I've never been to another place like Johannesburg. The city has a siege mentality and crime is rampant; almost no one goes out at night. Armed bandits rob restaurants and patrons; the newspapers are full of accounts of people killed in their homes by intruders. Already this year 40 policemen have been killed in the city. You hear gun shots in the night and tourists return to the hotel wide-eyed and robbed.
The downtown is ringed by what look like mesas, except that they are huge slag heaps from the gold mines. Beyond the slag heaps are the townships. Soweto (South Western Township), the biggest, has more than a million people and is larger than the city. Crime and violence saturate Soweto. The family gets inside by 8:00 p.m. and locks up so tight that the house becomes suffocatingly hot. They don't even walk outside to the outhouse, but pee in bedpans.
I spent the night sweating on their floor, where I was chewed up by some kind of spider that left me with bleeding sores. The welts swelled up so much that I ended up back in a Johannesburg hotel, commuting to Soweto. The rush hour is incredible as crowds of black people get out of the city before sundown. It was the middle of the rainy season when I was there, and it poured almost every afternoon, including three times while shooting the Big Picture. The storms cleared the air in Soweto, but not the atmosphere.
