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Lost and Found in Johannesburg: A Memoir, by Mark Gevisser
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An inner life of Johannesburg that turns on the author's fascination with maps, boundaries, and transgressions
Lost and Found in Johannesburg begins with a transgression―the armed invasion of a private home in the South African city of Mark Gevisser's birth. But far more than the riveting account of a break-in, this is a daring exploration of place and the boundaries upon which identities are mapped.
As a child growing up in apartheid South Africa, Gevisser becomes obsessed with a street guide called Holmden's Register of Johannesburg, which literally erases entire black townships. Johannesburg, he realizes, is full of divisions between black and white, rich and poor, gay and straight; a place that "draws its energy precisely from its atomization and its edge, its stacking of boundaries against one another." Here, Gevisser embarks on a quest to understand the inner life of his city.
Gevisser uses maps, family photographs, shards of memory, newspaper clippings, and courtroom testimony to chart his intimate history of Johannesburg. He begins by tracing his family's journey from the Orthodox world of a Lithuanian shtetl to the white suburban neighborhoods where separate servants' quarters were legally required at every house. Gevisser, who eventually marries a black man, tells stories of others who have learned to define themselves "within, and across, and against," the city's boundaries. He recalls the double lives of gay men like Phil and Edgar, the ever-present housekeepers and gardeners, and the private swimming pools where blacks and whites could be discreetly intimate, even though the laws of apartheid strictly prohibited sex between people of different races. And he explores physical barriers like The Wilds, a large park that divides Johannesburg's affluent Northern Suburbs from two of its poorest neighborhoods. It is this park that the three men who held Gevisser at gunpoint crossed the night of their crime.
An ode to both the marked and unmarked landscape of Gevisser's past, Lost and Found in Johannesburg is an existential guide to one of the most complex cities on earth. As Gevisser writes, "Maps would have no purchase on us, no currency at all, if we were not in danger of running aground, of getting lost, of dislocation and even death without them. All maps awaken in me a desire to be lost and to be found . . . [They force] me to remember something I must never allow myself to forget: Johannesburg, my hometown, is not the city I think I know."
- Sales Rank: #476222 in Books
- Published on: 2014-04-15
- Released on: 2014-04-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.27" h x 1.19" w x 6.31" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 352 pages
From Booklist
Two searing contemporary dramas—one violent, one quiet—frame this gripping memoir by eminent South African journalist Gevisser. Born in Johannesburg in 1964, the year Mandela was jailed for life, Gevisser remembers his privileged childhood in a walled white world. Then, in the mid-1990s, visiting Johannesburg (after years at Yale and then in Paris with his gay Hindi partner), Gevisser is held hostage at gunpoint, bound and gagged with two women friends when three brutal robbers break into their home. Is his assailant a prisoner from the apartheid war? The honest blend of sympathy and fury drives the story: his guilt now about his privilege, but also relief and sadness. Just as intense is his quiet meeting as an adult with Honey, the daughter of his beloved childhood nanny, Betty: while Betty lived in the servant quarters and raised him, she had to leave Honey behind. With lots of photos that show the people and places, including the mountains of yellow mine dumps from Jo’burg’s gold, this is a must for those who want to experience the personal reality of apartheid and its aftermath. --Hazel Rochman
Review
“[Mark Gevisser] is unflinching in his account of the complex contradictions that still haunt his country.” ―Andrea Denhoed, The New Yorker
“Gevisser . . . is acutely aware of the historical ironies in his story. . . . Part memoir, part psychogeography, his book is concerned with life as it's lived in these liminal spaces, which, in Gevisser's fine handling, take on both physical and symbolic dimensions.” ―Emma Brockes, The Guardian
“Mark Gevisser asks profound questions--about race, sexuality, faith, and politics--while examining both his own history and that of his beloved Johannesburg. The result, Lost and Found in Johannesburg, is unlike any other book I know. It is illuminating, unsettling, engrossing, often funny, and, in a word, brilliant.” ―Claire Messud, author of The Woman Upstairs
“Outstanding. A genuinely strange, marvelous, and complex account of a self and a city. Mark Gevisser does for Johannesburg what Orhan Pamuk did for Istanbul. Gevisser is as intimate and sophisticated a guide as one would wish for to this great, troubled metropolis.” ―Teju Cole, author of Open City
“Mark Gevisser brilliantly maps out multiple worlds fractured by race, class, and history in a story as complex and beautiful as any memoir I've ever read.” ―Dinaw Mengestu, author of All Our Names
“Apartheid is a phenomenal teacher, and Mark Gevisser has converted its untold lessons about geography and gender into a fascinating memoir about the making of a cosmopolitan.” ―Diane McWhorter, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution
About the Author
Mark Gevisser is the author of the prizewinning A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream and Portraits of Power: Profiles in a Changing South Africa. He is the coeditor of Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa. His journalism has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, Granta, and other publications. He is the writer of the award-winning documentary film The Man Who Drove with Mandela. Born in Johannesburg in 1964, he lives in France and South Africa. Gevisser was a Writing Fellow at the University of Pretoria from 2009 to 2012 and an Open Society Fellow from 2012 to 2013.
Most helpful customer reviews
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
Compelling and stimulating from start to finish
By Rhyder S.
First a disclaimer: I am a born and bred Jo'burger and of the same generation as the author so much of the material was very accessible to me. I'm not sure if it would be as compelling for a general reader with no connection to the source material but I can verify that the material feels 100% authentic.
The metaphor that Gevisser uses for describing Johannesburg is a map and the various borders of the map are the lines drawn by class, economics or racial segregation.
The material is varied and gives some background to the history of the author's family and his antecedents woven in with South African history.
Gevisser writes with a searing honesty and deals with issues like apartheid and race (which is the issue in South Africa) and sexual orientation with absolute candour. I can detect no artifice in his writing nor any desire other than to tell the truth.
His story makes for excellent reading - the book begins with what seems to be a standard personal history but there are episodes in the book which are unique and range from intellectually interesting to bone-chilling. His account of a home invasion is absolutely riveting and his take on growing up in white, privileged Johannesburg a stones throw from the abject poverty and violence of the townships is far from ordinary.
I highly recommend this book as an interesting personal history or for anyone interested in the experience in South Africa and Apartheid from the 1960's onwards. As a standalone piece of personal writing and insight I believe it is excellent even outside of the the context of Johannesburg and South Africa.
A technical note: The text underneath all the photographs in the Kindle edition is underlined for longer than it should be so that some entire chapters are underlined with links to the index at the back. This is a bit irritating but will hopefully be corrected in future editions.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
A loving and accurate portrait of the strange city of Johannesburg
By Errol Levine
This is an extraordinary book and memoir! It is beautifully written and a joy to read. It will have a particular appeal to readers with past or current connections to South Africa in general and to Johannesburg in particular.
Mark Gevisser has told multiple stories within the confines of his book. One story well told is that of the Jewish community of Johannesburg as it existed in the twentieth century. This community largely originated as descendants of Jews from Lithuania who came to South Africa to escape religious persecution and whose arrival coincided with the great gold rush in the early 1900s. These hardworking and dedicated immigrants were the driving force in the development of Johannesburg converting it from a crude mining camp to a thriving and cosmopolitan metropolis in a remote country at the foot of Africa. Mr. Gevisser beautifully recounts his family history. His paternal grandfather ("Grandpa Morris") originated in the Orthodox world of a tiny Lithuanian shtetl (now known as Zelva). Morris subsequently arrived by boat in subtropical Durban where this Talmudic scholar was apparently shocked by the exotic character of one of the British Empire's busiest ports. Mr. Gevisser describes how he recently visited Zelva to trace his family's roots. While there, he undertook a visit to a small local museum that memorializes the vanished Jewish community of the shtetl all of whom were murdered by the SS Einsatzgruppen in 1941.
Another story told with great skill is that of the pain caused by apartheid. Mr. Gevisser paints on a small canvas. Rather than dwelling on historical minutiae, he presents the ugliness of apartheid through the deeply-moving personal stories of people like Hope, the daughter of his family's longstanding domestic servant, Bettina. Above all, however, the book is a paean to the enigmatic city of Johannesburg. Mr. Gevisser shows great skill in evoking the vanished world of Johannesburg during the twentieth century. His interest in maps of old Johannesburg (one might almost call it an obsession) results in him portraying the city with great accuracy. I have not to date encountered such wonderfully evocative descriptions of places like West Park cemetery, the old Fort in Hillbrow, the Wilds and the great yellow sand piles remaining from the excavation of the gold mines in any other book about South Africa. Indeed, I learned things about Johannesburg from this book that I never really knew.
Central to the memoir is Mr. Gevisser's description of an armed home invasion he was involved in when three men brutalized him and two of his friends in an apartment near the Wilds. Home invasions in present day South Africa are very different to the burglaries that are common in most Western countries. The assailants are usually black men and invasions are frequently associated with extreme violence to the victims, including rape, and not infrequently result in their deaths. Mr. Gevisser, while greatly traumatized by this event, presents it in a way that makes a reader realize how home invasions, dreadful and inexcusable as they are, are part of the legacy of apartheid. The invaders apart from wishing to acquire the worldly goods of their victims also wish to express their hatred of their victims' privileged way of life. Mr. Gevisser's description of the trial of one of his assailants "the Colonel" is deeply moving when he compares his own privileged background with the impoverished and difficult background of his assailant.
Mr. Gevisser also paints a fascinating picture of his family. The Moshal-Gevisser clan was very prominent in Johannesburg having started out in the eastern port of Durban. His grandparents including Granny Gerty and Granny Janie and his mother and father are lovingly portrayed. Mr. Gevisser's father's uncle, Sol Moshal, developed a thriving lumber business but he and other family members knew nothing about trees! To this end Uncle Sol sent Mr. Gevisser's father, Dovidl, in the early 1950s to a whites-only agricultural college, the University of Stellenbosch, a fulcrum of Afrikaner nationalism, to study forestry. Here this spindly Jewish youth with a stutter was subjected to barbaric initiation rites and Jew-baiting by the brawny sons of Afrikaner farmers. However, Dovidl in a typical Jewish way not only survived and persevered but thrived and eventually became one of the most popular boys in the school even winning the heart of a deeply anti-Semitic professor's daughter.
This book is an intimate memoir of a very good writer. Although the book focuses on Mr. Gevisser's personal life which is described with great condor, he at the same time conveys the troubled history of Johannesburg. Such events as the Rivonia Treason trial in which Nelson Mandela was a defendant are well described. The family life and story of the anti-apartheid activists, Bram and Molly Fischer, are also depicted including the taboo mixed-race swimming parties held at the Fischer home on Sunday afternoons. The book is refreshingly free of hypocrisy. Mr. Gevisser tells things as they were and in doing so he reveals his own unresolved conflicts about Johannesburg and South Africa while he was growing up. Above all, he reveals that Johannesburg was a city of boundaries - boundaries between blacks and whites, Jews and non-Jews, Anglos and Afrikaners, rich and poor, gays and straights and master and servants.
These boundaries are shown almost amusingly at the old Braamfontein cemetery in Johannesburg where Granny Gertie's maternal grandparents, Zalman and Minnie Blum, are buried. Mr. Gevisser points out that Johannesburg's civic fathers set boundaries in death as in life. The southern portion of the Old Cemetery, established in 1909, was consecrated for Christian denominations namely "Dutch Reformed," "Nonconformist," "Roman Catholic" and "Church of England," while the northern portion was reserved for people of color (each group with its own location) including "Mahomedans," "Kaffirs" (a derogatory term for Blacks) and so-called "Christian Kaffirs." Separating the two portions was a large buffer restricted to Jews indicating the sometimes ambivalent situation of the Johannesburg Jewish community. I found these types of details which pervade all parts of the book to be endlessly fascinating.
Johannesburg in the twentieth century was a strange and even unique place. I know of no other book that conveys the spirit and life of this great and complex city as well as this one does.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
A biography of a city, a man, and a country
By Sonpoppie
I loved this clever and exceptionally well written memoir. The author uses his childhood obsession with cartography to map his way back to his personal past, as well as to guide the reader down the streets of the history of Johannesburg. Maps define and divide, frame and exclude, and so do the boundaries of city ; we are are defined by society. Sometimes we don't fit in and we have to struggle to find who we are beyond these limitations.
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