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It is five o’clock on a Friday evening, maybe we’re at Six Cocktail Bar on 7th Street in Melville, or at A Street Bar Named Desire on Bolton Road in Rosebank, or even News Cafe at Rosebank Mall, either way, we are scanning menus for half-priced cocktails, because in this economy, two-for-the-price-of-one is a welcome relief.
By the time ten o’ clock strikes, Ubers are called, or streets crossed in a hurry to hear the height of deep house music at Ratz Bar in Melville. We may be approaching our forties, but our ambitions for joy remain untamed and relentless.
At the door, we greet Malebza. She is the bouncer.
Stoic, highly revered, greatly loved and affectionately known as the official welcoming committee for all who sought entry at club doors or were worth mentioning after dark.
We gather at the bar because Ratz also accommodates the constraints of our collective economy, offering cocktails at half price. Carfax District is a reminder that cities need spaces where people can gather without pretence, lose themselves in music and experience the freedom of simply being.
Its bar is thick with cigarette smoke and house music that quickly switches to pop before collapsing into R&B, then electro without announcing itself. Either way, the intention is to propel us toward our collective peak constantly.
Last rounds are called at two o’clock in the morning, Malebza calls us by our individual names and reminds us to order Ubers to the Carfax District. We aren’t ready to sleep, not yet. We call our Ubers and offer a lift to the German woman we toasted with at the bar. Her name eludes us, but that doesn’t matter because we are committed to showing her the best part of our city.
The Uber arrives, and we get in, anticipating the exhilaration already underway at 39 Gwigwi Mrwebi St, Newtown, Johannesburg.
On Gwigwi Mrwebi Street, named after the pioneering South African jazz musician who carried South African sounds beyond its borders, are four iconic venues: Club A.M., AND Club, Bad Manners and Carfax sit shoulder to shoulder inside one of the city's last true nightlife precincts.
Here you’ll discover a collection of exceptional DJs that move effortlessly between deep house, techno, afro-house, gqom, drum and bass and experimental sounds.
Since the mid-1990s, Carfax has reinvented itself again and again, from industrial warehouse to cultural institution, without ever losing the raw energy that made it legendary, cementing its status as a beloved fixture in South Africa's cultural landscape.
For three decades, the District has anchored the city's restless creatives: DJs, painters, fashion designers, photographers, activists, performers and party kids, giving a home to everyone Johannesburg couldn't quite categorise.
When exploring the main hall, be sure to look down at the floor or glance at the walls to discover the 'Carfax Stone River,' a Batisse-inspired installation etched with countless names. If there has been a defining figure in South Africa's creative industries over the last twenty years, chances are excellent that they have left their mark on this very stage, and its walls remember them all.
On any given weekend, long after Johannesburg's restaurants have closed and the suburbs have gone dark, a different city emerges in this Newtown district. Home to the city's underground multicultural, unfiltered and provocative identity, it is the city’s resistance to the curated luxury that increasingly shapes urban life.
Where life has increasingly grown into a public exhibition, and colouring outside the lines of refined society enough to get you cancelled, in Carfax District, there are few rules beyond respect for community, music and the dancefloor. It curates a music landscape and versatility vast enough for its patrons to drop the filter and come undone.
In a world increasingly obsessed with definitive categories of identity, sexuality, class and race, between the hours of two and seven in the morning, these are all left at the door as soon as the entrance fee is paid and our wrists stamped.
These venues remain among the few places where Johannesburg's many worlds converge.
Artists, students, professionals, migrants, queer communities and night owls dance side by side until sunrise. More than nightlife, these spots are a reminder that cities need spaces where people can gather without pretence, lose themselves in music and experience the freedom of simply being.
In the words of Club A.M.’s management, “nightlife is culture, not just entertainment.”
So, when cocktail bars of the north have shut their doors, and all clubs have called for last drinks, those who know gather themselves and others for an exodus into deep town.
Previously known as 3rd Place, that is exactly what the District is known for: a third location for night owls who revel in the possibility of a party that never ends.
It is now eight in the morning, and we are in the parking lot, our sunglasses on, negotiating with sleep.
Still, one of us will suggest Kwa Mai Mai in Jeppestown for breakfast, or even Betrand’s in Maboneng, because it's Saturday morning and we’re ready to do it again.
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