Jo'burg's 'Bridge of San Luis Rey'

The winding road that connects the valley with the top of the ridge is Johannesburg’s ‘Bridge of San Luis Rey’.  


The road was named after Joseph Stewart, a socially concerned and active man who devoted himself to the community for 25 years. The beautiful arched walls, built of stone from the koppie, still exist.  Once there was a plaque marking the outcrop of the ‘Brixton Qaurtzite’ which forms the Observatory Ridge, but it was apparently shot to smithereens by vandals in a passing car during the apartheid era at about the time when David Webster was assassinated.

One story of the origins of Stewart Drive is that it was built by Italian prisoners of war (the 1939-1945 War); another is that it was part of the city engineer’s work programme for the unemployed during the Depression and was completed in 1935.

The road winds its serpentine way through dense gum-tree forests, though the protecting fence has long been dismantled and sold - ‘shipped to China’ as they say at the all-accepting, turn-a-blind-eye scrap dealers in the valley. This is the final destination of almost all the man-hole covers and fence-posts in the district.  Another fence, only partially stolen is the more recent initiative of a local politician. It separates the park at the top of the road from the ‘jungle’ below.

Benches for weary travellers, thoughtfully constructed by the road’s builders at key points on the steep path, have also been stolen. Only one or two concrete legs remain.

Once there was a pedestrian route up the ridge, coming out at the corner of Beatty and Hill streets, but the story goes that long ago, an ‘Italian megalomaniac developer’ filled it in with rubble from the demolished white elephant ,’Von Brandis Garage’ in Jo’burg City, thereby blocking the watercourse and precipitating his bankruptcy (so it is said). Such paths in the city (like the path up Houghton ridge) have, in any event long become too dangerous for walking.

‘Robber-barons’  come down a well-trod path at a lonely dark bend in the forest, from wherever they dwell with impunity (from all accounts), when they see travellers wending their way fearfully upwards. Sometimes, it is said, they place rocks in the road, late at night, to puncture the tyres of cars of unsuspecting travellers.

It’s a quarter of a kilometre of utter lawlessness, a real fairy tale world of bandit kings, a piece of Johannesburg that exists apart. Anyone who takes the time to offer a lift to people waiting fearfully at the top or at the bottom of Stewart Drive will meet all the characters of a modern fairy-tale: Beautiful young maidens; goodly parents shepherding small children to and from the crèche at the bottom of the hill; wise old folk; children like ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ on an errand; two angels from the Celestial Church of Jesus Christ, and a band of pilgrims almost robbed by two leather-jacketed men with guns.

I have met a Franco-African maths teacher on his way to and from a part-time post at the High School  below the imposing stone abandoned Sir Herbert Baker built Observatory , and a tutoring job in the valley; a Congolese former diplomat, Japanese and Spanish-speaking, hoping to go to London; a French teacher; a schoolboy who left his  ragged school blazer in my car (still hanging hopefully in my cupboard); an artisan who lives in a house of safety for people with mental instability; and a young business and family man, on his way to a Hillbrow pharmacy to buy 'family planning items'.

'Don’t stop to give people a lift any more, and keep your doors locked. You may be hijacked!' a local politician, cautioned. 'You can’t trust anybody these days'

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.

"Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray..."

On Stewart Drive a group of women with children signal that they want a lift up the hill but I am running late so I don’t stop.  At any hour of the day there are people waiting for a lift up or down Stewart Drive, which has become fraught with crime. Cell phones and cash are stolen at gunpoint by thugs who emerge from the bush and are apparently immune to police intervention.  Women have been raped.

Richard and I begin our ascent up Observatory Ridge from Gascoyne Street, navigating the uneven, rocky terrain towards the Anglo-Boer War Indian Troops Memorial. It is difficult to imagine that in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the ground was relatively even and a journey on horseback from Yeoville to Germiston would take approximately 40 minutes.  Year upon year of soil erosion has fostered the rocky surface of the ridge as it is now.

Litter; burnt stubbly grass; human excrement; the occasional discarded shoe or forgotten item of clothing; and remnants of animal sacrifice are part of the geography.

Several members of African Independent Churches, doing the best they can in an urban setting to follow Jesus’s example of going up into the mountain to pray, are dotted across the landscape.  One man is wailing and pounding the earth with his fists; a group of women and children led by a young priest are holding a prayer meeting; and two men pray loudly over a crying child.  They  are from the ‘Church of the Apostolic Faith of Jesus Christ’ and the ‘Limpopo Rock Church’.  Further along the path, a solitary hermit, dressed in yellow, is staring out over the valley a short distance from a rough shelter he has constructed by draping shreds of fabric over a couple of rocks.

Only a few protea trees remain on the ridge. Once there were many but they have been chopped down and used for firewood.

Small yellow and white veld flowers scattered spasmodically along the path, announce the beginning of spring.

Richard points out the remains of the rock circles that mark the activity of early iron smeltering dating back to approximately 1830.

The monument was erected towards the end of 1902 in honour of Hindu, Sikh, Christian, Muslim and Zoroastrian Indian members of the British Army who lost their lives in the Anglo Boer War. ‘Zoroastrian’ has been misspelt.  Originally the inscription was in Urdu, Hindi and English but only the English inscription remains.  It reads:

TO THE MEMORY OF BRITISH OFFICERS

NATIVES

NCO’S AND MEN

VETERINARY ASSISTANTS

NALBANDS

AND FOLLOWERS OF THE INDIAN ARMY

WHO DIED IN SOUTH AFRICA 1899 -1902

We squat uncomfortably amidst the flotsam and jestsam of separatist church ritual. I take Ivan Vladislavic’s novel, ‘Double Negative’ out of my bag and read a description of the valley:

“Stunned by the sunlight, we slumped against the rock with our faces turned to the sky, while Auerbach spoke about the history of the valley and the people who lived there as it passed from gentility to squalor and back again. You could still see some of the grand mansions on the opposite slope. Down in the dip there were houses that went back to the beginnings of the city that had survived the cycles of slum clearance and gentrification and renewed decline.

‘You think it would simplify things, looking down from up here…  but it has the opposite effect on me. If I try to imagine the lives going on in all these houses, the domestic dramas, the family sagas, it seems impossibly complicated. How could you ever do justice to something so rich in detail? You couldn’t do it in a novel, let alone a photograph…’”

‘Stunned by the sunlight’ like Vladislavic’s characters, Richard and I agree the description of the valley from the Kensington point of view applies as well to the vista from the Observatory side of the valley.

Driving back to Bez Valley down Stewart Drive, I give a lift to a young woman from the DRC with a baby on her back. She doesn’t  speak any English and I am too preoccupied to conjure up my school French.  We abandon ourselves to silence.

Katy Mazibuko

“I am just doing it. It's on my head. Nobody taught me. I love plants very much.”

Katy Mazibuko is a networker and a gardener.  Years ago she planted a tiny lemon tree in front of my house. Today it towers over my property and provides an abundant supply of lemons.

Katy is constantly on the lookout for a patch of ground to plant a flower or a shrub, or for an unused piece of concrete to plant a tree in a pot.

Her networking skills give her inside insight into life behind closed doors in Eighth Avenue. Once I asked her if she knew of anyone who could sew. Pointing to the house across the road she said, “First there is the Niger, then the Indian, then the Zimbabwe, then the China, then the China with the wife. That wife, she sews.”  I counted off 199 for the Nigerian, 197 for the Indian, 195 for the Zimbabwean, 193 for the Chinese and 191 for the Chinese man with the wife and sure enough, the wife did sew and I paid her to alter my lounge curtains.

Katy lives in one of four backrooms on a property in Eighth Avenue. She has been there since 1998. In the past the tenants were constantly changing because of the ill temper of the owner of the house. These days there is a difference. “I told him he will get criminals here if he is never satisfied. I said, there are no angels in this world”.

Katy has collected flowers and plants since she was a child. Growing up in Newcastle, she would bring them home and put them in glass bottles in the house. 

In 1965, when Katy was 13, her mother, a domestic worker in Bezuidenhout Street, Yeoville, brought Katy to Johannesburg to look after her baby sister.  When she was 17, Katy began work as a domestic worker herself. Gradually she accumulated piece jobs in Yeoville, Kensington and Bedfordview.

“I started to like plants more when I was working in Bedfordview,” she says. “I had a lot of plants and I sent them home. When I went home to Newcastle on leave I planted a big avocado tree.  Everyone knows that avocado tree. Then from there I carried on and carried on and carried on…  When I retire I want to plant and sell. I am growing vegetables where I work in Bedfordview. They have given me a big space there and I have planted potatoes, tomatoes, spinach… everything”.

In the backyard of the house where she lives, Katy has her own garden. In a small contained area outside her room she grows an assortment of plants as well as lemon, guava, orange, mango, and avocado and banana trees - all in pots. I asked her where she found the plastic fence for her garden. “I don’t remember. I just picked this thing up somewhere”, she says. “It protects my plants".

Franz Auerbach

"Some people feel a passionate loyalty to a single cause, and look upon themselves as belonging to a single human group to the exclusion of all others. I am not one of those…. No, I don’t have a single loyalty, or a single ‘group’ identity. All these strands are in me: together they make up a single human being who, I hope, has a harmonious personality perhaps best defined as ‘a human male named Franz Auerbach, born 1923’. I mention my year of birth because like everyone else I am also a ‘child of my time’, with experiences and perceptions somewhat different from those of earlier and later generations."

The great humanitarian and educationist, Dr. Franz Auerbach, once lived in my street.

When I made the documentary film, ‘The Other Voices’, under the auspices of the South African Chapter of the World Conference on Religion and Peace (WCRP), Franz was the Secretary of the WCRP and a co-signatory on all financial claims related to the film, so I would meet him regularly in his small study in the flat at North Hill Mansions in Yeoville, which is where he lived before he died in 2006.  

He was working on his autobiography at the time and sometimes he would talk about his experiences as a young man in Bez Valley. Thinking back, I  consider these conversations a great privilege.  

Franz was a boy of 13 when he and his parents came to South Africa as refugees from Nazi Germany. The family moved into a bachelor flat in Huntley Hall in Wolmarans Street in September 1937. The flat consisted of a bed-sitting room, bathroom and kitchen. Franz slept on a couch in the kitchen. Some years later, towards the end of 1940, the family bought a house in Eighth Avenue, Bez Valley, at a cost of R2, 400.

In his autobiography, No Single Loyalty: Many Strands One Design, A South African Teacher’s Life, published in 2002, Franz writes: “We were very happy to move into a five-roomed house with a large kitchen and a separate pantry, as well as a front garden – which my mother took under her care – a back yard with a plum tree, a shed, a servant’s room and a lean-to-shed where we would have parked our car if we had one. That didn’t come till 1953. There was a good tram service from Bez Valley to the centre of town, and the stop was just behind the house at the back of us, on the main road, Kitchener Avenue’.

1953 was the year in which Franz, now married with children, bought his first car in South Africa, a black Hillman Minx. It was also the year that the family moved from Bez Valley to Risidale.

I went looking for 70, Eighth Avenue, Bez Valley, motivated by Franz's autobiography, which I have recently re-read. The house is not numbered. A group of five or six young men were drinking castle lager from a few shared bottles on a verandah opposite the house, passing the bottles around from one to the other. I asked if they knew whether number 70 was the house on the corner with yellow walls, explaining in reply to their curiosity that somebody I had known used to live there. 

It was the right house. From the outside it appeared to be in very good condition. I walked around the walls, peering through the gate until a particularly vicious alsation made it impossible.  

'There’s only Congo people there now,' one of the young men shouted in a tone of voice implying that this would inevitably put an end to my interest.

Yukon

Unlike the more affluent areas of Kensington and Observatory surrounding it, Bez Valley has always been a predominantly working class area. In the past it was a proud working class area with a significant Portuguese population. These days more and more houses are overpopulated and neglected. 

As is the case in Yeoville and other areas weathering the Jo’burg city overflow, so-called 'slumlords' - frequently from other African countries - are buying up properties and dividing them up into small segments which are rented out at exhorbitant rates, often to vulnerable refugee families without permanent residence permits.

On the ridge, looking down at the Valley, there are still glorious homes, historically owned by the very rich. Some have been converted into bed and breakfast establishments. Others are for sale, such as the luxurious 1906 stone house Yukon, which has been on the market since the current owners  relocated a couple of years ago.

Yukon is perched over the valley on the terraced southern slope of a conservation area of Observatory Ridge. It was originally built by Mr. Tommy Allen, who became the mayor of Johannesburg in 1917. The exact history of the house is uncertain, but Yukon served as the mayoral mansion for two of Johannesburg's mayors for some years. In 1981 it was declared a 'Provincial Heritatge Site'.

Beautiful and majestic in character, the house offers a wide vista of the valley from Bedfordview to Jo’burg city. It has polished parquet floors, large mirrors, and 4.5m high pressed ceilings and contains six bedrooms with en suite bathrooms, a library, a lounge and a ballroom.

Sizwe

He was named after Umkhonto we Sizwe like many other young men of his generation. Sizwe was 20 when I met him. He arrived at my gate with a group of five or six other young men, new in the city from one or other rural location. Petrus was the leader of the team in the beginning.

They presented a piece of paper with the words 'Action Security' written on it and Petrus's cell number. A few of us in 8th Avenue decided to take a chance on them although it was evident they were not trained for security work.
When news spread that households that reneged on their agreement with Action Security were promptly robbed, it dawned on me that I was nurturing a group of vigilantes, but by this time I knew them all and it was too late for me to extricate myself.

Over the years the team changed and so did the name of the security company. Some of the gang returned home to Limpopo or Mpumalanga or Northwest Province, generally because somebody was dead or dying. As a poet said, these were the days of ‘love in a time of AIDS’.

Others ended up in jail. The team of six became five and then three - Sizwe, Lucas and the Mozambican Caluti - and then just Sizwe and Action Security became 'Sizwe's Security'.

The Portuguese builder from 7^th Avenue gave him a bicycle and I bought a chain for it. Once a day, then once a week, then once every now and then, Sizwe would cycle past and wave.

As more and more cars were stolen, Sizwe's clients dwindled. I was one of the few who endured. He continued to arrive at my gate on the first of every month with a tattered blue receipt book, still bearing the name, 'Action Security' and I continued to pay him.

One starless night in April, he shouted for me from the gate. He was dressed in a leather jacket and a cap and there was a taxi revving in the road behind him. He said he had a problem with rent and was about to be evicted. There was an aura of hysteria around him. I didn't have any money to lend him so I told him to come back the next day.

Weeks passed and still no sign of Sizwe. When I saw Norman, a gardener from Kensington, pushing his lawnmower down Cumberland Avenue, I stopped the car. ‘Any news of Sizwe?’ He shook his head and bending down, demonstrated with his hands Sizwe's swollen legs and feet. ‘I think it's this disease of these days,’ he said, a local euphemism for AIDS.

I sent an SMS to Sizwe's cell number after many futile attempts to call the number: ‘I have known you for more than 12 years, why didn’t you speak to me about your problems?’

Almost a year later, he arrived at my gate. He said he had been treated for TB in a clinic in Mpumalanga for eight months and then went home. His cell phone had been stolen and he had lost all his possessions.

I gave him my bike - a woman’s bike with a white shopping basket in front.

He hasn't managed to re-establish himself as a security company. He says it is because the people who can afford to pay have moved away.  He has a piece job a couple of days a week as a gardener in Observatory and has rented another back room in 8th Avenue.

Mama Fluffy

The children from 196  - Mohammed and Abdullah and Nabeela - call me ‘Auntie Melody’ (pronounced ‘Uhnnteee Melody’) but the children from 194 – Angel and Grace and also Ntombi’s children and their cousins and friends - call me ‘Mama Fluffy’.  I prefer ‘Uhnnteee Melody’.

The name came about when Angel bonded with my little dog, Daisy. She was messmerised by Daisy’s fluffy white hair and gave her the name 'fluffy'. 

Even the girls’ father who generally calls me ‘Mel’, refers to me as ‘Mama Fluffy’ when speaking to them about me. “Ask Mama Fluffy…” he says.