NASA spends an enormous amount of time, money and effort trying to kill bacteria.

For reasons of not wanting to accidentally set off a chain of contaminative space-evolution that will one day result in a super-sentient species of E coli with teleportation and death-lasers, NASA assembles all its Mars Rovers in specially-designed “clean rooms” that are some of the most sterile places on earth, bombarded with radiation and disinfectants and all sorts of hostile techniques meant to eradicate all organic life.

Recently, NASA also discovered 26 new-to-science species of bacteria, happily living in those very same clean rooms.

Radiation? No problem, they were resistant. In fact, some could continually repair their own DNA. Disinfectants? Poisons? They had turned them into food. It is, in many ways, nature’s most gloriously defiant middle-finger to humankind.

So, not only have we definitely been spewing decades-worth of organic life into our solar system, we’ve been letting a vast array of unkillable cosmic super-bugs loose on the universe. Excellent.

Over a weekend where to some extent global attention was turned on Joburg for the G20 summit, I couldn’t help but be struck by a kind of poetic parallel between these unkillable germs and the lurching, unstoppable megalith that is our “fair city”.

In fact, looking out over the vast forest that is central Joburg while the South African Air Force creakily flung its only two working fighter jets across the sky 38 times a day in an effort to make the G20 people feel like they were being protected with the best that money could buy (but not necessarily maintain), it was hard not to re-marvel at the insanity that this city even exists at all.

The city that shouldn’t exist, but you know … gold

Famously established next to no body of water in a particularly inhospitable area of a generally inhospitable part of the world, it’s an environment specifically designed to deter mega-cities from forming in the first place. And yet here we are, despite continuing efforts by every echelon of local government, City Power, Rand Water, the ANC and East European gangsters to kill us off.

And we’re not the only ones marvelling at our continued existence. Picking on Joburg has recently become something of a global sport. A raft of headlines and articles have taken a snarky delight in pointing out how awful this place is, epitomised by The Times’ “Welcome to Johannesburg, World Leaders: It’s Falling Apart”.

And sure, The Times is not wrong. But it’s also not necessarily right either. Sitting under a tree in Orlando West a couple of weeks ago on a sunny Saturday afternoon, as D’Angelo belted out of a nearby shebeen and some gents were watching Orlando Pirates on a battered TV outside a kota place while getting their cars washed, it was very difficult to feel anything but a deep love for this place where so many thrive. In fact, in the past two weeks, I have overheard more people saying variations of “You know? I just love Joburg” than ever before, almost in some kind of unspoken recognition that everyone else thinks of us with the same love and understanding generally reserved for a swarm of mosquitos.

And that’s really the thing, isn’t it? Joburg is less a city than an annoyingly and bafflingly successful organism. A loud, stubborn, mutating, wildly adaptive thing that keeps finding new ways to survive long after the experts have written our obituary. But against every sane prediction, it never actually dies. It just goes offline briefly, mutters “eish”, reboots, and then carries on.

Not collapse, but continuation

There is an analogue for South Africa itself here as well. As if the only story worth telling is the collapse, never the continuation. The country and its economic capital city are chaos engines, but also continual proof that humans can adapt to a lot.

And maybe that’s why Joburg is aggressively beloved by the people who continue to live here in a way that’s impossible to explain to outsiders. We don’t love it because it’s easy. We love it because it’s unlikely. Because it shouldn’t exist, and yet it does. Constantly, defiantly, and rudely. And it’s moments like President Cyril Ramaphosa refusing to fold under Donald Trump’s attempted bullying at the G20 that somehow felt like a pure expression of peak Joburg: a calm, stoic “Not today, my guy.”

And I get why people are exhausted by us and this place. It’s contradictory and aggressive and frequently deranged, but it’s also alive in a way few places are. Which is maybe why, every time someone overseas writes an apocalyptic think-piece detailing the hellscape that is our city, the actual people who live here respond by … well, carrying on. Usually quite loudly and with the kind of stubborn hope you can’t sterilise, no matter how many times the power goes out. Built in the wrong place. With the wrong infrastructure. Under the wrong leadership. But it is also in many ways representative of the spirit of South Africa itself.

And all you can hope is that every now and again the world gets a real glimpse of it, like it did last weekend, and considers a different headline. Maybe even a nervous SAAB subcontractor took a moment in between desperately hoping that some of his product wasn’t going to fall out the sky to think “You know? I just love Joburg.”