Without a pass from the apartheid government to work there, people were “denied a place” in Johannesburg, the inscription reads. It’s what is known in Johannesburg as a “hijacked building.” There are hundreds of them in the crumbling city center. What appeared to anger South Africans in the aftermath of the nightime fire that killed entire families was the admission by city officials that it was a city-owned building. People keep coming to the “city of gold.”What they find now is the surrounding Gauteng province’s unemployment rate of 36% — even higher than South Africa’s national figure of 33%, itself the worst in the world. Johannesburg still has more millionaires than any other city on the continent, according to this year’s World’s Wealthiest Cities Report.
