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.