Who Built Jozi? - Luli Callinicos

Wits University Press, 2012, softcover, , illustrated, index, 179 pages, 22.5 cms x 26.5 cms, condition: as new.

If you stand on the hill at the corner of Louis Botha Avenue and Boundary Road in Parktown, Johannesburg, and look northwards, you will see the road sloping down to the thickly forested suburbs below. A few paces down the hill on your left is an unlovely but historic beacon ...now part of a reinterpreted landscape, called Wits Junction, a uniquely historical precinct. Jozi is noted for its diversity - if there was the crassness of naked commerce, there were also the more subtle, countervailing cultures of millions of men and women who came to make their home or occupation in Johannesburg. In Who Built Jozi? Luli Callinicos weaves a fascinating fabric, exploring the foundations of Johannesburg by making the connections between the legacy of those first newcomers to the city and today's post-apartheid generation living in the residential complex, a conversation between the present and the past. This book is a treasure trove of local history. Written in an accessible style, it is richly illustrated in full colour, using both historic and contemporary photographs and maps.

The author,  Luli  Callinicos , is well known for her work on the formation of the South African working class, which includes a trilogy of books, namely Gold and Workers (1981), Working Life: Factories, Townships and Popular Culture (1987), which won the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa, and A Place in the City: the Rand on the Eve of Apartheid (1993). Callinicos has also taught history, lectured and pioneered workshops at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). She is credited with putting forward the often neglected history of 'ordinary' South Africans.