(Johannesburg) The view of Johannesburg is breathtaking from this apartment at 54e floor, but the Ponte, a cylindrical skyscraper with a number of tenants, remains the symbol of a dilapidated city center.
Ngwenya Polite, 33, watches the metropolis of the most unequal country in the world sparkle in the sun from her window a few floors below, her nearly two-year-old daughter in her arms.
“People in the neighborhood don’t realize how lucky we are,” he told AFP. “Here we are safe, it’s clean and the rents are reasonable”.
The raw-style gray concrete tower was completed in 1975. At 173 meters high, the Ponte was then the tallest residential building in Africa. Initially a sought-after address, for its appearance and its location, it suffered the impoverishment of a center deserted by business circles, firstly because of the sanctions against apartheid.
The building then became the landmark of violent gangs in the 1980s and 1990s, the headquarters of crime, prostitution and drug trafficking.
He had a makeover fifteen years ago, ahead of the 2010 Football World Cup, to put an end to his sulphurous reputation. The squatters were kicked out. Today, low-middle-class families have settled there, for rent between 250 and 585 Canadian dollars per month depending on the area.
In a neighborhood that remains one of the most disreputable in the city, the tower fascinates. And continues to scare: “it will take a long time” to change these prejudices, underlines Ngwenya Polite, music teacher in a school.
Inside, the building is hollow, offering a vertiginous perspective on the courtyard side and full of light to the apartments. But the windows to this atrium have been sealed: during the great collapse of the 80s and 90s, and in the absence of garbage rooms, people threw their rubbish out the window.
Today the entrance to Ponte, at the end of an access ramp opening onto a huge empty underground parking lot on several floors, except for a few boneless carcasses, is guarded night and day by a security hut and turnstiles. You have to show your white paw.
In the evening, this is a place where Uber drivers don’t like to hang around. The surrounding streets, poorly lit and strewn with rubbish, are not inviting. “Come on, hurry up! », launches one of them to a group which is slow to take position in its white Toyota.
The association Dlala Nje (Let’s have fun! in the Zulu language) wants to change these perceptions, highlight the place and its inhabitants. For the past ten years, it has been offering walks in the neighborhood but also in the very particular universe of the Ponte tower.