Slate takes a look at the history and meaning of the largest apartment building in Africa:
The building, along with the neighborhood of high-rises around it, had long functioned as something of a vertical waiting room for admission into urban South Africa. Adjoining the city’s largest train and bus station, it was the landing point from which thousands of immigrants, refugees, and rural migrants took their first tentative steps into Africa’s wealthiest city, and their presence made the area dizzyingly cosmopolitan. Congolese nightclubs jostled up against bootleg Nollywood film stores and Ethiopian restaurants; the knots of gossiping women gathered on street corners chattered in Zulu, Yoruba, French, and Somali.
And for a journalist like me, Ponte seemed almost too good to be true: a building that doubled as a neat metaphor for contemporary South Africa—a carefully wrought fortress of white privilege that had fallen into disrepair and violence before emerging, haltingly, into a more inclusive but far more uncertain version of itself.