Everyone said it was a no-go area, a place where you would be murdered, raped and robbed. Even the name sounds menacing: The Wilds. But when James Delaney bought a dog — named Pablo after Picasso — he kept looking out on the dark, tangled mass of parkland behind his second-floor flat and wondering why he had to drive 20 minutes to walk him when he had 40 acres on his doorstep.
“I asked my neighbours and they all said, ‘Oh no, you can’t go in there, you will be murdered,’” he said. One day he borrowed a key to the gate and ventured in.
“I didn’t go far — about 50 metres as I was scared — and told my building’s security guard to raise the alarm if I didn’t return. But then I thought, why would murderers go into a place where there were no people to murder?”
Over time Delaney, 52, started venturing further, armed with clippers and a bucket for weeds. What he found was astonishing. “It was like something out of a storybook,” he said. “A magical enchanted forest, all overgrown and crazy but magnificent, full of birds and animals.”
It was the start of a ten-year journey in which he would not only officially adopt the park but also inspire a campaign to reclaim Johannesburg, one of the world’s most dangerous cities. In the process he has set off a nationwide movement to bring back the hope that is so sadly missing as the nation goes to the polls this week.
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Like much of South Africa, the park was a complete mess. Across its two rocky hills, benches were broken, trees collapsed, branches everywhere, weeds six feet high, water features silted up, walls all crumbling, and greenhouses so overgrown that euphorbias had spread across the ceilings.
But as Delaney, an artist, hacked through the undergrowth he found stone pathways and a waterfall. Most extraordinary of all, one day he came across immaculate lawns being mowed by a few City Parks workers.
“They’d worked there decades and were all approaching retirement,” he said. “They mowed the lawns and grew vegetables for themselves in the nursery, which was falling apart. There were even tomatoes growing in the flowerbeds.
“The staff were scared of their own park. They told me they stayed together and never walked to the extremes. They kept the lawns but left the rest. New benches lay in a heap at the entrance, delivered by head office but never installed. It was clear that no one from City Parks head office ever inspected this park.”
The council had given up, Delaney said. “When they saw what I was doing they said, ‘Why don’t you adopt it?’” In 2016 he signed a formal agreement to do so. Johannesburg city council would mow the land and remove the waste but he would be responsible for everything else. Friends helped to clear it at weekends and he raised money through crowdfunding, offering some of his art as reward.
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But a big challenge remained: how can you lure visitors to a place everyone is terrified of?
“The sense of fear was profound,” Delaney said. “This place embodied all that was wrong in the city.” His solution was to make 67 metal owls, each with a different quirk or expression, paint them in bright colours and perch them in the trees. “Everyone told me the owls would all be stolen. But not one disappeared.”
Children in particular loved them, shrieking with delight as they tried to spot different owls. People posted pictures on Instagram which drew in others. “I don’t think I would have been able to turn this park around if it wasn’t for social media,” Delaney said.
The next challenge was convincing people it was safe to venture further. Security systems were impractical because there were too many trees. The park goes up and down rocky hillsides and it was too expensive to have many guards. “I realised for the park to be a safe space it needed a flow of people,” Delaney said.
So he made more metal sculptures — bright red kudus, orange monkeys, yellow pangolins — and installed the benches which he painted in zany colours. Now the park has more than 100 sculptures, including a pink and yellow giraffe standing five metres tall.
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It worked: today The Wilds has 10,000 visitors a month.
Last Sunday it opened with an early yoga class and soon filled with people: a Muslim family having a picnic; Orthodox Jews taking a walk; a young black couple strolling hand in hand across the giraffe lawn; a white family with two Pomeranians enjoying the views at Eagle’s Nest, which looks across to the skyline.
Gertrude Mangiwe, a teacher, was sitting on a bench reading. “I love this place,” she said. “I feel peace and safety that you can’t find beyond these gates.” She lived in Berea, a nearby neighbourhood where two years ago she was robbed at gunpoint on her way to work. “They took my phone and I lifted my hands to pray to the Lord to save me. Coming here calms me.”
In a city of terrifying crime and broken infrastructure, The Wilds has two security guards for 40 acres — and is always clean, even at the end of a busy weekend. “It’s because so many people are invested in this place,” Delaney said.
Over time he has attracted 4,000 volunteers and raised more than three million rands (£128,000), as well as numerous donations of plants. A mosaic artist recently offered to decorate the bridge leading to the giraffe lawn with footprints. “It’s nice to walk and look in parks, but if you dug and planted it yourself you get so much more,” Delaney said. “There’s this sense of ownership: this park is ours.”
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Along the way he fell foul of many obscure regulations from the apartheid era: benches could only be painted green, certain trees could only be moved by a forestry department that no longer existed.
“I’ve had police called on me just for fixing things and making it nicer,” he said with a shrug. Most recently he had to struggle to build an accessible path for wheelchairs. “In the end we had to come secretly in the middle of the night to do it.”
Delaney is now contacted by people all over the country asking for advice about an abandoned park in their area. “I usually say just do it. If you start clearing it people will join you but if you wait nothing will happen. We South Africans are make-a-plan people.”
Melusi Mhlungu, 36, agrees. Raised by his grandmother in Soweto, he escaped the township to become a leading advertising executive in the United States, where he made two award-winning Super Bowl ads.
But last year he was persuaded to return home by Robbie Brozin, co-founder of the South African chain Nando’s, to help rebrand Johannesburg with a programme called Jozi My Jozi. “This city is the heart and soul of the country and if we let Johannesburg go then the whole country goes,” he said.
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He and Delaney are now working on a plan to improve the look of the whole city. “There’s no messiah coming to save us: after 30 years of democracy our leaders have not delivered,” Mhlungu said. “But there’s no point just waiting for this perfect South Africa — we the people have to save ourselves.”
