Chaos precinct: How traders from Ethiopia have remade downtown Jozi

Dr Tanya Zack’s groundbreaking book, The Chaos Precinct: Johannesburg as a Port City, is a deep dive into the Ethiopian world in downtown Jozi.

Concentrated around Lilian Ngoyi (formerly Bree) and Rahima Moosa (formerly Jeppe) streets is a thriving cross-border trading hub powered by Ethiopian migrant entrepreneurs. The area is sometimes referred to as Little Addis, although that makes this booming makeshift hub sound exotic, says Zack.

Municipal officials speak informally of the area as the Chaos Precinct, a place of fevered cross-border trade whose annual revenue is twice that of the largest South African shopping mall, Sandton City. Traders in the area simply call it by the hallmark road – Jeppe.

On a rainy Tuesday morning we did a walkabout into the heart of Jeppe with informal guide and Ethiopian migrant Solomon Birhane, one of the people who helped Zack with her research. We met at the high court, which, with its blend of Edwardian and Art Deco, couldn’t feel less Ethiopian.

A few blocks later, however, we entered a maze of buildings, arcades and markets that lie beneath the dystopian high-rises of Marble Towers, owned apparently by Cameroon’s richest man, Baba Ahmadou Danpullo, and the Kwadukuza Egoli Hotel Tower, originally the Johannesburg Sun, built in the mid-1980s but empty and closed since the late 1990s.

The traders here are mainly Ethiopian immigrants, running thousands of small, informal businesses, using abandoned or repurposed office buildings and medical towers as retail units.

The trade itself specialises in fast fashion and consumer goods such as clothes, shoes, household items and cosmetics that are sourced from China and sold to cross-border traders from across southern Africa, including Zimbabwe, Malawi, Botswana and Mozambique. It’s a transnational network, a port, where goods are received, broken down and sold to local and regional buyers.

We visited Small Street Mall, a crazy-busy pedestrianised shopping arcade; we explored the blocks around the old Jeppe Street Post Office and Main Street Mall.

We walked down crowded streets, slunk through a few alleyways and climbed in and out of buildings crammed with thousands of small, often cupboard-sized shops, crammed in turn with an astonishment of goods.

Shop dummies line the streets, showing off the latest fashion; tiny shops sell different items such as jeans, shoes, clothes, T-shirts, perfume, spices, underwear and household goods. These minute spaces are maximised to showcase goods – every inch is pushed to productive use – and traders must also adapt to crime and police harassment. In one section of Jeppe, traders were hastily closing their shops and hiding their wares ahead of a rumoured police raid.

Jeppe is not touristy or cultural, but there are some specifically Ethiopian shops selling traditional clothes and homeware. There are religious icons, tapestries of St George and the Dragon, the odd picture of Haile Selassie. We had an early lunch at a local restaurant that served delicious traditional food – injera, the staple, sour-fermented flatbread of Ethiopia and Eritrea, essential for its spongy texture and its role as a utensil to scoop up vegetarian sauces and sides.

I emerged a few hours later, dizzy and overstimulated. In Jeppe, a so-called decayed area has been turned into a thriving, transnational, self-organised commercial hub without formal planning or official support. And it’s extraordinary to think that the shoppers here spend R10-­billion a year.

The orthodoxy is that the inner city of Johannesburg is declining. Zack tells a different story: of a burgeoning that is tempered only by restrictive by-laws, corruption and brutal policing. The Chaos Precinct places Jeppe as a centre – if not the centre – of Johannesburg’s globalised trade in fast fashion. Not only are commodities from China sold in Jeppe, but they are often resold – broadcast across the subcontinent in chains of value that are integral to the lives of hundreds of thousands of Africans.

A walkabout in Jeppe is a fresh perspective on how the globalised economy plays out on the streets – and Zack’s book humanises this bewildering place.

“Jeppe is a dynamic, exuberant hub that fosters entrepreneurship,” she writes. “Fortunes are made, loved ones back home are supported and commodities – particularly fast fashion – flow across southern Africa.

“Local and cross-border traders arrive on buses and taxis to buy shoes, T-shirts, dresses, underwear, jeans, suits, wallets, belts, nail clippers and cosmetics. Though situated on the dry Highveld, Jeppe is an entrepôt which bears a close resemblance to major port cities.”

The book challenges dominant narratives of inner-city decay, revealing instead how this informal entrepôt functions as a dense ecosystem. Through stories of resilience, ambition and the everyday logistics of informal commerce, Zack reframes how we understand migration, trade networks and the real engines driving African urban economies.

And it raises some massive questions: how can the potential of this port city be unlocked? What would it take to capture the rent here as a form of foreign direct investment? What relationship with Jeppe would be the most productive for the City of Johannesburg? How could the climate of mistrust with the authorities be overturned?

Could Ethiopian migrants be brought into the banking system? How do planners, architects, City officials and economists deal with the practices of trade, informality, migration and integration in African urban spaces?

Zack spent 15 years in Jeppe researching her book. It weaves together analysis and anecdotes, inviting the reader to explore this remarkable shopping hub through the innumerable conversations she has had with traders, street vendors, brokers, consumers, City officials, restaurateurs, security forces and academics.

The Chaos Precinct also tells the stories of those Ethiopian pioneers who first set out to open shops in what were high-rise medical buildings. And it loops back to Ethiopia, with extraordinary stories of those who encourage and facilitate the migrant journeys. Zack travels to Ethiopia to meet “Joburg boys” in Addis and Hosanna, a rapidly growing urban hub south of Addis.

She uncovers the risk and tragedy that Ethiopian migrants confront in Jozi – the perilous trips, the police brutality.

Zack’s writing is charming and lyrical, based on detailed research and rigorous academic questioning.

“It matters,” she says, “because it is an untold fascinating contemporary story based on deep ethnographic work, solid research and intimate portrayals of individual lives that I’ve had unique access to. It is imperative that we embrace the paradox of the singularity and typicality of the migrant shopping malls of Jeppe. They are simultaneously unique and also signal a massive remaking of the city in Africa.” DM

Dr Tanya Zack is a South African planner and writer specialising in urban policy, informality and sustainable development. She has been an adviser and consultant in the development arena for more than 30 years and has worked locally and internationally with ­governments, academic institutions, the private sector and directly with communities. The Chaos Precinct: Johannesburg as a Port City is published by Jacana Media and costs R420.

Bridget Hilton-Barber is a freelance writer who writes for Jozi My Jozi.

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.