FIETAS
Fietas was a haven of cosmopolitanism.
It was a world within a world, a democracy within a
totalitarian state.
There were no class barriers.
Each person belonged to the aristocracy of his own personality.
Yusuf Chubb Garda
Not growing up in Jozi means that I have little firsthand sense of the rich and diverse history of this city which started out as a boom town built on the discovery of gold in the 1880’s. Walking the streets with a camera doing urban exploration and graffiti archeology the past two years therefore lead to some unexpected discoveries and surprises.
Close to the CBD is a seedy-looking area where children play in empty plots and ruined buildings, shady characters lounge on corners and people of all colours go about the business of their daily lives. This makes for the gritty images of a city in transition that I love to photograph. I wondered why the area was in such a sad and sort state of neglect.
Early on a Sunday morning I drove down Krause Street through a subway underpass and saw pieces of a faded mural with the words “The Subway - Fordsburg and Fietas - Sisters in History” still visible. There was also a figure high on a ladder swathed in layers of clothes as it was freezing cold.
I stopped to take some photographs and so met Bié Venter busy doing preparatory work for the restoration of the mural. The restoration was commissioned by the Johannesburg Development Agency. While talking to Bié I got a potted history of Fietas, History 101 on a Sunday morning in a Jozi subway.
How’s that for a history lesson through the soles of my shoes?
As a boykie growing up in Pretoria some 60 kilometers north from the famed City of Gold I thought I knew what a “Fieta” was, a term that referred to a unsavoury character from the “wrong side of the tracks” in my frame of reference. I had no idea that it actually referred to someone from a small suburb in Jozi that was a microcosm of South African history.
Fietas, a name whose origins no one can recall, consist of two small suburbs - Pageview and Vrededorp - that used to be a close-knit, thriving multiracial area. It was home to several thousands of Coloureds, Malays, Indians and whites before the 1970s. This all changed in the decade between 1969 and 1979. The Apartheid machine stepped up a gear and residents were notified of relocation plans - Indians were relocated to Lenasia, 25 kilometres south west of the city. Malays and Coloureds were to go to Eldorado Park, around 30 kilometres in the same direction.
Fietas is unique when compared to areas like Sophiatown in Johannesburg and District Six in Cape Town, both areas that were also subject to removals and then flattened. In Sophiatown's case, the suburb was renamed Triomf (Afrikaans for "triumph"), and houses for whites were built; in the case of District Six, the area, three decades after its demolition, still remains an empty, windy grassland in the heart of the city.
But Fietas was never completely demolished, and one gets the impression that the bulldozers ran out of petrol. Reading about Fietas and talking to some people who used to live in the area it seems as there was something bordering on a running battle between the residents and the regime.
Many residents returned from work in the evenings "to find themselves lost" because the places they called home had been destroyed during the day. As houses were demolished people simply moved into properties still standing. They kept moving from one house to another, until there was nowhere left to go. 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.
The old remaining houses are a testament to the determination and resilience of the original residents. Two mosques are still standing, on 15th and 25th Streets and are used by regularly by the community. There’s an Anglican Church in Krause Road, St Anthony's, but it seemed to have closed. This church was a refuge in the uprisings of 1976 and during the evictions tents were erected in its yard to house the homeless.
Since the demolition and removals the suburb has never really regained its sense of identity, with untidy open patches of land remaining where houses once stood, now spaces where open-air shebeens operate, littered with garbage. New houses, out of keeping with the distinctive columns-and-veranda style of the former houses, have sprung up, and businesses operate illegally from the garages of some of them.
The injustice of the removals lingers, tainting the re-development of the area. In a cruel twist of fate there are now disputes on who owned the properties originally and who is entitled to reclaim those properties. Since the 1970s odd pieces of land have been bought, serving to complicate the issue and the number of plots available does not match the number of claimants. The uncertainty around the settlement of land claims has been a contributing factor to the general state of neglect of Fietas.
According to Feizel Mamdoo, who was born in Fietas and who conducts tours of the area, the now faded mural painted in 2003 in the subway depicted the relationship between Fordsburg residents and the Fietas community in the 1940’s. It's been said," He explains, "that what jazz was to Sophiatown, sport was to Fietas and part of the mural serves as a reminder of Fietas's famous sporting community. ""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.
The mural also depicts the still-existing Solly's Corner fish and chips shop in Fordsburg and the well-known activist, Don Matttera and the famous socialite 'Dolly'", for whom Fietas was a haunt." One of the remaining visible figures on the mural is that of Regina Brooks. Regina and her partner Richard Khumalo were both sent to prison in 1955 for a period of four months for living together and having a “coloured” child. I cannot find much reference about what eventually happened to them and I suppose their heartbreaking tale disappeared into the murky tapestry of Apartheid's history.
The new mural that Bié Venter was working on that morning is a joint venture of The Trinity Session and 26’10 South Architects, in partnership with Feizel Mamdoo. Rookeya Gardee, Bronwyn Lace and Reg Pakari have created a design that has brought together personal and historical stories, images and references of Fietas, the subway and Fordsburg.
Walking the streets of Jozi sometimes result in the recent history of this country hitting me squarely in the gut. The skeletons of the past steps out and I am confronted firsthand with the terrible things that happened it South Africa. The scars run deep and only fools can believe that these scars will heal in less than two decades of democracy rule.
"FOCKIN' FREEZING"
Trawling through the wide blue nowhere of hyperspace looking for information on Fietas I read that Bié Venter, who describes herself as an art mechanic and cultural developer, turned around August House in End Street in 2007. Bié also conducts art tours of Jozi; http://www.art-tours.co.za/
She qualifies for a special mention in this gallery of Visionaries, Maniacs and Wide-eyed Dreamers for reclaiming Johannesburg piece-by-piece. So do others like Jonathan Liebmann for Arts on Main, Brian Green and Mark Batchelor for the viby 44 Stanley Avenue, Isaac Chalumbira, Gerald Olitzki and Urban Ocean’s Alfonso Botha and Duan Coetzee.
You are making this city great again.
“But the memory of this historic place lives on in the hearts of those who called it home, and who, never to forget, were in essence made here”
It was a world within a world, a democracy within a
totalitarian state.
There were no class barriers.
Each person belonged to the aristocracy of his own personality.
Yusuf Chubb Garda
Not growing up in Jozi means that I have little firsthand sense of the rich and diverse history of this city which started out as a boom town built on the discovery of gold in the 1880’s. Walking the streets with a camera doing urban exploration and graffiti archeology the past two years therefore lead to some unexpected discoveries and surprises.
Close to the CBD is a seedy-looking area where children play in empty plots and ruined buildings, shady characters lounge on corners and people of all colours go about the business of their daily lives. This makes for the gritty images of a city in transition that I love to photograph. I wondered why the area was in such a sad and sort state of neglect.
Early on a Sunday morning I drove down Krause Street through a subway underpass and saw pieces of a faded mural with the words “The Subway - Fordsburg and Fietas - Sisters in History” still visible. There was also a figure high on a ladder swathed in layers of clothes as it was freezing cold.
I stopped to take some photographs and so met Bié Venter busy doing preparatory work for the restoration of the mural. The restoration was commissioned by the Johannesburg Development Agency. While talking to Bié I got a potted history of Fietas, History 101 on a Sunday morning in a Jozi subway.
How’s that for a history lesson through the soles of my shoes?
As a boykie growing up in Pretoria some 60 kilometers north from the famed City of Gold I thought I knew what a “Fieta” was, a term that referred to a unsavoury character from the “wrong side of the tracks” in my frame of reference. I had no idea that it actually referred to someone from a small suburb in Jozi that was a microcosm of South African history.
Fietas, a name whose origins no one can recall, consist of two small suburbs - Pageview and Vrededorp - that used to be a close-knit, thriving multiracial area. It was home to several thousands of Coloureds, Malays, Indians and whites before the 1970s. This all changed in the decade between 1969 and 1979. The Apartheid machine stepped up a gear and residents were notified of relocation plans - Indians were relocated to Lenasia, 25 kilometres south west of the city. Malays and Coloureds were to go to Eldorado Park, around 30 kilometres in the same direction.
Fietas is unique when compared to areas like Sophiatown in Johannesburg and District Six in Cape Town, both areas that were also subject to removals and then flattened. In Sophiatown's case, the suburb was renamed Triomf (Afrikaans for "triumph"), and houses for whites were built; in the case of District Six, the area, three decades after its demolition, still remains an empty, windy grassland in the heart of the city.
But Fietas was never completely demolished, and one gets the impression that the bulldozers ran out of petrol. Reading about Fietas and talking to some people who used to live in the area it seems as there was something bordering on a running battle between the residents and the regime.
Many residents returned from work in the evenings "to find themselves lost" because the places they called home had been destroyed during the day. As houses were demolished people simply moved into properties still standing. They kept moving from one house to another, until there was nowhere left to go. 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.
The old remaining houses are a testament to the determination and resilience of the original residents. Two mosques are still standing, on 15th and 25th Streets and are used by regularly by the community. There’s an Anglican Church in Krause Road, St Anthony's, but it seemed to have closed. This church was a refuge in the uprisings of 1976 and during the evictions tents were erected in its yard to house the homeless.
Since the demolition and removals the suburb has never really regained its sense of identity, with untidy open patches of land remaining where houses once stood, now spaces where open-air shebeens operate, littered with garbage. New houses, out of keeping with the distinctive columns-and-veranda style of the former houses, have sprung up, and businesses operate illegally from the garages of some of them.
The injustice of the removals lingers, tainting the re-development of the area. In a cruel twist of fate there are now disputes on who owned the properties originally and who is entitled to reclaim those properties. Since the 1970s odd pieces of land have been bought, serving to complicate the issue and the number of plots available does not match the number of claimants. The uncertainty around the settlement of land claims has been a contributing factor to the general state of neglect of Fietas.
According to Feizel Mamdoo, who was born in Fietas and who conducts tours of the area, the now faded mural painted in 2003 in the subway depicted the relationship between Fordsburg residents and the Fietas community in the 1940’s. It's been said," He explains, "that what jazz was to Sophiatown, sport was to Fietas and part of the mural serves as a reminder of Fietas's famous sporting community. ""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.
The mural also depicts the still-existing Solly's Corner fish and chips shop in Fordsburg and the well-known activist, Don Matttera and the famous socialite 'Dolly'", for whom Fietas was a haunt." One of the remaining visible figures on the mural is that of Regina Brooks. Regina and her partner Richard Khumalo were both sent to prison in 1955 for a period of four months for living together and having a “coloured” child. I cannot find much reference about what eventually happened to them and I suppose their heartbreaking tale disappeared into the murky tapestry of Apartheid's history.
The new mural that Bié Venter was working on that morning is a joint venture of The Trinity Session and 26’10 South Architects, in partnership with Feizel Mamdoo. Rookeya Gardee, Bronwyn Lace and Reg Pakari have created a design that has brought together personal and historical stories, images and references of Fietas, the subway and Fordsburg.
Walking the streets of Jozi sometimes result in the recent history of this country hitting me squarely in the gut. The skeletons of the past steps out and I am confronted firsthand with the terrible things that happened it South Africa. The scars run deep and only fools can believe that these scars will heal in less than two decades of democracy rule.
"FOCKIN' FREEZING"
Trawling through the wide blue nowhere of hyperspace looking for information on Fietas I read that Bié Venter, who describes herself as an art mechanic and cultural developer, turned around August House in End Street in 2007. Bié also conducts art tours of Jozi; http://www.art-tours.co.za/
She qualifies for a special mention in this gallery of Visionaries, Maniacs and Wide-eyed Dreamers for reclaiming Johannesburg piece-by-piece. So do others like Jonathan Liebmann for Arts on Main, Brian Green and Mark Batchelor for the viby 44 Stanley Avenue, Isaac Chalumbira, Gerald Olitzki and Urban Ocean’s Alfonso Botha and Duan Coetzee.
You are making this city great again.
“But the memory of this historic place lives on in the hearts of those who called it home, and who, never to forget, were in essence made here”