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.