Johannesburg, the City of Gold
Johannesburg—
city of lights, city of hunger,
city where the pavements gleam with promise
yet the shadows whisper of broken men.
I have walked your streets,
robbed three times beneath your crumbling towers,
and I asked myself—
Why does crime sing so loudly here?
South Africa, my home,
you are a fatherless land.
Eighty-five out of every hundred children
grow up without their fathers—
a generation cut from its roots,
drifting like leaves in a storm.
When the family falls,
discipline dies.
When fathers vanish,
sons become soldiers of chaos
and daughters are bartered in the alleys of despair.
Crime is not just crime—
it is business to the system,
a design written in hidden ledgers,
a profit carved from our blood.
I have studied the pattern.
Memphis, Tennessee—
the same story,
the deliberate breaking of the Black home.
For when you shatter the family,
you shatter the future.
And a people without a future
are easy to rule.
But hear me now—
no nation can rise on broken discipline.
Japan knows it. China knows it.
Work without moral strength is dust.
An economy without virtue is a corpse,
dressed in gold, stinking beneath the sun.
Our past is a wound still bleeding.
The land remembers—
its soil soaked in the blood of miners,
its air still trembling from the whips of apartheid.
Violence has sunk into the very bones of this country,
and that energy has not yet been cleansed.
Until wealth flows like rain—
not dammed by White hands,
not trickled to Black hands—
the storm will not end.
Poverty is not just poverty—
it is the stripping of dignity,
the denial of human worth.
And if the rich refuse to listen,
if the government continues to drink
while the children starve,
South Africa will rise in fire.
This land will not remain governable.
For the heartbeat of Johannesburg is breaking,
and when the heart breaks—
the whole body will collapse.
Johannesburg,
you are still my city.
But your gold drips with sorrow,
and your beauty is dying before my eyes.
Copyright ©
Chanda Katonga
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