This is Johannesburg at dusk…

…The video for this great afro-rock song by Juluka, “Fever” (1980), was not shot in the city that inspired it, Johannesburg…

Johnny Clegg sings:

The night is a promise/I feel it to the core.
Young and hungry on the street/Watching the score…
Down past an old cafe/Walking to I don’t know where…
Watching [the people] struggling to get their share.

Two things. A night in the city is nothing if its air is not vibrated by the beat of some promise—the promise of a new pleasure, a new happening, event, exchange, encounter. If you do not feel this promise “to the core” of your being, then you are not standing in a big enough city.

The other thing: The type of walking Clegg describes in “Fever” is only possible in the biggest cities on earth. Clegg deliberately walks with no sense of direction; he walks with no end in sight; he walks only to get lost. “Walking by an old cafe,” he sings. Where is this place? What forces brought him to this unfamiliar neighborhood? What will he encounter in this lost part of the city? And you just don’t get lost; you must know how to get lost.

The ability to lose your way correctly was designated by the German critic Walter Benjamin as the defining art of a big city person. “Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal, It requires ignorance—nothing more,” he wrote in his memoir “Berlin Chronicle.” “But to lose oneself in a city—as one loses oneself in a forest—that calls for quite a different schooling.” Johnny Clegg has had this different type of schooling.