Eish, Jozi. Ja, neh. Jozi, that great city where dreams and their dreamers are swallowed whole more often than not. To survive in Jozi, you do not necessarily need the right tools. You need the creativity to make the wrong tools work for you.
Like many great cities, Jozi is made up of layers. The top layer is the rough and tough face of its everyday business, that constant motion of people chasing life, hustling at a furious pace. The first lesson my mother taught me about this city was to keep moving and not speak to anyone. On its surface, that warning was about avoiding danger, about keeping yourself safe from the sharp edges of urban life. But it was also a warning about something deeper, something stranger. Sometimes that warning came with a word that both intrigued and frightened me, a word that has followed me from childhood into adulthood, a word that found new life on social media a few years back. That word is amasilamusi.
The great city of Jozi has a mystical layer that sometimes surfaces but mostly lives beneath everything else, along the edges of daily life. It is the Jozi that hides below the noise and shimmer, beneath its taxis and towers, its street hawkers and skyscrapers of glass and grit. It is a Jozi that exists in whispers, in stories told at twilight, in the muttered warnings passed from parents to children. Most of us know of it, even if we pretend not to. We learn how to live with it, how to move around it, how never to look at it directly.
It is a Jozi where myths breathe through concrete, where the ancestors still roam the alleyways, where dreams are traded as easily as airtime. It is a place that vibrates with the memories of miners who descended into the earth and never came back, of those who searched for gold and found ghosts instead. Some say you can still hear their songs in the wind that whistles between Hillbrow’s high-rises or in the low hum of the M1 traffic at night.
My Jozi, our Jozi, is a city that never lets you forget how close the visible world is to the unseen one. The streetlights may flicker on time, the billboards may sell you the next big thing, but behind that electric hum is something ancient and watching. You feel it in the way the mist hangs over the city early in the morning, in the way a taxi driver mutters a prayer before he pulls into rush-hour traffic, in the way your grandmother insists you never pick up money you find lying on the street.
Because in Jozi, nothing lies still without a reason.
When I was young, I thought these stories were meant to scare me. Tales about amasilamusi, shadow things that follow you when your spirit is unsettled, or about tokoloshes that crawl through keyholes to whisper your secrets back to you. But as I grew older, I realised these stories were not warnings so much as survival guides. They teach you respect for the city, for the unseen, for yourself. In Jozi, belief is not superstition; it is instinct, a way of reading the world.
The city hums with this hidden life. You can feel it in the vibrations of the taxi ranks, in the gospel harmonies rising from street corners on a Sunday, in the smell of paraffin and vetkoek, in the rhythm of isiZulu and seTswana and English overlapping like drumbeats. Everyone is trying to make something out of nothing. And sometimes that hustle is pure magic.
Still, Jozi demands sacrifice. It takes as much as it gives. For every person who finds their rhythm here, there is another who disappears into its depths. I have seen people lose themselves in the city’s glow, chasing money, chasing love, chasing the next opportunity, until Jozi swallows them whole. But I have also seen those who rise, who find themselves reborn in its fires. Because Jozi, for all its hardness, is also a city of second chances. A place where you can break and rebuild, where you can lose your name and still find your voice again.
Sometimes, when I stand on the Mandela Bridge at dusk, I watch the trains glide in and out of the city and think about how Jozi moves like a living creature. It breathes through its people, sighs through its streets, dreams through its towers. It remembers every footprint, every heartbeat. It holds every story, those told and those still waiting to be found.
And somewhere between the seen and the unseen, between the taxi rank and the stars, Jozi whispers, keep moving. Not because it is dangerous to stop, but because movement is how this city prays. It is how we keep its stories alive. It is how we remember who we are.
So, eish, Jozi. Ja, neh. You are a city of contradictions. You bruise us, but you bless us too. You steal time, but you give us rhythm. You test our faith, yet you feed our dreams. You are the sound of gospel at sunrise and amapiano at midnight, of sirens and laughter blending into one unstoppable song. You are the smell of wet tar after summer rain, the taste of kota and heartbreak, the gleam of light off a high-rise window that refuses to give up its shine.
You are every hustler’s heartbeat, every migrant’s hope, every poet’s muse. You are both the wound and the balm.
And still, we love you. We keep coming back to you. Because somewhere in your chaos, we find a reflection of ourselves, messy, resilient, miraculous.
Eish, Jozi. Ja, neh. The great city. The city that remembers. The city that never sleeps, because it is dreaming for all of us.
Disclaimer:
The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or official position of Jozi My Jozi.
Charles Siboto is a South African writer, editor and content strategist. He is the author of The Legend of Mamlambo (a love letter to Jozi) and co-author of the Kwasuka Sukela children’s fantasy series. His work frequently explores the intersections of mythology, identity, and contemporary South African life, particularly through the lens of place and notions of belonging.