When asked why he robbed banks, recidivist US criminal Willie Sutton famously said: “Because that’s where the money is.”
Sutton would have loved Ekurhuleni, the vast metro formally known as the East Rand. It’s home not only to a hell of a lot of banks but also the Rand Refinery — gold smelter and manufacturer of bars and coins.
Powered by its factories, warehouses, railways, highways and gold mines — many now abandoned and home to illegal miners engaged in gangster-style turf wars with assault rifles — it accounts for roughly 21% of Gauteng’s GDP, and 7% nationally.
Bang in the middle of it is OR Tambo International Airport, the country’s busiest gateway, which handles about 21-million passengers a year. Between January and July this year, 673,762 of those arrivals were international travellers.
Did they, as their widebody made its slow approach from the south, look down at the dun sprawl of dusty red-tile roofs and swimming pools, the shacks, the roads, the factory smoke, birds rising in alarm from the pan, the mall and the traffic snarling up on the N12, and think — at all — about the lives of the 3.8-million people who live there?
Do they think about rogue cops allegedly torturing a hijacking suspect to death in Sallies Village — right there under the starboard wing of their jet — and then being told to drop the body down a mineshaft or into a dam (both are plentiful here)?
Will they think of murdered whistleblowers, or the former policeman killed by bullets shot out of an AK-47 by as-yet-unknown gunmen on a Friday night, even as a commission of inquiry into other killings and corruption in the criminal justice system continues in the city next door?
Will they even know that the city’s name means “place of peace” in Xitsonga … but isn’t.
Ekurhuleni. A good name for a soap opera about the sprawl. Unlike eGoli, though, it will not be gentle viewing.
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