April 12, 2007
By Lesego Madumo
FEIZEL MAMDOO was just nine years old when he and his family were evicted from their home in Pageview by a government determined to turn the suburb white.
Nearly 40 years later, Mamdoo is back, leading a trail through the area, on the western edge of the city centre, that focuses on the history and heritage of the old, cosmopolitan community.
It is a place engraved with unforgettable memories, he says, still abuzz with life – despite the destruction of the old suburb under the apartheid government's Group Areas Act. That act was aimed at dividing people geographically according to their ethnic groups.
Between 1956 and 1977, thousands of residents of the suburb – officially called Pageview-Vrededorp but known as Fietas to its residents – were moved to areas further away from the Joburg CBD, such as Soweto, Lenasia, Eldorado Park and the western townships, and the suburb was demolished.
Homeowners were forced to sell their properties for meagre sums to the then department of community development, or have their homes bulldozed in front of them.
Multi-cultural mix
Before the removals and demolition, Fietas was a multi-cultural community populated by people classified as Indian, coloured, Malay, African and Chinese, according to Mamdoo. They were separated from the white Afrikaner community of Vrededorp by the notorious 11th Street.
A commune on 23rd street
The area now looks like a middle class suburb, home to a number of ethnic groups and a mix of large and small houses. An enormous mosque, neatly painted green and white, still stands on 22nd Street.
Part of Fietas is a patchwork of ruined old buildings, now empty; old houses that are still occupied; and vacant land bearing the scars of the forced removals adjacent to newly built homes. A few empty spaces covered by grass define the fossils of flattened buildings.
On 20th Street is the building where Mamdoo was born. It is being restored and a third storey is being added. Further along the street is a two-storey commune, painted cream with purple pillars and sky-blue chairs and a table set out on the balcony.
Nearby is an open space on which stands the former home of the Dokrat family, now a ruin. Two steel-reinforced pillars are left - the apartheid government's bulldozers failed to destroy them. Pointing at the pillars, Mamdoo says, "This is a memorial site and we should preserve it for the area's heritage."
It's a cool, misty Tuesday in March and there are few children running around or playing sports, though that was Fietas's culture. Perhaps the weather has sent them indoors.
The beginnings
The trail starts at the Market Theatre in Newtown. Mamdoo, in a wet black cap and a blue denim jacket, points out that the theatre used to be the Johannesburg Fresh Produce Market. "It's where Coolie Location, the first settlement area for Indian people established by Paul Kruger, was also based in 1887."
Despite the wet weather, the flea market at the theatre complex is abuzz. Passers-by, including tourists, visitors, actors and people working in the area, stop to look at and buy the beautiful works on sale.
Mamdoo is accompanied by Ntathe Modimokwane, the trail's first certified site guide who was also born and bred in Fietas. They speak about the purpose of the project and what they expect to gain. "With this trail we plan to reclaim our connection with our past and the positive ways in which it formed us."
Mamdoo adds, "It is very important for all people to know their history and heritage."
He was born in 1959; less than a decade later, in 1968, his family was forcibly moved from Fietas to Lenasia, before the intensified removals of 1976 and 1977. Now 48 years old, Mamdoo lives in Emmarentia, to the north of the city centre, but he is still nostalgic for the Fietas of old.
The trail goes west, past the Oriental Plaza on Bree Street. This shopping centre, Mamdoo says, was built for the traders who were chased out of their businesses in Fietas.
Many of those traders had two-storey properties in the once-bustling street bazaar on 14th Street; their homes were upstairs, above their street-level shops. We drive past an old, two-storey structure in Newtown that looks like a curtain shop downstairs and a home upstairs. People walk in and out; either window-shopping or buying curtains. It's business as usual.
Fordsburg
Mamdoo speaks about the relationship between Fordsburg residents and the Fietas community in the 1940s, today neatly depicted in a mural on the subway that linked the sister suburbs.
"The drawing depicts the still-existing Solly's Corner fish and chips shop in Forsburg, sports players and the well-known activist, Don Mattera, for whom Fietas was also a haunt."
The subway had a personality of its own, he says, and holds many rich memories. Part of the mural serves as a reminder of Fietas's famous sporting community. "It's been said," he explains, "that what jazz was to Sophiatown, sport was to Fietas.
"Fietas provided the only sports facility for Africans for miles around and we played all our sports at the dusty Queenspark grounds. It was the home of non-racial sport in Johannesburg."
A bus company occupies the grounds today, although a call has been made to reclaim it as a heritage site that will be used as a sports facility for the current Fietas community – as it was earlier.
The mural on the subway to Fietas
Before the Fietas community was evicted, the government issued families with summonses. However, Mamdoo says that some, especially the shop owners on 14th Street, refused to leave until they were literally chased out with batons and dogs.
As a result, many black people returned from work in the evenings "to find themselves lost" because the places they had stayed in had been destroyed during the day.
Refusing to move, with no place to go to anyway, these people sheltered at houses that had not yet been demolished. They kept moving from one house to another, until there was nowhere left to hide. Some of them, now in their 50s and 60s, can still be seen roaming around the community, drinking and smoking marijuana, squatting on the streets with no employment and formal housing of their own.
Some, including Modimokwane, stay at a nearby council shelter for the homeless.
Rough times
Fietas, Mamdoo says, was a place of backyards and alleyways with mosques and churches, bioscopes and shebeens. "The alleyways were used by many to escape from the police because it was rough then."
Modimokwane adds that many people lived in backyards as tenants, especially black residents, most of whom were employed as domestic workers. Some owned shebeens that catered for those working in Joburg's industrial areas.
At the core of the community, next to the 22nd Street Muslim mosque and a few metres away from the Apostolic Faith Mission – a Christian church that would often accommodate blacks – is a plaque erected during the Fietas Festival, with the support of the City of Johannesburg, in 2002.
The Fietas Festival is an annual cultural celebration held in Pageview-Vrededorp to celebrate the area's heritage. The trail is part of the festival.
It reads: "Maylay Location … was established as Pageview in 1943 … [It] became a cosmopolitan community of people classified as coloured, Indian, African, Malay, and Chinese …"
The famous 14th Street bazaar is now a pile of old bricks; another plaque was laid here by the council and the Fietas Festival. Next to this, in a scrapyard, stands an old blue Datsun van, with buckled wheels, a broken windscreen and an old Transvaal number plate. It seems as though it has been parked there for decades, quietly waiting in vain to be fixed.
The endings
At the Braamfontein Cemetery, where the tour ends, Mamdoo points out the different sections, providing burial space for different ethnic groups. There were some Chinese political activists among Fietas's early residents, he says. One, Chow Kwei, chose suicide in the early 1900s over the indignity of being registered under racially discriminatory laws.
The trail includes a visit to the grave of Enoch Mankayi Sontonga. His hymn, Nkosi sikelel' iAfrika, was incorporated into the South African national anthem in 1994. It has also been modified and translated into various African languages, and incorporated into the national anthems of countries like Zambia, Tanzania and Namibia.
His grave is in the black Christian section of the cemetery and has an enormous sandstone headstone, which includes a brief history of his life.
The Muslim section only has white gravestones, which denote purity. It includes a century-old mazaar, or mausoleum housing the remains of a Muslim saint. Built of brown bricks with a red tile roof, it is beautifully decorated with glass and blue and white tiles.
The faint perfume at the mazaar, probably from the roses cast on top of the saint's last resting place, lingers in the nose, just as the memories of Fietas linger in the air.
Bookings for the tour can be made through Feizel Mamdoo on 082 447 8080 or email mamdoof@iafrica.com.
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