The rubbish bins were overflowing, the streets needed attention and the walls of one elderly resident’s home bore the scars of attempted break-ins.
Looking at the state of her neighbourhood, the 72-year-old Sophiatown resident wondered aloud who would finally put things right. Then she glanced up at an election poster of Helen Zille.
“I know that Gogo can help us,” she said of Zille, the Democratic Alliance’s mayoral candidate for Johannesburg.
A long-time DA supporter, she had no intention of changing her vote when she went to the polls on Wednesday. But her concerns extended well beyond party politics. Crime, water outages, litter, broken streetlights and potholes were among the problems she wanted addressed. “This place has gone down a lot,” she spat. “It was so nice and so clean when we moved here many, many years ago.”
Showing the damage to her wall, she said older residents had become so accustomed to the threat of crime that they looked out for one another. “There is too much crime here. All of us old people who live in Sophiatown, and there are a lot of old people in Sophiatown, we don’t go to bed early.
“We stay up late because of the break-ins. We must be alert. If anything happens to our neighbours, we are there at their houses immediately.”
She did not want to be identified but spoke warmly of the mixed and diverse community where long friendships had been formed.
One of her ideas for tackling the neighbourhood’s problems was to pay young people a stipend to help keep the streets clean and, in doing so, keep them away from drugs and gangsterism.
With her neighbours, she lamented how far Sophiatown had fallen. Even if she wanted to sell her house and move closer to her daughter in Potchefstroom, she said, she would never recover her investment.
Her neighbour had a more combative response: “The ANC will vraat (gorge) but we are watching them and their day will come. God sees everything.”
At Christiaan De Wet Primary School, where residents from Sophiatown cast their ballots, Joanna Moleko, 63, was equally frustrated. Shielding herself from the heat with an umbrella after voting for the Freedom Front Plus, she said water was the biggest problem.
“Either there’s no water or the pressure is low,” she said, explaining that even doing the washing became a waiting game when the pressure was too weak for her machine.
“Somebody must just come and rescue this place.”
Two young men, who did not want to be identified, were casting their votes for the first time. One, a matric pupil, admitted to feeling nervous as he entered the voting booth. He voted for the DA and ActionSA, following his family’s political choices. His friend, an IT student, also voted for the DA.
Both were worried about unemployment among young people.
“Many of my friends who have left school don’t have jobs. I don’t want that to happen to me and that’s why I voted,” the matric pupil said.
For Lauren Smith, who walked almost 3km from Westbury to the same voting station after realising she had not updated her voting address, the future of her 13-year-old son was uppermost in her mind.
The 42-year-old single mother voted for the African Christian Democratic Party, saying gangsterism, violence and unemployment were robbing children in her neighbourhood of opportunities.
“I want my kid to get a good education and I want him to feel safe while getting the education,” she said.
For all their differences, the residents had plenty to say about what was going wrong in their neighbourhood.
They had cast their votes. Now they wanted to see the rubbish collected, the water flowing and their streets made safer.