The South African Building That Came to Symbolize the Apocalypse
It was 10 a.m. on a bright spring morning in Johannesburg, and just outside my apartment, the zombie horde was growing restless. They shrieked and wailed, clawing at their tattered gray clothes and surging toward the walls around them. As they thrashed against concrete and barbed wire, I heard shots ring out. There was a guttural yell and then, abruptly, silence.
Finally. For three days, the undead had been interrupting my workdays to fight pitched, cacophonous battles with their human nemeses on the movie set of Resident Evil: The Final Chapter 30 floors below my kitchen window.
When I had moved into Africa’s tallest apartment building a year earlier, I hadn’t counted on my work as a journalist being interrupted by a zombie apocalypse. But in many regards, I had to admit, it made sense. For more than four decades, after all, the Ponte City tower, which juts out over downtown Johannesburg like a 54-story toilet-paper tube,has been a vertical warehouse for South Africans’ greatest hopes and worst fears about their cities and
