Lizeka Mda: CITY LIMITS
Andr Wessels (not his real name) still remembers the time when Indians were kicked out of Pageview, an area to the west of Braamfontein station that was predominantly Indian at the time. He was jubilant, and so was everyone else he knew.
They would shout “Gaan terug [go back], coolies!” as Indians packed for Lenasia. When the bulldozers came in 1976 to forcibly move people from their homes and businesses, even Wessels had pause. “It wasn’t a nice thing to watch. Sometimes they bulldozed homes with people still inside them.”
The means may have been detestable, but Wessels and his neighbours found the end desirable. “We thought the Indians would make way for low-cost housing for Afrikaner families,” he says.
It didn’t happen. A few houses were built and some white working class families moved in, but it was nowhere near the scale of Triomf, which had been built over the rubble of Sophiatown. Twenty years later the area known as Pageview, south of 11th Street, is pock-marked by empty stands.
Like Sophiatown and District Six in Cape Town, the area affectionately known as Fietas is reputed to have had a wonderful, harmonious sense of community. It was a vibrant community, one of the first grey areas in Johannesburg at the turn of the century, when it attracted artisans from all the racial groups.
Today the place has a dejected air about it. For Wessels, who, like his father, was born in Vrededorp, it seems to mock his past faith in apartheid.
The house he has lived in for 20 years was a residential hotel when it was built almost 100 years ago. He is renovating it now, and if it were located just 2km to the north, in Melville, it could be worth R500 000.
Unfortunately, it is located bang in the middle of an area where houses cost around R80 000. Slumlords subdivide the houses and rent them to several families at about R300 per room. It’s driving Vrededorp house prices down and it irks Wessels.
In the house next door to him live several Somali families. Wessels has nothing against Somalis: “The most beautiful people God put on earth. I’m an Afrikaner, but I tell you I haven’t seen a face as beautiful on a white woman as that of a woman who lives next door.”
The problem is that there are just too many of them, and “they just live there”, says Wessels. The weeds in the yard and on the pavement are too tall. The children do not go to school.
“Is that life?” he asks, but he has not asked the Somalis. He does not talk to them.
“Decent people should be fighting to live in Vrededorp,” he says. “Here we are close to everything – buses, the freeway, the train station, Wits University, Rand Afrikaans University and Wits Tech.
“If only the Indians had not moved out, it would be so good now. I wish I could bring back 14th Street [the commercial centre of Fietas known as the “Mecca of shoppers”, which drew people from all over South Africa]. Our properties would be worth much more, and there would be none of this squatting.”
The empty stands attract squatters, a major source of headaches for the area’s ratepayers, who are united in their fight to preserve what is left of this community.
Wessels’ wife Annalie (not her real name), spends her days tracking down the owners of the 200 empty stands, to force them to clean up their act. She is an active committee member of the United Community Forum, an association for the residents of Vrededorp, Pageview, Vredepark and Jan Hofmeyr.
The committee has its work cut out for it.
The narrow one-way lanes of Vrededorp make for very intimate living. Everyone knows everyone else, and each household has the names and telephone numbers of committee members next to the telephone.
The composition of the 20-member committee indicates just how different Vrededorp in the new South Africa is from the suburb envisaged by the architects of group areas.
Residents include a doctor (of the academic, not the medical kind), a nurse, a physicist, several pensioners, housewives, and a few unemployed people. Some are white, others black, Indian or coloured. None fit stereotypes comfortably.
But they are as one over one issue – the whole community are gearing up for a fight with the Gauteng Department of Education.
There hasn’t been a school at Vrededorp since the whites-only Cottesloe Primary School was closed in 1991 because of falling numbers. But with the new arrivals, the community needs a primary school. Children attend schools in areas like Fordsburg, Melville, Auckland Park, Mayfair, Crosby and Brixton. It’s too far to walk and too expensive to take buses.
In the last two years the committee has been negotiating with the education department to reopen Cottesloe Primary School. In October they were told there were no funds to open the school. Perhaps in 1999.
The community was taken by surprise one morning in January when hundreds of pupils from New Nation School in Mayfair, carrying desks on their heads, moved into the old Cottesloe buildings. The education department had deceived the community of Vrededorp, and they are having none of it.
Now the community is being accused of racism because the pupils of New Nation School are black street kids who come from Hillbrow and other shelters all around Johannesburg.
“The real issue is not that the students are from shelters,” says Harry Dugmore, a committee member, “but that there is no school for the community. The community feels cheated, ripped off and very aggrieved. After all, they were in negotiations with the department to open the school for the children who live here. The government would never do this in Melville or Parkview. It’s because the people of Vrededorp are poor.”
Dugmore wrote his doctoral thesis on Vrededorp before World War II, and is one of the three creators of the Madam & Eve comic strip.
“There is an element of racism too,” he
says. “The department was not aware that Vrededorp is now mixed and that the most vocal people against the school would be Indians, coloureds and Africans. These are young couples whose children walk 5km to school every day while a school in their midst is closed to them. After all, they were previously disadvantaged. They feel they deserve better.”
“It’s so demoralising for a government we voted for to do this,” adds Usha Bapoo.
“But if it’s a fight they want,” vows Rynie Davis, who had to give up her nursing job so she could drive her children to and from school, “then a fight they will get.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by Gladys Machava. “I’m a fighter,” she says, “and I’m not going to curl up and die, just because I’m black.”
If you judged her from her appearance, you would expect this working-class woman to be subservient and unable to hold her own among the more educated members of the committee. You would be wrong.
To say the welcome the Machavas received when they moved to 6th Street in 1992 was not warm would be an understatement. Every time they ventured outside they were greeted by jeers: “Wat soek julle? Gaan terug kaffers! [What are you looking for? Go back kaffirs!]”
She took all of them on. From the gun-toting thug who kept coming to the Machava door to warn them that “kaffirs” were not welcome there, to the next-door neighbour who threw rubble over the wall into the Machava yard. Both troublesome neighbours moved out.
“If people do not like to see my face,” she says, “I tell them they had better leave. Ek sal hier doodgaan [I will die here.]”
Gladys’ proficiency in Afrikaans takes one by surprise. She grew up in Clocolan in the Free State and, after coming to Johannesburg in 1977, spent 14 years working and living at a home for paraplegics in the Afrikaans middle-class suburb of Linden. Afrikaans is her home language.
“That one thinks she’s white,” a former neighbour used to say in exasperation at Machava’s cheekiness.
These sentiments about Machava are being echoed by new neighbours, the only difference being that these neighbours are black. Slumlords have taken over the two houses to the west of her home. One of them houses a shebeen. The noise, brawls and littering raise Machava’s ire.
“You think you’re white,” the tenants tell her when she orders them to clean up. So do the squatters when she loses her patience with them because “they won’t do anything for themselves”.
It’s water off a duck’s back to Machava, whose zeal about the upliftment of Vrededorp will not tolerate anyone who thinks just because the people who live there are poor, they deserve less – like the Brixton policeman who suggested at a meeting with the community that Vrededorp residents should not expect the police to arrive five minutes after a call. Vrededorp was not Sandton, after all, he said.
Four minutes would suit the community even better, Machava told him. From that day on, there is an understanding between the police station and the forum.
And for a community from which things have always been taken – businesses, homes, sports fields, churches, a library, banks, schools, a post office – every small victory is a step forward.