At a certain point, the elderly white lady sitting next to me started to cry. We were sitting on plastic chairs in the middle of the road on Twentieth Street in the Johannesburg suburb that is now known as Pageview. In the old days, of course, it had a name that was nowhere near as snooty-sounding as “Pageview”. They called it all sorts of things, but mostly it was known as “Fietas”
— the area that spread from Vrededorp, right near the centre of the city, into the surrounding neighbourhoods, a jumble of races occupying a crazy jangle of houses and apartment blocks that nudged each other for space, and sometimes seemed to be sitting one on top of the other, tolerating each others’ idiosyncrasies and getting on with the business of living.
We had all come to linger over the memory of Fietas — one of those all-too-free living areas that were steadily emptied and demolished by the apartheid government between the 1940s and the 1970s.
The idea had been to hold a Fietas Festival in the shadow of the World Summit on Sustainable Development, to remind ourselves and the world that there is more to think about in the realm of development than lofty ideals that no one believes will ever be truly implemented, along with flashy motorcades and fountains of hot air. The idea had been to remind ourselves that a critical part of development lies in restoring the foundations that our present reality is built on — foundations that had been systematically chopped away, in an all- too-recent era that is now masquerading as an innocent part of the distant past.
I think what made the white-haired white lady start to cry was the accumulated weight of all those memories that were slowly being unfolded on that semi-derelict street in Fietas that balmy Sunday morning. We were part of a steadily growing crowd that had started out with around a score of old Fietas residents and their families, but that would grow to about 200 by the end of the day’s proceedings. Not a large crowd by any standards. But it was a significant testimony to profound memories, nevertheless.
It was during the open mike session that the lady sitting next to me had stood up and started to express her feelings about the occasion, before the tears had overwhelmed her. She wanted to pay tribute to the courage of the people whose testimony, through poetry, prose and impromptu recollections, had spoken of why the spirit of places such as Fietas, Sophiatown and District Six should never be forgotten. She was the only white person in the audience at that stage.
She said she wanted to invoke the memory of a white priest from the local Presbyterian church who had steadfastly stood up against the unyielding claw of the government and its bulldozers, until there was nothing left around him to stand up for. Perhaps she, too, had been one of that small, isolated group of white volunteers who had tried to do something about the lingering and unavoidable death of Fietas, and had lost out.
In any case, she had come to join in the sharing of memories of a happier time in this sad, withered space. And in the end this dignified, bittersweet gathering of memories had brought her to tears.
Don “Bra Zinga” Mattera was, appropriately, our master of ceremonies at this occasion. The masterful poet of the revolution repeatedly brought us back down to earth with his personal accounts of what it was like to live and die with Fietas and its sibling areas of Sophiatown and Malay Camp in the scattered, black, alternative world of Johannesburg of the 1930s, Forties and Fifties.
In his own inimitable way, Bra Don let rip with stories about his own career as gangster-turned- man-of-the-people in these streets of memory in Fietas. His articulate, guiding presence, in a boggling array of living European and African languages (including his favoured brand of “tsotsi-taal”) was a reminder that memory can still be a living thing, and that there is always something we can learn from it. Especially the idea that we are all one.
It is too bad that there were no representatives of the black communities of the Fietas of the old days represented on this moving day.
According to my mother, who spent part of her childhood there and went to school in the local academy up to matric, the upper part of Fietas, from Twenty Third Street down, was largely black.
The lower part of the district was already restricted to coloured and Indian ownership, and the vibrant Fourteenth Street section was controlled by Indian traders.
And yet ownership of Fietas, in another sense, lay in the hands of guys such as Don Mattera, and the many other persons of indeterminate colour who moved up and down through the streets and zones of Fietas as if there were no colour bar, legislated or otherwise. Fietas was open to interpretation.
The racially exclusive townships that the people of Fietas were steadily moved to between the 1940s and 1970s left no room for such interpretation according to basic human instincts.
And therein lies the heavy burden of apartheid, which has left these colourful communities, such as those that previously inhabited Fietas, eternally divided.
Sustainable development must surely incorporate the need for sustainable memory and all its demands.
Well, that’s my take, anyway.
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