Lost and Found in Johannesburg: A Memoir

by Mark Gevisser

An inner life of Johannesburg that turns on the author's fascination with maps, boundaries, and transgressionsLost 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 Johannesburg, my hometown, is not the city I think I know."

Genres: South Africa, Africa, Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography, LGBT, History

353 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 6, 2014

About the author

Mark Gevisser is one of South Africa’s leading authors and journalists. His next book “Dispatcher”, about his personal relationship with his home-town Johannesburg, will be published by Farrar Straus Giroux and Atlantic Press in 2013.
Gevisser has been awarded an Open Society Followship for 2012/13 working on The Sexuality Frontier. During his fellowship he will be looking at the ways ideas about sexuality and gender identity are changing globally, and how this is changing the way people think about themselves and their worlds. He will travel to United States, India, Nepal, Russia, Hungary, Poland, China, Turkey, Lebanon, Senegal, South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Brazil, Argentina and Western Europe.
Gevisser’s book A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream was published by Palgrave Macmillan in the UK, and by Jonathan Ball in South Africa under the title, Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred. It was the winner of the Sunday Times 2008 Alan Paton Prize.
Gevisser was born in Johannesburg in 1964, and educated and King David and Redhill Schools. He graduated from Yale in 1987 with a degree magna cum laude in comparative literature and worked in New York as a high school teacher and writing for Village Voice and The Nation, before returning to South Africa in 1990. His journalism has appeared in publications and journals including Granta, the New York Times, Vogue, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, Public Culture and Art in America.
Gevisser has previously published two books – Defiant Desire, Gay and Lesbian Lives In South Africa which he co-edited with Edwin Cameron, and Portraits of Power: Profiles in a Changing South Africa, a collection of his celebrated political profiles from the Mail & Guardian. He has also published widely, in anthologies, on sexuality and on urbanism in South Africa. His publications on art include a biographical essay on Nicholas Hlobo and a response to William Kentridge and Gerhard Marx‘s The Firewalker. He has also published an essay on Thabo Mbeki‘s legacy.
Gevisser’s feature-length documentary, The Man Who Drove With Mandela, made with Greta Schiller, has been broadcast internationally, and won the Teddy Documentary Prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 1999. The film is an excavation of the life of Cecil Williams, the South African gay communist theatre director. Mark has also written scripts for the South African drama series Zero Tolerance; his scripts were short-listed for SAFTA and iEmmy awards.
Since 2002, Gevisser has been involved in heritage development. He co-led the team that developed the heritage, education and tourism components of Constitution Hill, and co-curated the Hill’s permanent exhibitions. He is a founder and associate of Trace, a heritage research and design company. His Exhibition Joburg Tracks was exhibited at Museum Africa. Gevisser works as a political analyst and public speaker; his clients have included several South African and multinational organisations and corporations.
From 2009 to 2011, Gevisser was Writing Fellow in the Humanities Faculty at the University of Pretoria, where he taught in the journalism programme and ran a programme on public intellectual activity. He is an experienced writing teacher, and has conducted narrative non-fiction workshops in South Africa and Kenya. In 2011, he was a Carnegie Equity Fellow at Wits University, and convened a major event at the university on creativity and memory featuring Nadine Gordimer, William Kentridge, Hugh Masakela, Zoe Zicomb and Chris van Wyk.[1][2][3]

Reviews

[Gerhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Look up Claim Hill and feel, in your groin, the thrill of Estoril and Exclusives, of the Skyline and Gotham City; none of that is there any more, but something else is, some other kid is finding his way, her feet, his city, her path, his future, her umtshotsho.'

Review to follow.

[Mish Middelmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

The breadth and depth of this book is a gift to me. I am so glad that a fellow white South African man has written so sensitively about growing up under apartheid, both aware and unaware of his privileges, both insider and outsider at the same time. And that he writes so lovingly about Johannesburg whether he is exposing its divisions and depravity or its transformative power and possibility. I feel as though his experience and honesty somehow validates my own.

Gevisser is able to situate a very particular experience of growing up as "other" yet privileged in apartheid Johannesburg within such universal themes as the way boundaries can become thresholds. He is not afraid to paint on a wide canvas. Yet he is equally courageous to go deep and personal, from gazing clearly at privilege to sharing what it is like when the world tells you the way you love is not OK. He also opens up subjects where he can't see the whole picture - such as what it was like living across the master/servant boundaries of the apartheid yard - with an equal honesty about what he feels and senses and doesn't know.

And he tells the story of being violently attacked at home with close friends without, as he put it at the book launch I attended, resorting to "the Pistorius defence." He and his friends show compassion for themselves and their situation without diminishing their hurt and outrage, and without dehumanising their attackers or losing sight of their own privilege and its impact.

[Ray Hartley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mark Gevisser's Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred is easily the best serious book written about modern South Africa. This is a very different book, a personal, intimate account of growing up in Johannesburg and a meditation on what it means to live in a city with a history of division and separation. What it shares with the Mbeki book is a command of language, a writer's mind that ceaselessly opens new doors and asks new questions and an anchor sunk deep into the muddy substrata of a nation that is impossible to define. The work of a master writer.

[Elaine Proctor · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘Dispatcher’ by Mark Gevisser is an important book, not only for South African readers but for the world. To review such a book is beyond my power so this is, in a sense, a simple appreciation.


Every now and then the world’s seemingly unfathomable places throws up a writer who can think and feel a path through its complexity to a kind of truth that others can understand. Mark Gevisser is such a writer and ‘Dispatcher’ is such a book.

Johannesburg, South Africa is his place and he suffers its cruelties and joys along with just about everyone who calls it home. In the prologue, Mark reveals that he and two dear friends were robbed and assaulted in a flat in Johannesburg in January 2012. The book concludes with a deeper description of that event and its consequences. But in between these two powerful narrative pillars, and what makes it so extraordinary, is that the writer brings us to an understanding not only of his own suffering but to that of others living in the city’s diverse geographies.

‘This is something I must never forget.’ He says in the first chapter, ‘Johannesburg, my home town, is not the city that I know.’ So, from the outset, we embark with him on a journey in which neither he nor we the reader are totally safe. He invites us to solve a mystery of this place with him and his invitation is so candid and full of promise that we are quickly bound to the journey wherever it may lead.

I share a Johannesburg childhood and adolescence with the author and perhaps this is why the early part of the book is so moving to me, but I don’t think that is the only reason.

I did certainly find deep traces of my own adolescence in his journey and saw reflected there my own effort to escape the map intended for me as a white South African. I had never found a way to share those routes, those pit-stops in my journey to adulthood, with those closest to me who came from more settled countries of origin.

Our rites of passage did not look like the ones I heard my American husband and English, Indian and German friends describe. Ours were far more extreme, brushing the edges of danger and volatility in a deeply uncertain present. So I packed them away and forgot they were there. I had no expectation that these routes would ever be laid down as named experience and therefore given place and meaning. But they are now, in this book.

But that is only the beginning of what the writer achieves. He takes us to previously invisible ordinary lives, most mysterious and quietly heroic, lived in every part of the city. He also takes us into its rivers, its underground tunnels, its buildings; all the physical features that give it its particular pathology. And, of course, we leave knowing what we didn’t know before.

The eclectic intellectual universe this writer occupies and the range of his skills, makes it possible for him to stitch the disparate pieces of our city together in such a way as to make, at least from this vantage point, a whole and integrated culture, a whole identity, a whole meaning. He gives us one another and he gives us our country.

Books this good do not require one to be OF that place to feel their verity. In his almost unbearable description of the attack we understand the degree of trauma the writer and his friends experienced. The very ordinariness of what follows; from the chaos of the police investigation, to their attempt to bring their assailants to justice, makes for gripping reading. What is transformative about it though is the writer’s commitment to remaining OPEN to his beloved country.

And he did. He returned to throw himself into his research in Alexandra Township, he rubbed shoulders and skin, and time, with enough people to be reminded of his place amongst them. He refused to allow this terrible event to make him a reactionary man, but used it, instead, as a portal to understanding his pain and the pain of others. That is the genius of the book and indeed, of the man who wrote it.

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like I know Johannesburg and all its depth, secrets, and value.

I guess I need to visit it now...

Gevisser is a well-known, critically acclaimed writer here in South Africa, yet I struggled with his memoir. Most parts I had to force myself through, while a small portion were enjoyable and informative. I feel that me being an American with all my ignorance, I couldn't quite appreciate its mastery as much as a South African could. My favorite part was most definitely the recall of the armed invasion and its ramifications for both the victims and the culprits - my hands were shaking by the end of it and I had tears in my eyes.

Really great commentary and navigation of the tricky waters of race, class, sexuality, and privilege in this challenging and beautiful country.

[Elmarie · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are a lot of unspoken things that contribute to the “voice” of this book, and, since it is a memoir, the voice of its author by extension. Unspoken privilege. Unspoken resentment. Unspoken condescension.

The author does try to address issues of his privilege, but this often happens in a “woe is me for being so rich” kind of way: lamenting trips to London after the Soweto uprising, being angry at his parents for “forcing” him to study at Yale. These are not the “relatable” experiences the author seems to think they are.

Then there are the discussions around apartheid, and life thereafter. The author tries to present himself as progressive, yet he clearly is just as poorly adjusted to a post-apartheid South Africa as the majority of his white peers. Black people’s levels of education are judged by their accents, their languages described in disdainful and even disrespectful ways, their ability to do their various jobs is constantly scrutinised, and black people he knows personally are often infantilised and patronised. He calls the adult daughter of his childhood nanny by an odd baby-version of her real name even though he clearly doesn’t know her all that well. He attends a choral performance by said nanny’s grandchild, which she cannot attend herself because she is too busy preparing roast lamb for his dinner, and he sees absolutely nothing wrong with this.

I had a lot of issues with this book, obviously. Its entire demeanour made me angry in some places, while at others I could do nothing but roll my eyes. The pretentiousness of it all was an intensely draining experience, and one I do not recommend.

[Jill de Villiers · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning and heartbreaking book. The story of a young white, Jewish, man growing up in Johannesburg, trying as a child who loved maps to understand the borders beyond which the maps stopped, and the black townships began. It is also a story of being gay, and the surprising changes that occurred there in its acceptability, protections written into the constitution at a time when other nations were not yet there. But it is also a brutally honest story of a vicious crime, and the intense struggles of a liberal thinker to find forgiveness in the face of horror and degradation.

[David Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most intimate, detailed and heartfelt ode to Johannesburg one is ever likely to read. I feel privileged to have been let inside. Trying to understand the city that used to be gold? Read Mark Gevisser's book.

[Derek Baldwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting, heartfelt, touching, this is partly an exploration of place, Johannesburg, of self and identity, of recent history, and of how all these and more become intertwined. Bookending all of this is the frightening and yet horribly prosaic home invasion suffered by Gevisser and two companions one night, in a flat near The Wilds, which I myself roamed happily and safely many years ago. Maybe what the book is not quite honest enough about, perhaps for artistic or perhaps for political reasons, is that times change, places are built, buildings demolished... we rearticulate continuously, and while this does have poignancy really all it is is the march of time, nothing terribly profound. This is the weakness of the Dispatcher metaphor which drives the narrative. Not a fatal weakness by any means. and this is definitely well worth reading, but it feels forced at times and overwritten. But very good 4.5/5

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh - It was a good idea in theory to write a book and using maps to "guide" the story. However, it became somewhat repetitive while at the same time not fluid enough (there was a lot of skipping around) and I decided to not finish this and went to the end to find out about the attack, as that was the only remotely interesting detail. The story of the attack was too detailed and, though my curiosity was piqued and then satisfied, frankly, it was boring to me and I ended up skimming that part as well.

Overall, I felt the book was a cathartic exercise for the author and not anything that really interested me. I did skip over most of it though so, maybe I never gave it a fair chance. Perhaps if you are more familiar with growing up in Joburg, it will be more interesting to you.

[Gina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received this book as a first read. It's an interesting memoir. It has some issues with jumping around and lacking continuity. But it's a neat look at how society can divide itself both in life and in death. I enjoyed the discussion of various maps and how they tied into history. I also really enjoyed the discussions about cemeteries. It was interesting to see how similar South Africa is to the United States in segregation and discrimination and families broken apart by "passing". There were a lot of interesting historical tidbits that made me want to learn more about South Africa and its mining history.

[Salem · Rating 3 out of 5]

There may have been too much history to allow Gevisser free rein to share his story, because this memoir often drifted far from the personal. I also found the cartophilic moments somewhat distracting, but I think it was a necessary abstraction that allowed Gevisser the emotional distance to share as much of his city as he did. Interesting and poignant, yet not great.

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

a personal reminiscence of growing up in apartheid with the very interesting angle of using city maps to study his and his city's/country's biography. black parts of city did not exist, on paper. gevisser writes and this book is very like sebald's memory books Austerlitz

[Danial Tanvir · Rating 5 out of 5]

i read this book in 2 days,i bought it from bangkok this year,i read it in 2 days and liked it.
it is about a young boy growing up in south africa .
in johannesburg .

he draws maps and the novelist nadine gordimer has been mentioned in it.
it is based in south africa and the country is decribed.
he is gay and gets married to a man and then he is victim of an attack.

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5: The problem is I love liminal space, but you can't read liminal space. It is so hard to read a book discovering liminal space because it lacks structure. This book does read as Gevisser's personal thoughts, as though his journey and realisations are jotted down, each chapter written feverishly after a thought occurs. However, I love the realizations themselves, particularly the comparison between his parents holiday picture and that of the pool party- that was his single most brilliant moment of artistic commentary. I struggle with how the robbery would relate to these liminal spaces- but isn't that the problem with the abject? it is everything. I would have appreciated more about him as a young person, coming to terms with things or interactions with LGBT people or POC. Blur the boundaries some more, show that interactions would take place anyway not only that the boundaries could be broken.

[Sylvia Boshoff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maps are an interesting entry point into the system of Apartheid, what the maps showed and did not show. What was hidden and what was exposed. Mark Gevisser is an engaging writer, he has researched his subject matter very well. As a Joburg native, he opened my eyes to the city in a new way. His own personal struggles within the South African framework of Apartheid resonated with me at times, but his agonising over what he could have, should have noticed or done or stood up for or against became tiresome. Hindsight is 20/20. I almost felt sorry for him that he still seemed to feel guilt after being held at gunpoint in his old flat. There is the past and then there is the present, people make choices every day that have consequences. I'm not sure why he still felt as if he should be held accountable for the actions of the 3 perpetrators. He lost me there.

[Caleb · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book hard to review and hard to rate. It's by an apparently well-known white, gay, Jewish South African journalist about growing up and living in Johannesburg and the racial issues in that country. That's clearly many things I'm not (besides white). In some books and in this book for stretches, that's fascinating to look at someone and somewhere so different. However, this book wanders and assumes a level of knowledge of places and locations in Joburg that I don't have and I suspect most readers don't have. It also jumps around quite a bit and it feels like several shorter books as much as one larger one. And the arc story about his own experience being a victim of armed robbery is very intense and helps frame the story. Worth the read but be prepared for meanderings along the way.

[Noris Ismail · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's interesting how a map book, in this story at least, can fascinate kids in the 70s, 80s and most probably early 90s. The memoir revolves around the author's obsession with ring-bound, blue cloth cover 'Holmden's Register of Johannesburg" street guide, where he plotted and fantasized a lot of walking adventures.
.
Actually dah sampai chapter 4 baru tahu sipenulis adalah seorang h0m0sexual. He came out sometime during his university years in Capetown, and eventually got married to another g@y.
.
Punya putaralam nak cerita pasal trauma dia kena home robbery at gunpoint.. dari map fascination, imaginary travel, growing up with servants, hardships as white gay in black dominated country, attended Pride party, coming out etc etc... Barulah nak cerita pasal rompakan.

[Alex Annear · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very intimate book with details of this man’s life, past and present, which was at times moving to read but unfortunately did not add up to much for me. It was great to learn about Johannesburg, especially from the view of a white, middle-class, gay Jew growing up in the time of Apartheid. It was interesting to read about him growing up and learning about racism and how it shaped the world around him, discovering his sexuality and the world available to him at that time, and traveling away to the United States and Paris before coming back to rediscover his home and trauma he experienced there.

[Shelley Tracey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this more than I did, because it was so comprehensive and well-researched, and because I learnt so much about the city of my birth, but the placing of the story of the attack near the end of the book spoilt the whole thing for me. It was as if Gevisser was saying, all this social and political history, this rich detail and extensive research is only a device to lead the reader to the most important part of the book: the trauma of the attack.

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A delightful memoir of growing up in Johannesburg. It took me back to my own childhood and brought back many fond memories. Gevisser has a deep knowledge of Johannesburg's history and his writing is informed and enriched by it. I also thoroughly enjoyed how he interweaved the strands of the past and the present (2012) into one coherent thread, and in so doing, illuminated those parts of the city that were only glimpsed at by most white residents during the Apartheid era

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the second half of this book which dealt with the mine dumps in Johannesburg, but the chapter devoted to The Wilds resonated with me as we have just returned from Durban where the author could just as easily have been describing the condition of the Durban botanic gardens where we once used to proudly take all our overseas visitors. Same problems with the cycads and the similar amazing dedicated workers such as Enos Mhlanga the chief horticulturalist.
The follow up to the attack describing the police and their efforts to track down the culprits was most enlightening.

[Jacques Siebrits · Rating 3 out of 5]

Close to four stars, but I struggled to get into the book - the first chapter or two was a bit too self-consciously intellectual. And the author sure likes doing navel gazing (but I guess I should have expected that, given the title). But still an interesting read.

[Josh Slingers · Rating 5 out of 5]

“It strikes the adult in me as precisely the consequence of the type of blinkering we endured as white suburban children in apartheid South Africa. We lived in an artificial world, our own void of sorts, dug out of the earth by the hunger for gold”.

[Leora · Rating 1 out of 5]

Interesting subject but not great writing. And the all-important maps, which were so crucial to the story, were printed so small that I could not make out the details.

[Esther Dushinsky · Rating 3 out of 5]

The information and knowledge I gained made me push onward. But there is no plot line, no order and a lot of repetitive information.

[Jess Barbour · Rating 4 out of 5]

makes me never want to live in South Africa sadly

[Mikaela Cheslock · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you've been to South Africa, and Joburg in particular, you'll appreciate this even more! Amazing.

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

It started slow, then got really interesting then just sort of meandered. He was a very thoughtful author but sometime felt he was trying to use every word in the English language to show that he knew them. At times making it difficult to read.

[Lezanne Maree · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't actually finish the book. But unfortunately Goodreads doesn't have a "waste of time" category.

It was boring. I found the narrator (and author) to be nothing more than a privileged white boy, so caught up in his own ego he doesn't realize no one cares. At least if it was well written, I could complement that but in all honesty it was lacking any form of spark.

I am impressed that I could actually find a book I was willing to not finish, even if my OCD never allows me to do that.

I want my 200 bucks back.