Johannesburg Layover Near Rhodesfield Station

Johannesburg’s Rhodesfield station sits in Kempton Park, two kilometres north of Emperors Palace, which keeps the floor the talks that ended apartheid were held on as a walkway open to anyone for nothing.

Emperors Palace keeps the hall where the end of apartheid was negotiated

Emperors Palace is a casino and convention complex on Jones Road in Kempton Park, a little over two kilometres south of Rhodesfield station, and the part of it worth the trip is not the gaming floor. It was built over the site of the Kempton Park World Trade Centre, the conference building where nineteen political parties opened the Convention for a Democratic South Africa, CODESA in every account written since, on 20 December 1991. Those talks broke down. A wider Multi-Party Negotiating Process reconvened on the same floor on 1 April 1993 with twenty-six parties at the table, and what came out of it was an interim constitution and a date for the country’s first open election.

On 25 June 1993, while that process was sitting, about three thousand members of the Afrikaner Volksfront, the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging and allied groups drove an armoured vehicle called the Viper through the glass front of the building, walked in past a police cordon, took over the negotiating chamber, held a prayer meeting in it and left more than R700,000 of damage behind them. They went peacefully, under an agreement that nobody would be arrested that day; sixty were charged later. What survives is the South Wing of the convention centre, which the complex keeps as the CODESA Walkway, laid along the ground the talks actually used and captioned with what happened on it. It is inside a working venue, so whether the wing is open depends on what is booked into it, and the convention centre desk is the place to ask.

Kempton Park was laid out as 216 stands on a Boer farm

Karl Friedrich Wolff named the town after Kempten, the Bavarian town he was born in, when he subdivided part of his farm Zuurfontein on 24 August 1903 and put the stands up for sale; the spelling drifted into English as Kempton Park. The railway from Pretoria down to Vereeniging had already been cut across the farm in the early 1890s, with a station on it called Zuurfontein. A circular feeder bus leaves the station forecourt and works its way around southern Kempton Park in fourteen stops, finishing on Pretoria Road.

The grid is a working town centre now rather than a sight: shopfronts, taxi ranks and one dark tower block over low roofs, with the municipal library at the civic centre where C.R. Swart Drive meets Pretoria Road. Two hours is honestly the whole of it. With longer than that, the rest of the network beats a second lap, since one change at Marlboro puts Sandton and Rosebank within reach and the main Johannesburg guide covers the museums in the old centre. For something that collects you from a Kempton Park address and returns you to it, a private half-day run out to Soweto and the Apartheid Museum is the shape that fits a boarding time, because nothing here is walkable and everything else is a drive.

Nothing around Rhodesfield is a short walk from the platform: the roads out are wide arterials with long crossings rather than a compact grid, so anything you do from here starts with a bus or a car and a suitcase in the boot.

Airport carriages keep their doors shut at Rhodesfield

The run out to O. R. Tambo International Airport (JNB) carries a surcharge on top of the ordinary network fare, and the operator protects it by loading airport passengers and ordinary commuters into separate cars of the same train. At Rhodesfield the doors on the airport cars stay shut; at the airport station the commuter cars’ doors stay shut instead. A ticket that ends at Rhodesfield therefore costs a fraction of one that ends a kilometre further on at the terminal, and nothing on board is allowed to blur the line between the two.

Crossing between the two stations is therefore a road trip rather than a train ride, a bit over a kilometre with the R24 freeway lying between them. The second feeder bus from the Rhodesfield forecourt calls at Emperors Palace and then the airport, nine stops end to end, and a metered or ride-hailed car covers the same ground in a few minutes. The airport service itself runs daily from about 05:30 to about 20:30, every twelve minutes at peak, every twenty off-peak and every thirty at weekends and on public holidays, and the operator’s own warning is the one to plan against: the last train from the airport makes no connection to the northern and southern stations, and the last trains on those lines make no connection to the airport. The gates want either a Gautrain card carrying at least R38 or a contactless bank card, with at least R20 on the card if a bus is part of the trip.

Rhodesfield is not somewhere you would go for its own sake. It is the stop where the fare drops back to an ordinary one, and it happens to sit two kilometres from the room where the country was argued into its present shape.