Rift Valley Reflections: Justice

Wednesday, 24 August 2011

Justice

“Every day I do something… I am just trying to maintain…”

Justice Thoka pays R550 a month for a small room in a house in 7^th Avenue, Bez Valley, where he lives with his wife and two children. The house belongs to a Nigerian who apparently owns several properties in the area. Justice hasn’t had any permanent work since he came to Jo’burg City as a 20-year old matriculant seven years ago. Apart from a few contract jobs with ‘Real Landscape’ and as a security guard, he has had to find creative ways to sustain himself from day to day.

Every morning he reports for work at the local Pikitup dump at 8h00 and leaves when the dump closes. He has been doing this for 18 months. He is a volunteer but is hoping that Pikitup will eventually employ him.

He survives by fixing and reselling whatever he can salvage, and from tips for helping people to offload waste.

In quiet times, when every bit of redeemable waste has been retrieved and rehabilitated, Justice cultivates a small garden made from broken ornaments, discarded pots and bits of bric-a-brac that can’t be fixed. In between these bits and pieces of junk, he grows vegetables and flowers that he has found around Bez Valley and replanted. “We eat this every day,’ he says, pointing to spinach growing in pots and patches of soil on the concrete. "In November I will plant tomatoes and potatoes."

Justice learned vegetable gardening from his grandmother, who still grows vegetables at the family home in Rustenburg.

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History of Bezuidenhout Valley and surrounding inner city suburbs of Joburg

The first owner of the farm, known as 'Doornfontein' is said to have been a Voortrekker named Barend Christiaan Viljoen. He apparently named the farm 'Doornfontein' because of the thorn trees (doringbome) and springs (fonteine) on the land.

Records indicate that the farm was transferred to Frederick Bezuidenhout on the same day that it was registered in the name of Viljoen by Mrs. Viljoen, who ceded the farm to the Bezuidenhout family.

Bezuidenhout was a young trekboer who came up from the Cape in 1848 and helped the Viljoen family with the farm. He eventually married the Viljoen's daughter, Judith, after whom the suburb of Judith's Paarl was named.

Frederick is believed to have built the homestead that can be seen today.

The farm consisted of approximately 4,000 hectares of ‘bleak, exposed and sparsely vegetated…’ land, extending from what is now End Street in the west to Bedfordview in the east and from Louis Botha in the north to beyond the Natal Spruit in the south. The Bezuidenhout's farm contributed to Jo'burg's transformation into the City of Gold.

The Main Reef Leader running across the south of the farm was proclaimed a public digging; there was an abundant water supply on the farm; and the requirement for land close to the growing town were critical factors in the evolution of Johannesburg.

Over time sections of the farm were auctioned off and the suburbs of Doornfontein, Jeppestown, Belgravia, Troyeville, Fairview, Bertrams, Lorentzville, Judith's Paarl, Bezuidenhout Valley, Observatory, Kensington, Cyrildene, Dewetshof, Bruma and Morninghill were founded.

Why this blog?

I was born in Johannesburg and have lived here most of my life. For 15 years I lived in the inner city suburb of Bez Valley, where I often felt like one of the characters in 'Road', a play by Jim Cartwright, who said, "It's so hard..."

My thespian nephew played the role of Scullery in the play, the narrator who "meanders aimlessly down his road pointing out features of the grim landscape and setting the scene for the glimpses we see of the inhabitants lives..."

But Cartwright does find hope in the lives of his characters and as Gilbert Keith Chesterton points out, "One sees great things from the valley and only small things from the peak."

I recently moved from Bez Valley to another liminal space on the Louis Botha Avenue side of Orchards, around the corner from Satyagraha House and across the road from the Torah Academy. This is an historically very rich part of Johannesburg and I am already planning a few blog posts.

So this blog will continue to explore the changing face of Jo'burg, moving slightly further afield than Bez Valley and the suburbs that immediately surround it, but not abandoning my starting point by any means. There is still so much to say.