Roger Cohen: The Changing Face of the Global South

Roger Cohen is a columnist for the NYT.

When European Jews first headed to South Africa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many settled in the Doornfontein section of Johannesburg, not far from the range of rocky hills called the Witwatersrand, where one of the world’s richest seams of gold was discovered in 1886.

Johannesburg spread to the din of the stamp batteries crushing gold ore through the night. Sickly yellow mine dumps, man-made hills of viscous slag, began to form on the horizon. Pioneers, pimps and prostitutes peopled the streets of the “City of Gold,” or “eGoli” to the black workers who plunged down shafts to labor in the new mines. My great-grandfather, Sydney Adler, was there at the creation. Maggie’s, perhaps the city’s first bar, was his; later he opened a hotel called The Pioneer. Both were establishments of dubious repute.

With time Jews migrated northward, first onto the ridge with its precious reef, in areas like Yeoville or Berea, and then beyond it to Houghton, where plots ran to one acre. Chutzpah was defined as a Jew who moved from Doornfontein to Houghton without first passing through Berea, where my father was born in 1921.

Of late, since the fall of apartheid in the first democratic elections of 1994, Houghton has lost its predominantly Jewish character. The handsome jacaranda-lined avenues are still there, but plots have been subdivided, old houses are coming down, and the neighborhood has seen a steady influx of Indians and blacks, South Africa’s new middle class....