Finding peace in the vortex

Richard Welch lives in a boomed off enclave called Randview, on the edge of overpopulated Yeoville flatland. His house overlooks Lorentzville and adjacent suburbs. "I can see the old synagogue directly from up here, and the mosque. I hear the call to prayer every day."

A background of social and political engagement as an anti-apartheid activist and an educator, has contributed to Richard’s perspective that to live authentically in the South African context requires finding “the vortex” and making a place of peace within it. This philosophical orientation is the thread that connects the different strands of his life and serves as a barometer of the efficacy of his day to day decisions.

His eccentric home, constructed on ancient rock in the 1930s, is surrounded by a multi-layered garden which slopes downwards towards the valley. The unexpected interrelationship between trees, shrubs, flowers, herbs and vegetables, says something about Richard’s faith in creating a space for variety to thrive on its own terms.  A visitor remarked that the garden made him feel as though he was in the country, in the city.  “That made me so happy,” Richard beams, “because that is exactly what I have tried to do.”

The Welch garden is a haven of peace, attentively cultivated to balance the circumstances of his life in the second hand book trade and his proactive day-to-day engagement with the local community.

He offers a wealth of information about formal and informal traders from Yeoville to Bertrams and beyond, and knows where to buy anything from halaal Egyptian sausages to Congolese dried fish.  His culinary experiments and willingness to try out whatever new cuisine presents itself from diverse corners of the continent in his own kitchen, are notable. “There is a Congolese man who sells fish and meat and the kinds of vegetables and he is very keen to teach you how to cook the kind of food they eat in Central Africa. Then at the market you get all kinds of things that we as South Africans don't know how to cook, like Zimbabwean spinach, which is very different from our spinach. It is very, very thick and you have to boil it for a long time and then wash it and cut it finely, and then fry it..."

Richard owns an inimitable bookshop, Kalahari Books (named long before Kalahari Net came into being), a block away from Louis Botha Avenue, which is one of the major suburban arterial roads in Johannesburg, and the main road into the huge, historic township of Alexandra.  Here too, he aspires to foster a still place in the “centre of the storm” for customers to “follow their own strand of thought” and “find themselves through books.”

Unlike the pristine bookshops, set apart from the mainstream of life in suburban shopping malls, Richard's bookshop, known affectionately as the “Garret” is an old warehouse, accessed from the road by means of a ramp, and surrounded by small traders, light industry and suburban housing. I made a note of “Orchards Wheel and Tire”, “Jay-Jay's Car Wash”, “Mashi Rose Tombstones,” “E&W Steel Design”, “Burgess Plumbing”; “Vintage Clothing”; “Tonino's Pizzeria”.

Inside, books on shelves and in containers line the walls of the 180 square meters building, from concrete floor to corrugated iron ceiling.  A small wooden stairway leading to a narrow walkway assembled from steel, wood and hemp rope, runs alongside the upper part of two of walls. On the opposite side of the room, against the only wall with windows, there is a desk with a computer on it and a red noticeboard exhibiting a picture of the lady Parker; the cover of Laurie Lee's  ”I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning”, and a collection of family photographs.

Two well-worn old armchairs are positioned against a maroon wall beneath a picture of Gandhi as a young man, and an assortment of paintings and drawings by prominent South African artists:  Frans Claerhout; Pippa Skotness; Mary Hume; Godfrey Ndaba; and Norman Catherine.  On another stretch of wall, painted royal blue, there are posters advertising Samuel Becket's 'End Games' and “ Africa Mama Yo”, plays that Welch's actor son had performed in.   

Old metal street and construction signs hang from the frames of shelves: 'Bryanston Drive'; 'Pimm Street'; “Men working overhead (Werkmense besig bo)” bearing boxes and crates of books labeled in thick black ink: Peter Cheney; Howard Spring;Denis Wheatley; Frank G. Slaughter; Stephen King; Taylor Caldwell;  Dornford Yates; Medical Romances;  Shakespearian Studies; Crime Fiction…”

I sit opposite Richard on one of the armchairs. Traditional Indian flute music, and later, Czechoslovakian Gipsy Hip Hop play in the background. I ask him why he chooses to live in the inner city of Johannesburg when so many middle class people have moved away. He leans back in his chair, adjusts his glasses and hat, and waves both hands dramatically as he speaks: "I wanted my son to grow up as a new South African without the weight and burden of the past. I wanted him to be a citizen in his own country. I always thought of Mtutuzela Matshoba's book, “Call Me Not a Man”.

Yukon again

The daugher of one of Yukon's previous owners sent me this description of her childhood. 

"The ‘bearer of light’ …happens to be my father. In fact I grew up in Yukon, it was my childhood home and a place filled with very happy memories.  I remember sliding down its grand banister, knocking on the panels of the ballroom for ‘hidden treasure,’ I remember staring in wonder at the carved cherubim above the bedroom doors and imagining they could speak to me; I remember sitting on my Dad’s lap on the rock that looks like a hippo right at the top of the mountain terrace behind the house, while he told me stories of his time in the bush; and I remember dancing and sliding across the Victorian tiles downstairs in my socks, and staring through the colourful  panes of glass in the front door, imagining magical multi-coloured worlds.

My father was not a mercenary, nor an arms manufacturer… He was a gentleman, a professional photographer and a gifted one at that -with some of his works still exhibited in the Boston Museum of Art. He had his springbok colours in trap (clay pigeon shooting) and made his own clay pigeon cartridges. He also collected antique firearms (probably where the false information about gun manufacturing originated), which he repaired to their former glory involving careful woodwork, engraving and filigree. He was and is still an incredibly gifted antique specialist and can fix and restore just about anything. He had a dedicated workshop for his antique repairs in those days, adjacent to his office upstairs. I would often go in there as a child and watch him work in wonder. It always smelt wonderful...of linseed oil, leather and the pine-forest smell of distilled turpentine.

I have no idea whether the information about the window or fireplace is true or hearsay.

None of the rooms in the living quarters were ever dark or sombre, every room in that house was filled with light and love and beauty. The only dark room was his photographic studio, for obvious reasons.

Whilst under the ownership of my dad, the house appeared in the covers of Habitat magazine, something surely unheard of considering it was so garishly decorated, according to your gathered descriptions of it? He created something truly magnificent and paid the utmost respect to the heritage of the house. The upstairs floors were most certainly not ‘carpeted’ in lion skins, nor were the walls adorned with the gaudy gold icons you describe. The only room I can imagine this information to be built on was his formal office upstairs, where we had one very special and very beautiful hand painted antique icon that was the last thing left of our Russian/Greek family who died in the Russian revolution. There were in fact only two lion skins (not my favourite) but the office was carefully decorated in the African colonial style that he had so much respect for (pictures in the Habitat magazine I speak of).  In fact, every piece of furniture, every detail was carefully and lovingly chosen in order to match the period and style of the house’s late Edwardian architecture. 

He was there for 28 years and spent 25 of those years restoring and reworking the sometimes irreparable damage that had been done to the house under its previous ownership. Along with the ‘gallons of paint stripper’ you mention; much love, sweat, blood and tears were spent restoring Yukon. In fact if it wasn’t for him, you most certainly wouldn’t find it in the preserved condition it is today. It would be a wreck; it’s beautiful woodwork under layers and layers of chipping paint, its floors rotting, and its beauty a mere memory.  

Not only did he restore Yukon to her former glory, he created an incredible terraced garden at the back of the house that, owing to the rich soil washed down from the koppie and his incredible green fingers, allowed Mediterranean fruits and vegetables to thrive. We had peaches, plums, artichokes, cherries, apricots, mulberries, walnuts, avocados, greengages and the most delicious grapes... all lovingly hand planted, pruned and looked after by him. We ate from that terrace all year round.

Under my father’s ownership, Yukon was certainly a place of light and it was a very sad day to see it sold before he moved away from South Africa. It was tasteful, stately and gracious, not the dark seedy, Russian ‘mafiosa’/criminal place you conjure up...It was a much loved HOME.  

I remember running around the house as an eleven year old giving little goodbye kisses to inanimate structures around the house; to wooden panels, to banister rungs, to window frames- a strange childhood fear that the house might think that I wouldn’t miss it... it was a long and sad goodbye and I’d love to return to see it someday."

Miracles and wonders in Jo'burg City

People tend to forget that the Charismatic churches mushrooming throughout the inner city of Johannesburg have their roots in this country in the Pentecostal movement of the early 1900s. The American businessman turned evangelist, John G. Lake, who founded the Apostolic Faith Mission and the Zion Christian Church, was one of the forerunners.

I learned about Lake from Bheki Ndlovu, who sells Christian and motivational books from his ‘shop’, a single, narrow bookcase propped up on the corner of Bedford and Rockey Streets in Yeoville, outside the fruit and vegetable market.

Bheki came to South Africa from Zimbabwe at a time of severe repression/recession in that country seven years ago. He pays R 50 per month to rent the space for his bookcase. Previously he sold books from a small, foldable table outside the Shoprite Checkers supermarket. One of many illegal vendors, he had a contingency plan for maintaining a micro business in the turmoil and instability of city life.  His 'shop' then consisted of exactly the number of books he could fit into a suitcase, making it possible for him to gather his stock and run at a moment's notice when the police raided.  He tells me he managed to avoid being arrested in the four years he operated illegally: "If you are in the middle of the block, most of the time you are spared. The police come from the ends of the street on both sides, and they exhaust their manpower before they get to you."

His customers reflect the diversity of the city. "They are locals, Zimbabweans, Nigerians, Congolese, Zambians, and even some pastors from Ethiopia buy from me. I like that."

I went to see the house at 4 Melbourne Street in Bertrams, where Lake and his wife Jennie and their seven children lived during Lake’s ministry in South Africa.  Bheki discovered the address accidentally when reading through a collection of Lake’s letters.

In 1908, Lake and his family arrived by boat at Cape Town harbor and after a series of miraculous events, moved to Johannesburg where Lake preached his first sermon to a ‘congregation of 500 Zulus” with the aid of an interpreter. Lake’s ministry was so powerful that it spread throughout the country and across the border to Botswana. Thousands were converted and miraculously healed. Gandhi, who became a friend of Lake’s, predicted that Lake’s work would spread throughout the world.

House in Bertrams where John G. Lake and his family lived

Obstacles to Lake’s ministry included a virulent racist backlash from white South Africans who resented Lake’s close relationship with his black followers. It is not clear whether racism or jealousy was the catalyst for the controversy that festered around Lake’s work, causing considerable hardship for him and his team of 125 ministers. 

While Lake was away evangelizing and healing the sick, his wife Jennie ministered to a steady flow of people at the family home.  During one of his preaching trips Lake returned to find that Jennie had died, supposedly from exhaustion and malnutrition.  A few years later Lake returned to the United States with his seven children, who turned their backs on their father as they grew to adulthood, blaming him for their mother’s death. 

Controversial research published late last year turns the 103 year old account of the cause of Jennie Lake’s death on its head. The researcher claims that there is conclusive proof she was poisoned by members of a rival church group.

I had a sense of the extraordinary potency of Lake’s ministry when I accompanied Bheki to his church, a massive Pentecostal church with 7,000 members led by a Zambian pastor known as "Prophet Banda'. The church building is an abandoned factory in the centre of the city.

Known for his ministry to sangomas, Prophet Banda addressed a young woman who was standing next to a blanket on the floor, which was crammed with all the paraphernalia associated with traditional healing practices.  After interrogating the girl and her mother, the pastor sent them outside accompanied by a team of lay pastors, to burn the goods and exorcise demons.  Then, turning to the congregation, he called in a loud voice, for anyone who had ever been involved with such practices to come forward.



Tracked by young men with video cameras, women and men (mainly women) dotted throughout the congregation, screamed and cried and writhed and fell down unconscious. The images were simultaneously projected onto overhead screens located on pillars throughout the vast room. They made me think of Dante's 'Inferno'.   Finally, human bodies resembling a battlefield of casualties, lay on the floor at the front of the church to be carried out by lay teams for exorcism, and without a pause, Pastor Banda turned his attention to others in the congregation suffering from marital problems, financial problems, domestic violence, work problems, every kind of illness.

It was late afternoon when I left the church with a throbbing head, feeling quite overwhelmed by the underbelly of Jo’burg City and thinking that somehow it always seems to be women who are the witches, the bewitched, the shamed and blamed. I drove past Lake’s house at sunset and thought about Jennie Lake and the hardship and tragedy of her life.

Yukon revisited

I’m intrigued by the relationship between light and shadow, the sacred and the profane in the history of buildings. If systems theory could be applied to a building, perhaps the extremes of life in an old building could be seen as a swinging back and forth like a pendulum, a momentum from within to reach a point of integration and balance. When I interviewed Jungian Analyst, Mariaan Nielsen in her Lorentzville home, once a cinema and then a synagogue, she commented: “There are drug dealers in the area who service quite a number of prominent people from the business, media and academic worlds…I live in the shadow of Johannesburg…It is about not being able to keep the shadow out and at the same time trying to find a place of groundedness.”

So, I’ve revisited Yukon http://melodyemmettsbezvalley.blogspot.com/2011/08/yukon.html, the gracious old house, with its verandah almost all the way around, nestling below the Observatory ridge, with a busy, narrow one-way street below it, because there is no doubt that Yukon has embraced between her majestic walls, both light and shadow in Johannesburg’s turbulent history.

I’ve patched together, through off-the-record conversations with people who knew people who once lived there, fragments of memory, hearsay and fact in a sort of mythology of the house. Can one be “honest” about houses, especially imposing ones? There are on-going politics and powerful forces to be disturbed.

Originally occupied by an early mayor of Johannesburg, Yukon was, like the houses of the Randlords, built to impress the wealthy (The name, “Yukon” says it all http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klondike_Gold_Rush) and the powerful.  

Johannesburg’s wealthy have always been fickle – fifteen years would be a long time for a suburb to retain prestige.  As the demographics of the city changed influential political and business leaders migrated to suburbs like Parktown, and Troyeville’s mansions soon began to fall into disrepair. Today practically only Yukon remains of those neo- gothic edifices with their terraced gardens. From the top of the ridge, the foundations of one nearby can still be seen, in outline, the only half-wall remaining converted into a basket-ball wall for local children.

For approximately 20 years Yukon was owned by someone named, provocatively, after an angel, a “Bearer of Light,” half Russian, half Greek, a photographer, hunter, arms manufacturer and purported mercenary. I was told that several of the upstairs rooms in the house were used for the manufacture of guns. In another room upstairs, the floor was apparently carpeted with complete lion skins (heads included). The furniture was “Chippendale”, the walls adorned with gold embossed Russian icons.

Other rooms were sombre, furnished with heavy, dark furniture, “sombre like the man…”

When the ‘angelic’ owner bought the house it had been “a cathouse” – a brothel.

Apparently the ‘Madame’ who ran the house had painted out Italian artwork on the ceiling of what is known as the “ballroom”, which leads on to a large veranda on the side of the house. The Italian paintings were lost forever, but the rest of the decor was restored by its new owner to its original condition by means of “gallons upon gallons of paint stripper.”

The “bearer of light” sold the house roughly 15 years ago to a couple who ran it as a poster gallery. Described as “a secretive guy who could get out of any situation,” he is said to be living in a castle today, the hunting and fishing advisor to the “Duke of Cumberland.”

On selling Yukon, he stripped the large room on the opposite side of the house to “the ballroom” of its marvellous leaded stained glass windows and uprooted several Italian marble fireplaces, and shipped them to London. He sold the windows at Sotheby’s in London and “bought a flat with the proceeds.”  One of the fireplaces was apparently sold to a music producer who represented the British beat, rhythm and blues pop band that was popular in the 1960s, Manfred Mann.

Somewhere in its history, Yukon was purportedly, like other houses around and on the Observatory Ridge, hired out for rave parties at which illegal drugs and alcohol were in plentiful supply for people working in the “creative industries”.

My first contact with the house in 2008 – 2009 was when it had been transformed; re-generated into a spirituality centre by an Anglican priest, Jeremy Jacobs and his wife Kim. The room that once contained the lead windows was a chapel.“Wrong place…wrong place…” one confidant laughed, when I told him.

Today there is wood paneling where there were once glorious, north-facing, lead and stained glass windows

This was a time of light, inspiration, and solace in Yukon's history. The Jacobs family succeeded in converting Yukon into a haven of hospitality and prayer and many visitors to the centre benefitted from their efforts. The house was put on the market when Kim Jacobs was expecting her second child. The couple realised that two lively small children and retreatants seeking silence would probably not 'gel'.

Yukon was built to overlook the valley by architects of the day who had little understanding and ambivalent feelings about the African sun. The main rooms all face south and get little natural light. The house is “as cold as hell" in winter, and costly to maintain, one interviewee said. “I wouldn’t live there for love or money.”  

The current owner, Sir Henry Chamberlain, contacted me by email last year to congratulate me on my blog and suggest that we meet for tea. He told me that he had made his money working on an oil rig in North Africa.

'Holocaust' of plantlife

It is difficult to imagine a time when Johannesburg was a dusty mining camp with barely a tree in sight. The cultivation of trees was critical in the transformation of the city from grassland into living areas.  

“In Johannesburg, one of the most immediate needs was for vegetation, the bare veld being most inhospitable to European eyes, and early photographs show how quickly this desire to ‘humanize’ the landscape was gratified by the planting of rapidly growing trees to line the streets and squares.” (Dennis Radford) 

Seen from space Johannesburg is considered one of the great man-made forests of the earth.

Over the past few years, tree felling has become a micro enterprise. Tree fellers advertise their services on street corners throughout Johannesburg. In the more affluent suburbs, advertising is more sophisticated and so are the tools.

In suburbs closer to the city trees as old as the city itself are being chopped down for firewood, hacked down in backyards because they don’t suit the aesthetics of new occupants, or in some cases poisoned when autumn leaves become an irritation.  

According to City Parks, citizens who cut down trees in the street without permission are liable for a fine but culprits are rarely reported or caught. http://melodyemmettsbezvalley.blogspot.com/2011/08/jesus-went-out-to-mountainside-to-pray.html

http://melodyemmettsbezvalley.blogspot.com/2011/10/once-there-were-two-rivers_14.html

Since the largely Italian and Portuguese property owners have moved out of suburbs like Bez Valley, and young upwardly mobile South Africans and their families, together with unconscionable speculators from other parts of Africa have moved in, the trend has been for cultivated gardens to be uprooted and replaced with concrete.  This is often accompanied by the deployment of large, miserable looking, blatantly neglected dogs to patrol the concrete in small front yards from morning to night.  I have written about these things on this blog. http://melodyemmettsbezvalley.blogspot.com/2011/09/dog-called-police.html

My own garden in Bez Valley has sustained me and shielded me from the often grim realities of life on the streets. In my door-sized front garden, a gooseberry bush, a bay tree, a lemon tree, granadillas and strawberries flourished and extended their generous offerings through the fence to passersby. 

In a small garden at the back of the house I grew vegetables – spinach, onions, tomatoes, beans, peas, and even mielies - interspersed with herbs of every variety, including a comfrey plant that was practically a tree, roses, hydrangeas and several large trees.

Together with my Muslim neighbours, who have a penchant for palm trees (considered a symbol of affluence by some Johannesburg residents), I continued to nurture and tend to my garden whilst gardens all around me were being uprooted and concreted in.

Two weeks ago, after living in Bez Valley for 15 years, I relocated slightly further north, to a flat with a large terrace. I potted some of my plants and moved them together with my large collection of plants and herbs already in pots, to my new home.

I discussed the garden with the new owner of the Bez Valley house, explaining what I would take and what I would leave behind.  There was no argument, in fact she nodded gratefully when I asked if she would like me to leave this or that plant.  Under the circumstances, I mistakenly thought we shared the same ideas. 

On Tuesday I received a late night call from a distraught Katy Mazibuko, who tearfully told me that the new owner had uprooted the entire garden, back and front, and transported it in bakkie loads to the local dump. I phoned another neighbour to get confirmation. “Yes,” she said, “I was very upset to see all the lemons falling down…There is only one tree left in the back. Everything else has gone …”
http://melodyemmettsbezvalley.blogspot.com/2011/08/katy-mazibuko.html

I asked the new owner why she hadn’t let me know. “I would have taken the plants,” I told her. 

“You should have taken what you wanted,” she said. I am not a garden or a flower person…”

For many people, plant growth is merely a hateful excrescence of the earth, a sign of a lazy householder, and the encroachment of the jungle into civilized life.

With a heavy heart I have imagined my trees and plants, their lifeless arms and legs projecting into the air on a dusty city dump site, a ‘holocaust’ of plant life.  

They use muti

Eighth Avenue, Bez Valley, becomes Carnarvon Road in Bertrams. Behind a corrugated iron fence, crowned with giant pumpkin leaves, there is a small, crowded shack settlement. Constructed on the remains of two houses that were apparently razed to the ground eight or nine years ago, it is peculiarly elevated above the road, just a block away from the Bertrams Spar. Twenty-five-30 people live there.

I spoke to Ezra, originally from Mozambique, who came to South Africa “in 1970-something, after the wars of Mozambique.”  He told me that most of the other residents are South Africans from KwaZulu Natal or the Free State. 

They don’t like one another very much and “use muti” (witchcraft) against each other and against him, he said, which is why he can barely walk, even with a stick.  His  church, St John’s, which meets "at the Spruit”, had confirmed that he has been bewitched.

I had a quick look around with Ezra as my guide.  In between piles of rubble; washing lines of clothing blowing in dusty city wind; and squawking chickens in a makeshift metal cage, a group of women plucked the feathers from freshly slaughtered chickens, and prepared to cook them on a wood stove.

One of the oldest inner city suburbs of Johannesburg, Bertrams was named after Robertson Fuller Bertram who came to the Witwatersrand from Queenstown in the Eastern Cape in 1889, which is when Bertram Township, as it was known, was laid out on a portion of the farm, ‘Doornfontein’.

Originally conceived as a middle-class suburb adjoining Old Doornfontein, Bertrams was a favoured residential area of wealthy leaders of society.

Murderess Daisy de Melker lived here

According to a feasibility study on the Greater Ellis Park area for the Jo’burg Directorate of Arts, Culture & Heritage, "interesting people" who once lived in the area (though very briefly in some cases) include the Founder of the Boy Scout Movement, Lord Baden-Powell http://www.biographyonline.net/humanitarian/baden-powell.html, the murderess Daisy de Melker http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_de_Melker, the President of the Transvaal Rugby Union, Mr. H.J. Sanderson, and the British Imperialist, Cecil John Rhodes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Rhodes.  

H.J. Sanderson lived at 18 Gordon Road

Those I spoke to were doubtful that Cecil John Rhodes ever lived in Bertrams. One expert said: “To the best of my knowledge Colonel Frank Rhodes (brother of Cecil John) lived in Doornfontein in an area which is now the Technikon. I suppose Cecil John may have stayed there on occasion, but I would have guessed that he stayed at the Rand Club.”  

http://www.randclub.co.za/History.htm

Cecil John Rhodes lived at 21 Berea Road

For beauty's sake

A small girl surrounded by a sea of hairpieces sucks a lollipop, and sways to loud music and adult conversation. Patrons on plastic chairs submit to the practiced fingers of hairstylists from Lagos, Kinshasa, Nairobi, Maputo, Lilongwe, Harare, Accra, and Luanda.  Coils, knots, braids and beads, sewn, woven, crocheted in pyramids, sausages, swirl and curl, for beauty’s sake. Soft and lovely, light and free, beautiful black mane tumbles onto blue, red and gold fabric in the fading light of a Saturday afternoon in Jo’burg City.

Hairdressing is big in Jo’burg. And it’s everywhere. On pavements and street corners, in shopping malls, main streets and side streets, in converted garages, on verandahs and in backrooms. There are hairstylists in Chinatown, Bruma, Eastgate, Park Meadows, and on every block from Bez Valley to Judith’s Paarl, to Lorenzville, to Bertrams, to Troyeville. From morning until late, seven days a week, hairstylists ply their trade along Commissioner Street, Bree Street, Jeppe Street; in Newtown and onwards to Fordsburg. Hairdressing has become integral to the social and economic life of Jo’burg City.  

The how and where of hairdressing have changed radically over the past twenty years. The greatest changes have been in the last decade with the dissolution of apartheid structures. The influx of huge numbers of Chinese traders, products and accessories and the influence of fashions and trends from other African countries has given new vibrancy to hairdressing and related trades. But whilst the stimulus of influences from a multiplicity of traditions is evident in the proliferation of new hair creations, special skills are required for different kinds of hair so white hairdressers will stick to white clients, black hairdressers to black clients and Chinese hairdressers to Chinese clients. 

However, hairdressing salons (as opposed to pavement hairstylists) increasingly offer a variety of additional beauty treatments (massages, manicures, pedicures, waxes, etc.) and here you will find black clients going to white beauticians and white clients going to black or Chinese beauticians for a vast array of services.

I have had the privilege - and the stress - of observing the vitality of inner city hairdressing at close quarters since my Nigerian neighbour two houses down set up first a hairdressing and then a barber shop in his carport.  The underbelly of the development is the relentless buzz of clientele hanging out on the pavement, and the fact that my neighbour (who has permission to build a carport, not a hairdressing site) has threatened to “deal with” me if I come too close or take a photograph.  

A block away from the carport salon, on Broadway, between 8^th and 7^th Streets, Louise Andrade is blow-drying the hair of an 86-year old client who has been coming to her once a week for 40 years.  The two women chat away in Portuguese. Every now and then Louise translates in broken English. I am aware that I am missing out on chunks of the conversation. Louise’s client, Henrietta Monteiro, originally from Portugal, immigrated to South Africa from Mozambique more than 40 years ago. Like many of Louise’s clients, she lives entirely in Johannesburg’s Portuguese community and barely speaks or understands a word of English.   

Louise is also from Mozambique. She came to Johannesburg in the early 1970s with her husband and son (two more sons were born in South Africa). Thirty-seven years ago she bought the shop, "Maison Sharon", where she had been employed as a hairdresser. She paid R 4,000 for it.

Things have changed a lot since those days: “The shops were nice, the houses, were nice, everything was nice. Now everything is dirty and most of the nice shops have closed.” With obvious nostalgia she reminisces about the chemist, the drycleaner, the butcher and the Greek café owner, Spiro, who sold wonderful bread and cakes and imported cheeses.

Louisa’s husband’s death seven years ago has made her especially conscious of death and dying and its impact on her business: “Every year three or four or five of my clients pass away,” she says with a sad voice.

Louise’s life has been challenging in many ways: She was always the main breadwinner since her husband’s employment was irregular and unreliable, and she has suffered from a series of stress-related illnesses and degenerative conditions related to her trade, which have necessitated several painful back operations.  Her clients have saved her time and time again, she says, by listening to her, allowing her to talk about her struggles, and supporting her various money-generating enterprises (she sells jewelry and a range of fashion accessories that she has created). 

Louise feels a connection to shops and shop owners who have remained in the area: Settlers Stores, Bez Valley Tailors and “the lady who makes the hats”, Dolly the milliner. Dolly was very famous, Louise says.  “Everybody asked for her…”

Many of Louise’s clients (men and women) have been coming to her since she began her business in Bez Valley. Their children and grandchildren have become her clients too.  But business has deteriorated in recent years. She says this is because people are scared to come to Bez Valley and because of the proliferation of hairdressing salons in the city and surroundings: “There is a lot of competition.”

In the old days the shop was open from seven in the morning to five or six at night. These days, Louise opens the shop after eight and closes at three in the afternoon.  “It is too dangerous to stay open late,” she says.

Her prices remain very reasonable. “I don’t put up the prices to much because people can’t afford more…”

Local customers include the owner of ‘Love Craft”, the sex shop two shops down, and “Indian and coloured” clients for manicures, pedicures and eyebrow tinting and shaping.

"Whatever I have done is with my own ten fingers.”

I squinted through the metal grid and dark windows of Broadway Milliner for any sign of life but could only make out a few very dusty hats on a small hat stand to one side of the shop window. Inside, Dolly Sepel was working on a new hat. She has been doing this for 48 years.





Women in their sixties or seventies who lived in Bez Valley as children, told me they remembered their mothers having hats made by Dolly. “She was famous,” one said. “She made all the mayoral hats.” When I went back to tell them that Dolly is still alive and still working, they were flabbergasted. “She must be nearly 90!”

Most people in surrounding shops that I spoke to don’t know Dolly. Only the tailor around the corner, Mr Moti, still chats to her from time to time. “She was a beautiful woman in her day,” he told me.

Dolly grew up in a house in Braamfontein and was educated at the Cottesloe school. Her father worked for the municipality. The family was very poor. “I came from a poor house,” she says. She and her two brothers and sister left school and started working at the age of 16.

“I didn’t have a training, I worked in hat factories. My first job was for a men’s hat factory in Fordsburg. The directors were two married couples from England. Then I went to a factory in Eloff Street Extension and then another factory, and then another hat factory in President Street…”

1952 protests against the banning of Solly Sachs

When she was in her twenties she had an offer from a draper’s shop in Bez Valley. “There was a draper next door and there was a girl working there called Frances and she said to me, 'Why don’t you come and work from our shop? We will give you a little corner and you can sell your hats there'.”

It was a large shop that included the shop that is Bez Valley Tailor’s today. “I started with that counter there, Dolly says, pointing to a white wooden counter with drawers, “and where the tailor is today, that is where I worked. That was my place. That was part of the draper’s shop.” 

Before she joined the Garment Workers Union, Dolly earned 3 pounds 10 a week. Her wages went up to 7 pounds 10 when she became a union member. She speaks in glowing terms about Solly Sachs, who formed the union in 1928. "He was a wonderful man. He helped us a lot." http://www.sahistory.org.za/organisations/garment-workers-union-gwu

The owner of the building lived with his family in a flat above the shop. As Dolly’s business grew, he built a separate shop for her and two more flats on top of the shops. Dolly dipped into her savings to pay the deposit on a flat and start her own shop. “I had 50 pounds in the bank,” Dolly says. “I was always a saver. I used to save 50 pence a week.”

There was a carpenter next door before the printing shop moved in and a Chinese shop that sold groceries. The Valley Butchery owned by Lilly Green was a block away and there was a big tea-room over the road on the corner. Directly across the road from Broadway Milliners there was a hairdressing salon. “It was a white hairdresser. Now it is a black hairdresser.”

“There have been big changes since those days,” Dolly says. “There were Italians and Greeks and Portuguese that lived here. They have all left now. It is all black people living here now. I had a very big business but my customers were all white and now many people don’t want to come here. But now I have very rich black customers. I have judges, lawyers, businessmen coming here. I am always busy. I do work for a shop in Sandton. She sells my hats for R 1,500. Fashion changes all the time. Smart women still don’t go without a hat. If you are smart you don’t go without a hat.”

Rentals for shops in the vicinity are approximately R5,000 per month. “I could have bought this building for 55 pounds more than 30 years ago but I didn’t have the money then.”

Dolly has not had an easy life. Her husband was a bookie who contributed little to day to day expenses and left her for another woman, and one of her two sons died in the SADF at the age of 22.

She has been making hats for so long that she can’t imagine doing anything else.

“You have done it all of your life. You have never done anything else. Most of my life has been in this shop…

Lime green, turquoise, gold, black and white… You just make things… People bring their outfits for me to match. I dye their shoes, their bags, everything…

I used to work seven days a week. Only the last year I don’t work on a Sunday…

Whatever I have done is with my own ten fingers.”