by Andie Miller

It is a Saturday afternoon, threatening rain, and I’m glad of the excuse of my raincoat covering my bag as I head up Cavendish Street to meet with Bienvenue. It’s been a long time since I’ve ventured this far into Yeoville, and I’m now in unfamiliar territory. As I walk the fifteen blocks from Louis Botha Avenue, across Rockey Street, I enter another world.

I’m struck immediately by how many people are out in the streets, going about their weekends; many, as in any other suburb, getting their hair done. There is no shortage of hair salons in these parts (plus a few saloons, and a saloona). Even on the Sabbath, in my predominantly Jewish neighbourhood ten minutes away by minibus taxi, there were relatively few people out on foot.

As I make my way up the hill, I steel myself against being saddened by the decay of the beautiful old buildings, and the accompanying sense of loss. I’m thinking of ‘Yeoville Confidential’, Achal Prabhala’s essay in Johannesburg: Elusive Metropolis, in which he expresses his intolerance for the bewailing of ‘the ghosts of cappuccinos past … frankly,’ he wrote, ‘the stories bore me … My own Yeoville memories are exactly one year old … and I like that just fine.’ I found the essay fascinating and enjoyed it enormously, in an abstract way, like I would reading travel articles about faraway places I’m unlikely ever to visit and have no desire to live in.

Some of my friends, homeowners still living in the suburb, also grow impatient with nostalgia for the bohemian Yeoville of the past. The difference between us is that they’re car people, now driving to Norwood and Killarney to shop, bank, visit bookshops and meet for coffee. I need these things within walking distance of my home.

Earlier, Prabhala had written that, despite how comfortable he felt in Yeoville, ‘I realise that I owe this happy existence to owning a car’. Then he came to the conclusion that ‘civilians have done me no harm in Yeoville, or indeed, anywhere else in South Africa. I realise that I owe this happy existence – in different ways – to owning a car that isn’t posh (in fact, a borrowed VW Beetle that doesn’t lock), to living in a building that is strict about security, and to being a dark-skinned male. Friends in similar circumstances, but crucially lacking their own transport, have not had it quite so good … It’s not a nice place for the walking classes,’ possibly the majority of Yeoville residents, ‘at any time of the day, especially after dark. Women fear they’ll be parted from their cellphones, and grown men prefer to walk in groups.’

At Hillcrest Mansions, a shell of its former self, I cross the street to the corner of Cavendish and Webb, and pass through the security gate into Xanadu. The young guard informs me sternly: ‘You can’t sit on the wall.’ There will be no loitering here. Bienvenue comes down to fetch me, and we make our way through surprisingly quiet corridors. A sign warns residents that Braais are NOT allowed on the balconies, and I notice they are using energy efficient light bulbs in the passages. The globes are bare. I have interrupted Bienvenue and his friends watching a soccer match on TV.

Bienvenue came to South Africa from the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1994, when it seemed like South Africa was finally becoming hospitable to its African neighbours. ‘When I came, the socio-political environment in DRC was bad. They closed down the university for two years in my last year. I was thinking, like everyone, I can find things better. Get my papers ready as early as possible. Comparing to what we hear from some friends overseas … I don’t know about the realities there, but when you are talking to them on the phone, they were telling you, things are better, I’m doing my job, I’ve got my papers. Then I was thinking I would have the same treatment here. Unfortunately it didn’t happen.

‘In the beginning we really experienced that attitude from people, saying, “Now you can go back to your country.” This kind of language. That’s why you experienced these xenophobia stories, it started a long time ago.’

He has lived in Yeoville for fourteen years and witnessed it changing. ‘When I came in Yeoville then, I didn’t find a lot of foreigners. Especially the Congolese guys, most of them were staying in Ponte City. So when we were here we were small. In the beginning it was a bit stressful. I used to go to Berea to see friends, otherwise I must wait until Sunday until I can walk to Berea to go to the church to meet my friends there. It was not quite easy, until more people were coming.

‘“It is totally different now. First the majority was a white community, then it was black, now 70 per cent is a migrant community.’ It is now a uniquely pan-African suburb. ‘Sometimes you can feel at home now,’ he says. ‘If you need help. We experience most of the problems together.’ After the xenophobic attacks in May 2008, ‘Some of my people I know, we founded an organisation called African Diaspora Forum. When this situation came here, the xenophobia stories, we say, no man, we can be together, try to fight those spirits. And in that time we decided to go to the refugee camps, to see what is happening. We found our brothers and sisters there. Myself I found my friends there, some people I know from Yeoville, in the camps. So the experiences were shocking.

‘At that stage, the police, they became a bit softer, because they got instructions: Please, they are being harassed now, don’t give them more harassment. They became better. But now it’s back to the same.’ By far the biggest problem he and his friends experience is harassment by the police. ‘For me, I can say it’s mostly during the day, because during the day most of the people are walking around. The problem we are facing here, even if officially they are saying they are checking people because they want to fight crime – yes, it is right – but you then realise that they are really not fighting crime, they are just checking for foreigners.

‘Myself, I remember three months back, I was going to catch my taxi to work from Berea. I find a group of policemen, around half past seven, there were about fifteen policemen around one of those vans, and other cars there. I even recognised one face. They were stopping on the corner of Joe Slovo and Olivia.

‘The taxi from Yeoville to Cresta,’ where Bienvenue works, ‘now they cancel it. You know those guys from the taxi associations, they didn’t agree about something, so now I walk to Berea, corner Lily and Abel Road, for the taxi to Cresta. From there I can save some money, because it’s going straight to Cresta Mall; instead of taking two taxis, from here to town, and from town to there.

‘So when I was going there,’ a block before his turnoff, ‘I met those policemen and they shout at me: “HEY, DON’T MOVE, DON’T MOVE!” They tell me to put my hands up. And then I put, and they check for everything, knife, gun. They didn’t find anything. I was carrying my papers, my status, and it was also certified by the police, the Yeoville police. And then when they ask me for those papers and I show them my status and the police stamp, one of them, he just take it and he say, “It is fake!” And I was shocked. I say, “No Man,”’ he laughs incredulously, ‘“it’s not fake, it is real. You can even see the police stamp. I went to the police to certify.”

‘Then they started to harass me, and they take me and throw me in the van. I was shocked, why they can do it. I was so confused inside the van, I found three or four people, and I don’t know what to say, why they can arrest me just like that. And I was really disappointed. Until later on, one of them told them, “No, just leave him.” So they opened and they gave me that paper. But this is just my story. There are a lot of people, friends and family, they are experiencing harassment every day. Especially in Yeoville, because those people are making their business in Yeoville.’

Then there is the ongoing battle of dealing with the Department of Home Affairs. ‘When you go now to Home Affairs – this is the main thing those policemen are taking advantage of, they are talking about illegal immigrants or undocumented migrants – when you come to renew your papers, they say, “No, go back home.”

‘When you apply, you are just an asylum seeker until they allow you to stay officially. Now you become a refugee, and you get an official letter from the director of Home Affairs and your permit to stay. Maybe two years, and then you have to go back and renew it. But meanwhile, before they give you refugee status, it can take maybe three years, four years to wait. You gonna go back there after two months, or three months, to renew your permit. But the problem now, when people are going to renew, they don’t want to take you, so then you become illegal. So when you go back home the policemen in Yeoville arrest you. Or when you go there, there are a thousand people, and they’re taking maybe two hundred. The eight hundred they are leaving for Monday, you go back home, on Tuesday another thousand they came, they took a few. So those ones, plus the eight hundred from yesterday, they become a problem. Like my nephew, now it’s three weeks he is going there. I ask him, “How are you walking?” He says, “I am just taking a risk.”’

If it’s not harassment from the police, ‘it is just those robbers when you are walking’. In fifteen years he has been mugged as many times, with both guns and knives, always in the Yeoville, Berea, Hillbrow area. ‘They will say to you: “Give me my cellphone!” Give me my cellphone! And then you ask, “Please can you give me my SIM card?” If they are kind they will do that. But they don’t. Then they can just klap you. It is only by God’s grace that I am still here.

‘We are a bit confused,’ he says sadly. ‘Now they are saying, the World Cup, African Cup, Confederations Cup … I don’t know which image they are selling. Now they say, okay we are better now. I don’t know,’ he shrugs. ‘Because now the thing that is affecting me a lot is the people sleeping outside the church, like animals.’ He is referring to the more than two thousand Zimbabweans seeking refuge at the Central Methodist Church in the city centre.   

After fifteen years he now finally has permanent residence, but he doesn’t see himself being here forever. ‘For now, yes, because I can find my people. I’ve got more friends, so it’s not like before.’ Two years ago he married a Congolese woman whom he has known virtually since childhood, and they have a 4-month-old daughter. ‘I would like to go back home one day and do my own business. There are two things. I’m thinking, if I have to go back and work in Congo,’ since he’s trained as a mechanical engineer, completing his studies at Wits University, ‘then I would like to find an opportunity with an international company. Then it will be better. Otherwise I can plan, having some money, so I can go there and open a business, and create some jobs for the people. But just going like this, and sitting at home, is gonna be much worse.

‘In DRC it is also a bit confusing, because they say it’s gonna be democracy, everything is gonna be nice, but in practice it is not what they’re preaching. But now, when you go there, you also realise that, oh, there are poor people, there are rich people, so now if I go there I’m gonna take my path. I’m gonna know what I can do. But if you gonna wait for the environment to be fine, aii …’

2.
At 9.30am on a sunny Monday morning I feel perfectly safe in Rockey Street (I’m still wearing the raincoat, just in case). Or to be accurate, it’s actually Raleigh Street, at the Joe Slovo end. Roses are blooming through the palisades at the Providence Healthcare Centre, and I’m struck by how clean the streets are. Either it was a low-key Human Rights Day weekend or the cleaners have already been.

I had come to meet Suzanne at her house a few blocks away. The gate and front door were wide open, but no one was in sight. When her friend answers the bell, in traditional West African dress, he tells me she has gone to the market and will be back in about an hour. I ask him if there is anywhere in Rockey Street that I can get coffee. He looks doubtful. ‘Nandos?’ he suggests. I decide I don’t need coffee that badly, and instead take a tour of the places where I once lived.

The synagogue next to the house in Hunter Street is now the Word of Faith Mission (Eglise Parole De La Foi), facing the M6 Restaurant & Bar opposite, already full – no food or women in sight. One corner down, that synagogue has become the Word of Life Assembly Church, and in the opposite direction is the United Church School.  

Across from Olympia Mansions in Yeo Street, the houses have transformed into the Livewire Recording Studio, and Tafari’s Hair Salon (Braids Plats and More). And what was once a yeshiva next door: www.churchofjoburg.co.za. I see my butterfly decals are still in the windows after a decade.

The house opposite the park is the most disappointing. The front wall is still relatively low by Joburg’s standards, with razor wire on top, and one would still be able to see across the street from the raised stoep, if there was anything to see. This section of the park has been cordoned off and is filled with corrugated iron huts. The only activity in sight is construction.

Round the corner past the police station there is a crowd of people, mostly women and children, waiting outside the clinic. The newly-renovated swimming pool is sparkling, and empty – a perfect place to swim laps right now. ‘It is full when school is out,’ the attendant assures me. As I head down Rockey Street – ‘It’s a one-way street, and it goes downhill,’ actor Charles Comyn used to sing – at times I feel like I’m in Woodstock in Cape Town, or parts of London. Perhaps it’s the Indian traders or the frequent Wholesalers signs. Things for sale now are mostly practical, and there is a refreshing lack of false advertising – what they say is what you get. Like the dedicated Nappy Shop, piled floor to ceiling with disposables. And the Mattress Store cc (lay-bye accepted), which also has a few fridges.

Very little is familiar to me, apart from Yeoville Hardware – everybody needs hardware – and the librarian, still at her post after twenty-two years. ‘I still live in Yeoville,’ she tells me. The chairs and tables are full of people reading books and newspapers.

When I reach the rasta shop it’s the first place that draws me in, with a glimmer of the creativity of the Rockey Street I remember. ‘I’m just looking,’ I tell the rasta on duty.
‘Yes, you must look, sister,’ he says, ‘seeing is believing.’
‘What is the name of your shop?’ I ask him.
‘The Rasta Shop,’ he says.
I laugh, and ask him if he is from Ethiopia.
‘We are all from Ethiopia,’ he says, with a red twinkle in his eyes: ‘Ethiopia is the real name of this continent. Africa is just the name of the colonisers.’
I tell him that I may come back for one of his ‘Legalise’ backpacks (only R30), or the Obama T-shirt: ‘Change We Can Believe In’ (R120), and as I say it I realise, once I step outside, it’s unlikely that I will be back.

The closer I get to Bezuidenhout Street, the more uncomfortable I begin to feel with the groups of men loitering in doorways. A tap on my shoulder startles me, and I decide to head back to Suzanne at her Ivorian restaurant.

Standing at the gate, her friend Marshall has changed, he is wearing a World Cup 2010 T-shirt. Suzanne is petite and gorgeous, quite different from the image her deep voice conjured up. She leads me through the front room, with empty beer bottles from last night on the dining and pool tables, and I have a feeling of déjà vu. Then I realise I’m not hallucinating. I have been here before, at a party in the mid-Nineties, when it was home to a group of young American volunteers with Visions in Action.

She takes me into a smaller room at the back of the house, with lacy pink curtains and tablecloths, and smart black place settings. ‘This is my VIP room,’ she tells me. ‘You know those young ones, they like to make noise. Sometimes people want a quiet place where they can eat and talk.’ She goes to the kitchen to get me a Coke, and her German shepherd puts his nose through the window to check if I’m kosher as a chicken walks past in the yard.

Suzanne arrived in South Africa from Côte d’Ivoire in 1997. ‘The time the wars are starting. This time I was a student, and I marched there, and then people run after us and I run away.’ English was a problem for her and so she has never finished her marketing degree.

‘In the beginning, when I come, I know how to braid hair, so sometimes at home I got one or two customers in the day, and I do this to pay my rent. And thereafter, our Abidjan community needed somebody to cook for them, because our food, you can’t get it here, so in 2002 I opened this business’: a maquis, literally meaning underground place, the name given to these informal eating places in West Africa.

‘Now sometimes I get South African people who come to eat. Before it was only our country people, but now it’s better; Congolese people come, South African people also.

‘In the first house, after two, three years, the owners come to chase me. After there, in the next house, after two, three years the owner chase me again. And now I am here. The problem here is the rent. I pay R10 500.’ Though I haven’t rented a house in many years, this sounds steep to me for this neighbourhood and the state of disrepair of the house.

‘Now I’ve got the refugee paper,’ she says. ‘I went there last month and they gave me three months. I have to go back in June. Aaaahhh,’ she shakes her head, ‘nowadays it’s very difficult. If you want to get the paper, the stamp, in that day, you must sleep there. You can go today, around five or six, and then early in the morning you can go in. Sometimes it’s raining, then you must take the umbrella.’ When you don’t manage to have your papers renewed on the due date, ‘If the police find you then you must pay them twenty rand, fifty rand. Sometimes we are scared to go out. So it’s better to stay there until you get your stamp.

‘Before I had problem from the police, because I was selling liquor and I didn’t have a licence, but now I have licence. Before there was too much problems! Sometimes when I get a customer, he says, “My sister I need beer.” Then after fifteen minutes the police are here.’ There is a weird irony in this, given how long the police take to arrive when called for a serious problem. ‘They ask, “Have you got a licence?” and you say “No”, then they say, “Open the fridge,” and then they take all the beer. Then sometimes they want to take me too, then I say leave me, and I can pay maybe five hundred rand. So now it’s better, I’ve got licence.’

Her restaurant is closed on Mondays, and though she describes Mondays as her ‘off day’, this is not entirely true. It is her market day. ‘I go to the market in town. I take a taxi. The butchery is by Mandela Bridge. Sometimes I take my stuff from Mandela Bridge, the meat, I put it here,’ she pats her shoulder, ‘then I’m walking to the Mozambique market for cassava, like big potatoes, yam. I make that with couscous. Sometimes I put one here, two here, two here, like this,’ she says, demonstrating with her arms and shoulders, and the bags she has to carry. ‘The Mozambique Market is not far from Noord Street,’ she says, referring to the taxi rank from where she travels home. ‘At the Yeoville market I can buy only tomatoes, because here it is expensive, and they haven’t got some of my things.’

I wonder what she thinks of our public transport system, compared to Abidjan. ‘In Ivory Coast we have too much buses, big buses, not so much taxis like here,’ she says. ‘Also, the meter taxis are not too expensive like here.’ I recall a traveller passing through who I waitressed with many years ago, making the observation: ‘I can get a bus in Papua New Guinea, where people have bones through their noses, and I can’t get a bus in Johannesburg!’

Suzanne is streetwise and has never been mugged. ‘On the street,’ she warns me, ‘if you walk, and you see two or three person, men, you must be careful. You must be careful! If you see they are moving to you, my friend you must take your legs and run away,’ she laughs. If she has to go out after dark – ‘Sometimes I forget to get my stuff,’ she says, ‘and then I walk to the shop – then I take somebody with me.’

In her home she hasn’t been as lucky. ‘Two times they coming at home, around ten in the night. Two men, they say they are looking for Zambia people. I have about twenty customer inside. I say to them, ‘No here is Ivorian house, not Zambian house’. After one hour they are coming back, and they took everything – cellphones, money from the customer inside.’ Now she has two dogs, and she feels much safer.

She was not personally affected during the xenophobic attacks, when Yeoville was possibly the safest place to be, but like most African ‘foreigners’ she was on high alert. On the 18th of May, a week after the violence broke out in Alexandra, the headline in the Mail & Guardian warned: ‘Violence Grips Johannesburg.’ ‘Eighteen May was birthday for my daughter,’ nine years old, ‘and there was too much people here. About four o’clock, this man from Zimbabwe came to tell me, my sister you must close everything because the people are coming from Hillbrow. But then nothing happened here.’

Suzanne has no desire to return to Côte d’Ivoire. One day, she says, she would like to be able to buy this house. ‘I got no problem from South Africans. I like it here, I got my business. And in 2010 people they going to come. They going to need food.’

3.
I visit an old friend, Jennifer, who has lived in Yeoville for over twenty years. At one time she and her husband were looking to move, and then they changed their minds. ‘For one thing, we could never get the kind of house that we have here, elsewhere. But apart from that, we’re happy here, so why move? We were also thinking of moving because we were thinking of downscaling, so we were fantasising about “lock up and go” – it was much less about moving out of Yeoville than about not having to think about the gate, the pool, dogs, having to get someone to look after the place when we go away.

‘And then we also have an absolute attachment to the energy of the place. We stayed because we didn’t want to abandon it and follow the trend of everybody getting out. Although I think that many people got out not because they saw the place changing, but because they saw their investments plummet, which they did, and now it’s built up again. But even to find a lock up and go kind of place elsewhere is very expensive.

‘We go up and down between being feeling tired of the mass of people around – because month-end in Yeoville … there’s just a sudden wooooosssshhh. People either going out or coming in. And sometimes that sort of chaos gets to be a bit much. But on the other hand, I also love it.’ Today is the first of the month, and I’ve noticed the little vans with their cardboard: Bakkie 4 Hire signs out in the streets – obviously how poor people, with few possessions and no access to professional removal companies, get from one place to another.

‘We’ve thought about venturing back into Rockey Street at night,’ Jennifer says, ‘to Tandoor,’ the rooftop reggae club ‘which is apparently still the place to go. But they say you must catch a taxi there, and you get seen in, and then once you’re in it’s fine.’

She still goes to Rockey Street during the day from time to time, if she needs the odd thing from the café. ‘The other day I’d just been to Fruit and Veg City and done a R300 shop, and I was just popping in for something and a guy stole it all out of the boot. What they did – they say this is happening now – the car guards distract you, and he opens the back door just as you’re locking your car.’ This is the first theft I’ve heard of, though, of a load of vegetables. ‘So it’s not really advisable to drive to Rockey Street, but I’m happy to walk to the café.’

The spaza shops in the neighbourhood, on every corner and in between, where you can buy virtually one of anything, also come in useful when she half-heartedly decides to give up smoking. ‘First it’s one, then it’s two, and pretty soon I’m buying a packet again.

‘When we had our kids here, my stepchildren, they did walk around. But as the years went on, by the late Nineties, we got a bit … looking out the door to check that they’re all okay. And in the latter part of their school years they moved back to their mom in Highlands North, because I think they did feel a bit trapped here behind the wall. And all their friends were on that side.

‘But there’s something in our street … Ownership pride, I think. I have a sense of community here that is very rare in this city. I know all my neighbours.’ For the past three years, she and her husband Nicky have been running a swimming group on Saturday mornings. ‘From ten to twelve there’s a group of kids from the area who come and swim. They arrived at our gate one day: “Please, please can we come and swim?” And I said to Nicky, “Oh lord, if we let this group come we’re going to end up with thousands of children.” And funnily enough, it hasn’t become thousands of children, it’s pretty much the same dozen or so children, but they obviously monitor it. They’re about six to twelve or thirteen years old. And then somehow when they get to about thirteen … We had two teenage girls, but they don’t come anymore. There’ve been a few occasions when I’ve had to say, “Sorry guys it’s full, you’ll have to come next week”, but otherwise it’s been fine. And they draw and they paint and they play ball on the lawn and swim. We obviously have to be vigilant. There are many parents who don’t know that their children are here, but we started sending a note for the parents to sign. And they know they must come at ten, not half past eight, and it’s worked out well.

‘So when Nicky and I go for a walk, we have: “Jennifeeer, Uncle Nickeeeee …,” even from children who don’t come swimming, so people know us in the neighbourhood.’

The psychological effects of shrinking public spaces does concern her. ‘I look at other suburbs … I really worry about the fact that our society’s becoming so individualised in terms of people’s needs. Everybody’s really out there just doing and getting and going and moving for their own needs. And there’s a kind of arrogance and an aggression that gets connected with that, and that upsets me.

‘It has to have an effect, so that your spiritual, emotional, sociological connection with the world gets more and more closed in on itself, and more self-obsessed.’ As Jeffrey Robinson put it: ‘I realised that I had let the space around me … become all angles and walls cutting me off not from the outside world of the city but from my continuity with the world.’ Jennifer recalls: ‘When I was very young and self-involved, a boyfriend I was walking with once said to me, “For heaven’s sake, look up. Look up, look around you!” So now I make sure to look up.

‘It feels like the things that really matter in the world, like a child being able to play in a street, and what it means for a street to be able to exist so that it can, these are things that don’t cost money, it just costs a kind of a morality that a society demands and fosters and everybody supports.’

Recently, her 79-year-old mother moved from the small town of George, midway between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth where she’d been for forty-five years, to live with Jennifer in Yeoville. Every day Elaine takes her little dog Daisy, who she describes as ‘a thoroughbred mongrel’, for a walk through the neighbourhood.

‘The first time I went out I was a bit wary,’ she says, ‘but I don’t have any fear. I haven’t had any bad experiences. I’m so amazed how frightened men, more than women, are of this little dog. She’s in a brace, and she doesn’t bark at them or anything, but I’ve had quite a few funny interludes going up and down, where a huge man will see the dog and go across to the other side of the street. Some of them will go like this,’ she puts her hands out in front of her. ‘I could understand it if I had a huge hound,’ she laughs. ‘When I said to one man as he passed: “She won’t hurt you”, he said, “But they bite my ankles.” It is very strange to me, that dogs here mean fights or bites or whatever. She’s in her little harness, and I’m just an old aunty!

‘I speak sometimes to the women who have these beautiful little babies on their backs. I think I’m slightly getting known now. The only thing that frightens me is that the dogs of some people further up want to come out and fight, they’re very aggressive. And now she knows, she pulls me back to have a fight with them, and I say to her: “Do you know what’s behind there?”’

Jennifer unlocks the gate to let us out and her neighbour is arriving home. ‘I see Ma is taking a walk,’ Sibusiso remarks, as Elaine and Daisy blur into the crowd along the street.

An edited version of this essay first appeared in the Sunday Independent. It is extract from Andie Miller’s Slow Motion, a collection of stories about walking, published by Jacana. It appears here by courtesy of the author.