after days underground,
are targeted by gangs who rob them or force them
back to the shafts. Rescue by police means arrest or
deportation. These men eke out a living in perilous
conditions from which some do not make it out alive.

Mark Lewis is based in Johannesburg. He started photographing
professionally in the early eighties in London, where he worked
as a fashion photographer, publishing work in Face, Vogue
and Interview magazines, amongst others. More recently
he has worked in documentary, with a specific focus on the
African continent, freelancing for German and other European
publications. He has photographed workers in Swaziland,
the city of Mogadishu and ship breakers in Bangladesh. He is
currently working with writer Tanya Zack on a ten book series of
Johannesburg stories called Wake Up, This is Joburg, published
by Fourthwall Books. His work has been widely published and
exhibited. Recent solo exhibitions include Wake Up, This is Joburg,
Fourthwall Books, Johannesburg (2014 and 2015), and The Grande
Hotel Beira, Gallery MOMO, Johannesburg (2013).

These photographs are part of the ten book series, Wake
Up, This is Joburg by Mark Lewis and Tanya Zack. Published by
Fourthwall Books, Johannesburg.