After the Bell: Give your heart to Marshalltown

When I was at Wits University in the late 1980s, I lived in Melville. Wits was just up the road and I worked a night shift at The Star newspaper, which was then, as now, in downtown Johannesburg. It was an easy commute. But all my friends at the time stayed at the hippest and trendiest place in Joburg, which was Yeoville.

Yeoville at the time was like an independent country; some of SA’s race laws, then still on the statute books, just didn’t seem to exist in Yeoville, which had its own crazy, bluesy vibe. It was grubby but happy. It was free to the extent you could be free in apartheid South Africa. Music belted out of the bars at night and motorbikes roared up and down the street. There was revolution in the air.

Being young and naïve, my friends would hang out in the grubbiest bar on Rockey Street, called, for reasons I have never understood, the Harbour Cafe. The bar steward was a woman who was kinda hot, so almost every guy who walked into the bar tried to flirt with her.

Mistake. She was the coldest person I have ever known. Her name was Meridith, but we called her Megadeath. I once made the mistake of asking for a glass of the beer she had just slapped on the counter. She scoffed and said, “Bourgeois, hey,” and ignored me. It was great. We loved her.

The joy of Yeoville was the promise that it held of a new world where drinking with friends of different races would be commonplace, where all the ideas would be fresh and where creativity would flourish.

And in some ways it did, but just not in Yeoville. Perhaps we should have known. An early sign of the downturn was the increasing levels of crime. The flat of a musician friend, which held practically nothing, was broken into and the thieves took absolutely everything except the Yellow Pages and the welcome mat. The next day, they came back for the mat.

And all this time, I was actually living in what was then a quiet suburb with a few not very memorable restaurants on the main road which was called — you guessed it — Main Road, as if to relish its ordinariness. My friends thought I was a terrible sell-out, but I liked it. I liked the fact that there was a hardware store on the corner, the sine qua non of middle-class home improvement. It had a terrible Italian restaurant that sold barely edible pasta and a fabulous bakery where you could read the paper in the morning over croissants. It was comfortable.

People slightly older than I used to speak very warmly about Hillbrow, with its high-rise flats, the tower, the famous record store and the poker dens. Yet Hillbrow eventually got swallowed by the inner-city monster, which was one of the reasons Yeoville “emerged”, until it too succumbed. Then, irony of ironies, Melville suddenly became the “it” spot, until it too sank into the swamp.

Cities develop this way, with the middle class establishing new suburbs, or reviving an old one, before casting off to a new harbour (maybe that was the genesis of the name of the bar in Yeoville). As the middle class moves out, working-class people move in and, at its best, the system over the long term drives gradual lifestyle improvements for each successive wave of entrants.

But for that to happen, the city has to step in with vigour, because otherwise, what you get is not a gradual improvement but a very quick decline. The reason is simple: the services the middle class maintained with their spending power need to be substituted with state support or else they disappear. Joburg has made stuttering efforts at improving suburbs at various times, but generally it has focused outside the city itself — and it shows.

The result has been the takeover of the inner city by newcomers; people our politicians deride as “foreigners”; people I would describe as some of the most resilient people on Earth. Oddly enough, if you go to Yeoville today, it’s crazy and grubby — as it always has been — but it still stands, and there is still a vibrant community there. You just have to speak French.

This week, the city’s neglect of the areas inhabited by “foreigners” really came home to roost in a horrible, horrible way. Seventy-four people, at least, dead, burnt alive at 80 Albert Street in Johannesburg’s inner city Marshalltown. And all the sympathy our politicians could muster was to blame it on NGOs and those “foreigners”.

I remember an old Afrikaans song that had the chorus line, “Give your heart to Hillbrow,” by Johannes Kerkorrel. Fabulous song; just ecstatically good. One verse goes, “Ons sit in die son en drink wyn; ons survive met ’n helse lot pyn in hierdie land; kom ons drink op die een wat sy drome oorleef: op die een wat kry wat hy vra: Jou sente, jou drome, jou klere vol gate. Gee jou hart vir Hillbrow.”

(We sit in the sun and drink wine; we survive with too much pain in this land; let’s drink to the one who can survive his dreams; to the one who gets his wish: Your cents, your dreams, your clothes full of holes. Give your heart to Hillbrow).

Where is that heart now? DM