#hillbrow

 On New Year's Eve, residents of the Hillbrow suburb in Johannesburg, throw unwanted furniture out their window to celebrate. – WTF Fun Facts

During 1985 my family and I were living and working at a  residential farm school at Glen Austin midway between Johannesburg and Pretoria in South Africa. The school was operated by a charity founded on the educational and social principles of the philosopher Rudolf Steiner and operated as a fairly closed community. 

The director of the school had a moderate and tolerant approach. She became unwell and others, who were stricter on the dogma, took over. In short, when the original director was in charge the place was fun and people were happy. When the blue meanies got the upper hand it became oppressive. I decided it was time to move on. There was no problem with my work, it was a matter of a lack of commitment to some of the very odd ideas which underpinned the running of the place (See Anthroposophy, if you are interested). 

The place gave me a distaste for fanatics. We left  with only a very small amount of money 

I had a British nursing qualification and phoned up the head of nursing at a state psychiatric hospital in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg. She gave me an interview the next week. After a year of doing hard manual work with only a monthly pocket money allowance, all I had in the way of clothes was baggy jeans, trainers and T-shirts. My hair was home cut. I could not imagine anyone would employ me looking like that. I was also late for the interview. I had to hitchhike into the city and then find my way across the northern edge to the hospital which was tucked away in a residential area. The first words out my mouth was an apology for how I looked and for being so late. The lady who interviewed me, did not seem phased by any of that and I got the job.

 I was to work there for about eight years and count it as the best place I have ever worked. Incredible opportunities were provided for me. The hospital was linked up to a top-class university (Wits) and the learner culture was rich. I count that interview as one of the luckiest half an hours of my life. A friend at Cresset helped us move our stuff, which only amounted to a few suitcases, to our new home in a district of high rise flats on the edge of Hillbrow in Johannesburg. We were in the Helderberg Building. Twenty storeys high with a view out over the city. We had no furniture at all. I bought two cheap mattresses for the kids and that was our new home... but we did have a swimming pool. Near Christmas, a Jewish charity came collecting door to door. I was not home but they saw how we were living through the open door and rather than asking for money they gave us a generous amount to get us over Christmas and up to my first pay packet from the hospital that I was working at. We somehow survived that first month and then things got a lot better. Six months later we had had a fridge, tables and chairs and everything! 

After rural Glen Austin, Hillbrow was like an overdose of adrenaline. It had been the place where immigrants to the country had been arriving, in waves, for a hundred years. Southern Europeans, Brits, Jews escaping oppression under the Russian empire, lots of Irish and a sprinkling of Czech, Poles. Hungarians. It was an area of the city which was starting to 'go grey', which was a term to describe relaxation of the Group Areas Act which had controlled where people of different races were allowed to live. It was urban, noisy busy and exploding with street energy. A very tall African man in high heels, wearing a kilt and full Scots regalia would promenade up and down one of the main streets playing the bagpipes all day long, trying to entice people into underground arcades. I remember lines of Hari Krishna boys, as we called them, dancing in a long conga line wearing Saffron robes. I would sit out at a continental i.e. Mediterranean style café's and watch all this craziness going by. 

 When a country is in crisis all kinds of odd people turn up… drawn in by the political fever. An Australian Doctor arrived proclaiming the end of the world on a certain date. Thousands assembled on a hillside, waiting for the end which did not come. Every trickster, scam merchant snake oil entrepreneur headed in to set up shop one minute and disappear the next. Hillbrow felt like it was having the equivalent of a manic episode. It operated twenty-four hours of the day. I was shocked when the police turned up and hurled tear gas at revellers on New Year’s Eve, but this was the regular deal that happened every year to clear the streets. It felt so extreme. The dark side of this was the levels of criminal violence in the city. I was common to see blood on the pavements as I ran across town to catch the bus to work. Piles of glue-sniffing street children slept in shop doorways every night, and street hold-ups were a constant hazard. One incident sticks in my mind though. 

The Helderberg Building, where we were staying, was surrounded by a low wall and a paved area. On one side of that area was a swimming pool, and the remainder was spotted with palm trees and benches. I regularly got up at 4am to sit, drink coffee and read. One night I heard a commotion out in the streets and went to the window. A black man was running down the street being pursued by white men in a car. There was a lot of screeching of tyres and shouting going on. I watched as the black man ran into the paved area below my window, but seven floors down. He hid behind one of the palms furthest from the gate. Three or four men, armed with handguns, got out of the car and began conducting a search. I could see both sides. The man hiding and the other men searching. As they got closer I could see the man was going to run, which he did. What happened next was really odd and I have never understood it. He ran but then stopped by the wall of the building. The chasers stood in a line and opened fire at the man who then collapsed to the ground. They then walked over and stood him up. He walked away with them in a fairly normal way. They then pushed him into the back seat of the car and drove off. Lots of lights had come on in the buildings surround a park in front of our flats. They then all went off within a minute or so, I guess because the observers had judged the incident over.

I have no idea if this was an incident related to crime or politics, or if the men in the car were police or not. They were not in uniform. What struck me was how suddenly things happened and were over. 

In later years I learnt that a government sponsored death squad was based at the Johannesburg Fort detention centre less than a mile away.

To be continued. Travelling around Lesotho with the aid of a bin bag.

Photos: 1980s Hillbrow and neighbouring areas

David Goldblatt. Practice. Hillbrow. June 1964