Forced removals

I have been doing a bit of research for one of my short stories, and the subject matter was Johannesburg in the early 1960s. I am absolutely transfixed by the stories I have read, the pictures I have seen and the sad relics that still remain today. The Mayfair / Fordsburg area is something that gets under your skin - if you allow it to - and never leaves you. Every time I drive around this area I am transported to another time.

Mayfair was a white suburb, built for poor whites working on the railways. Fordsburg was also a predominantly white area into which some Indians moved around the 1950s. Fietas, otherwise known officially as Pageview / Vrededorp, was an area which is remembered by most of the people who inhabited its colourful streets with sad regret and painful nostalgia. Sophiatown was a suburb initially developed for whites, but after the government slapped a sewage plant next door to it, the owner of the land began to sell the remaining land to Indians, coloureds and blacks.

I try to see all this history when I am out and about. Now it is Mayfair and Fordsburg that are the colourful, vibrant areas, much like Fietas of old. Today, these two neighbouring suburbs are filled with Indian Muslims, Indian Hindus, coloureds, Pakistanis, Somalis and even some old whites who never sold up. Yes, there is practically a drug dealer on every street corner. It is also a place of stark contrasts. The old burnt-out shell of an old railway house can exist merrily with its drug-addicted occupants right next to a brand new two-storey, five-bedroom house with a Mercedes and a BMW parked in the garage.

I prefer the old houses, myself. I’m an old-fashioned kind of gal. When you are in an old building with a history, the soul is filled with appreciation in a way that can’t be obtained from standing in a shiny new building, full of glass doors and stainless steel trimmings. The house I live in is a typical old railway house, with beautiful hardwood floors, dado rails, pressed metal ceilings and a fireplace in the lounge. When I look up aimlessly at the patterns on ceilings I do so wondering what kind of people lived in this house over the years and whether they too looked up at the ceilings in the same way I do now.



Whenever I have reason to cross the divide of seventeenth street, I enter completely into the past. For who can roam the streets of Fietas without being haunted by ghosts of the people who were forcefully removed from this place? Unlike Sophiatown, the people of Fietas were evicted over a long period of time, due to resistance from the residents and a lack of concerted organisation on the government’s part. And unlike Sophiatown and District Six, Fietas was sort of half-demolished. Some buildings were only partly torn down, and remain to this day, ghostly reminders of the destruction wrought by the apartheid regime. And of the houses that were demolished properly, relatively few new ones were built upon the vacant stands that were cleared for the sake of the whites.

Fietas is a sad, seldom-visited museum. Its patches of unkempt grassland speak volumes about the children who grew up in the houses which now only exist in their fast-fading memories and crinkled back-and-white photographs. Its grand mosques speak of a time when the surrounding neighbourhood was a community. The solitary remains of its dilapidated 14th street bazaar tell little of a trade mecca that invited patrons of every race from far and wide.

I can also imagine the terror and the sadness felt by the residents of Sophiatown in 1955 when they were rounded up by heavily-armed military personnel like dogs and put on trucks headed for the South Western Townships. The whole area was then razed to the ground by government bulldozers and the area re-developed for whites. It was as if Sophiatown never existed. The new suburb was named Triomf (Triumph in Afrikaans) – a final kick in the teeth to the people who grew up listening to the sounds of jazz music and tsotsitaal in the vibrant township.

Did those residents of Fietas, Sophiatown and District Six ever think that the cruel regime under which they lived would come to pass bloodlessly? Did they think it would happen in their lifetime? Did they think they would ever get rid of the Special Branch coming into their homes late at night? Did they ever conceive that their grandchildren would grow up going to school alongside children of all different colours and religions, and that they would be free to study what they wished, apply for any job they wanted, marry whomever they wanted to and live wherever they pleased? And finally, did they imagine that a non-racial, democratic South Africa would be a utopia? Would you choose to live in Fietas in the fifties or Mayfair in 2010?

Social media gives mainstream media the finger

At the start of a new year and decade, it is a time to pause and reflect upon both past, present and future, a way, if you will, to mark a large “You Are Here” in red on the timeline. It is a time to note emerging trends and make predictions about the year ahead.

One thing that cannot have failed to have grabbed everybody’s attention by now is the rise of social media. You would have to be living under a bridge, or approaching your second heart bypass, to be unaware of things like Twitter, YouTube, blogging and Facebook and the impact that these media are having on modern society.

The younger generation of the world is one that demands many things. This crowd is not known for their patience or understanding. They want to have contact with their peers at the touch of a button and they expect news and information to be constantly at their fingertips.

They are also not very good at keeping things to themselves. While I would call this “oversharing”, teenagers and twentysomethings are telling the world about their angst, their heartaches, their funny stories and the things that make them angry.

Their thirst for information is insatiable. Sure, they might not be reading as much as their parents or grandparents, but they are adept at gleaning the bare facts from 140 characters or less. Their parents had to go to the library and search through dusty old tomes for the information they sought, learning to summarise and make their own notes from printed textbooks. But now all that is required is to pick up a mobile phone or turn on a laptop, point it in the general direction of Google or Wikipedia and the gist of the information is absorbed.

It is perhaps not surprising then, that the mainstream media, generally led by wrinkly men with a grey hair or twelve, are struggling to keep up with the spread of news and views on the internet. These would be “unauthorised” news and views. They haven’t been vetted. These stories never sat on a news editor’s desk and the angle of the story wasn’t carefully calculated.

You could argue that it has turned the entire internet into a large corporate office, rife with rumour and gossip, snatches of misinformation whispered between cubicles. But on the other hand it could be said that it keeps the fat cats on their toes and checks their ability to get away with murder without creating a tsunami of whispers and suspicions.

The rise of the use of Facebook and Twitter as means of communicating news has led to many young people questioning the role of the mainstream media and the relevance thereof.

A typical case in point was the recent gathering of about 1400 Gaza Freedom Marchers from 48 countries. They gathered in Cairo, Egypt, intending on travelling through the Rafah border crossing into Gaza and holding a demonstration to draw attention to the plight of the people living in Gaza under blockade, a year after the Israeli attack on the area.

The Egyptian government refused to open the Rafah crossing for them and Egyptian police attacked a group of European female demonstrators, punching, kicking and tearing off headscarves. One French protester reportedly died of her injuries.



Through all this, however, these images were nowhere to be seen in the international media such as the BBC or Sky News, and nowhere in the local media outlets. This is a clear indication that the news corporations are too concerned with toeing the political line. Bad press for the Israelis is something they usually avoid at all costs – even when the cost is a human life.

Climate change is also a big bone of contention which threatens to turn on world leaders and bite them in the rear ends. With the leaking of documents at the Copenhagen climate change summit, the world saw a cancerous clot of greedy bureaucrats stuffing up the last real chance we had to undo decades of pollution and reckless consumerism.

Perhaps an inevitable conclusion is that the social media-using millions will begin to grow restless in the coming years when it begins to sink in – years of inaction and cover-ups by politicians, as thick as thieves with the newsmen. Unfortunately, this may mean years of unrest and demonstrations, perhaps also civil disobedience from protesters and heavy-handed punishment from governments clutching desperately onto power.

I sincerely hope that when the discontent reaches fever pitch it will usher in some kind of new era where ethics and accountability prevails, but the undying cynic in me is prone to point out that the “free” world is more likely to end up resembling the end of George Orwell’s prophetic but terribly depressing novel, 1984.

Freedom fighter extraordinaire

WARNING: this blog post has been written from a sardonic point of view. If you find yourself running low on humour, please visit the SABC’s website and you should be fine after a few minutes.


I have been a veteran in the struggle against apartheid since 1993. Yes, the year I arrived in this country, at the tender age of twelve. As young as I was, I was nobody’s fool. Although I was slightly disappointed to be unable to see any Zulus throwing spears up at the aeroplane on the way to Jan Smuts airport in Johannesburg, I figured that since it was a public holiday, even Zulu warriors needed a break from throwing spears at the whites.

No, you would never catch a bright person like me, brought up in God’s own country (just to make it clear, this would be England), being ignorant about African current affairs. Although I will admit that when I heard the news about Nelson Mandela being released from prison after 27 years, I struggled to understand why everybody was making such a fuss over a convicted criminal. But I was only a pipsqueak of eight back then. To be sure, I knew by the time I moved to South Africa in ’93 that Mandela was a very dangerous man.

Since we were brought over by a white South African family with whom we were living, I had the advantage of being able to learn a lot about South Africa very quickly. Yes, I learnt all about the kaffirs, and how they were all ready to kill us in our beds and take our BMWs.

We had two maids, Pinky and Mabel. They used to speak Afrikaans very oddly, I thought, with all sorts of funny clicking noises and no-one could understand them when they did that. I gathered that it was some kind of secret code. Eugene Terre’blanche will tell you that there are enemies everywhere, and boy, was he ever right.

Since the elections were fast-approaching, there was little to do except instruct the women and children in combat shooting. We stocked up on baked beans and candles, sandbags and ammunition. We kids were told to practice re-loading firearm magazines until our fingers bled, for it was us children who would be relied upon to reload for the adults when the bloodshed began.

The time of the elections was nearly upon us, and we went on what could possibly have been our last holiday. It was a long and weary trek in our air-conditioned BMW down to Richards Bay, and we outspanned when we got to the lobby of the hotel. For some unknown reason I became embroiled in a political discussion with a black man sitting in the lobby. Fancy me, an educated Englishwoman of twelve, imparting my erudite political views to a savage!

Nevertheless, I asked him politely who he would be voting for in the elections, to which he replied he would be voting for the National Party (an old party from the times of apartheid and the last bastion of hope for the whites). I was very pleased with this man’s valour and common sense, and I remarked that the National Party was the ideal party to vote for, because as I put it, “things will stay just exactly as they are”.

I think that from the way the poor man's face dropped in utter horror, that he probably made sure that he was the first person in the line at the polling station on the first day of voting, and I’m almost 100% certain that the tick he made was next to the box that read “African National Congress”.

So you see, I really was doing my bit for freedom even back then, when I had more pimples than common sense.

Restless nights

It has been my second night straight without any sleep and about two or three weeks since I knew a proper night’s slumber. Yes, I have been bitten by the fiendish insomnia bug. The bags under my eyes are now large enough to accommodate all of Mariah Carey’s luggage, and I have changed my Facebook picture to that of a rather attractive-looking donkey. Yes, sleep is a fickle thing indeed.

The romantic in me suggests that during these restless nights I should be true to the writer’s stereotype and sit up until the wee hours of the morning, a double scotch in hand, cat on my shoulder and a shotgun on my lap, hacking away feverishly at the keys, but I don’t drink, the cat can be homicidally averse to being awoken from his carefree night-time slumber and I am sadly lacking in the shotgun department.

It is also challenging to be properly eccentric when you share a house with non-writers. The desire to sit up nights and slump into the horizontal position during the day may oft be looked at askance by the people and children in the house who expect to be fed at regular intervals during the day. Their clothes stand in ridiculously frequent need of washing, hanging and ironing, their dirty dishes pile up in the sink begging to be washed. This is the pitiful impasse of the female writer who is reasonably cognisant that her offspring should preferably not be removed by Social Services.

It is thus that I remain in bed all night, trying hour after dolorous, humdrum hour to find new joints to crack in a reasonably loud and satisfying manner, a myriad of inconsequential and mediocre thoughts stampeding inconsiderately through my echoing cranium. And when the birds begin their pre-dawn song and the call to morning prayer sounds, I may perchance thereafter fall into an inert, dreamless unconsciousness, only to awaken abruptly as the morning’s clamour begins.

To be a truly great writer, one should preferably be a convicted criminal and one should die an honourable writer's death - suicide, syphilis or consumption. I am working myself up towards all of these lofty goals, but in the interim I hope to get some sleep first.

Death of a Beatle

At around the very time that I was conceived, an event occurred that was to send the Western world into shock and mourning. On the 8th December 1980, across the Atlantic from the place of his birth - and the place of my impending life – John Lennon was shot in the back four times in New York City and was pronounced dead on arrival at the nearby Roosevelt Hospital.

It has been twenty-nine years since the death of one of the most successful singer-songwriters ever to have lived, but it is an anniversary I still comemmorate with countless others throughout the world. The Beatles have been the largest single influence on modern songwriters today.

I often ask myself what it would have been like had John Lennon lived to a ripe old age like Paul McCartney, but I know, and always have known that even at the age of 40, Lennon had reached his expiry date. Somehow, when I think of the song “When I’m Sixty-Four”, I can imagine Paul losing his hair, sitting by the fireside, but John Lennon’s existence was so full of creative angst and tortured emotions that it was almost impossible for him not to become immortal by dying a tragic death.

Growing up, my entire life from the age of about five was affected and influenced by the Beatles. My brother decided to take up the guitar at school, and our headmaster, Mr. Hill, was a huge fan of the Beatles. Simon came home from school one day with a tape Mr. Hill had given him, and I remember that the first song we listened to was Strawberry Hills. From that moment onwards our home in North Yorkshire became an effective shrine to the Beatles. When my brother taught me to play the guitar soon after he took it up, it was mostly the Beatles that we were playing.

I recall when he obtained a book which contained the concise anthology (music and lyrics) of the Beatles’ works. On the front cover were pictures of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr. There was something about Lennon, though, that was different from the rest, a piercing look that the others didn’t have. Simon asked me which Beatle was my favourite and I remember being devastated when he told me that out of the four band members, I had to pick the one that was dead.

As I grew up, my passion for the Beatles - their music and their lives - was never tempered. I devoured as much information about them and the period that I could lay my hands upon.

I know every single lyric from every single song. I wished and longed to travel back in time just to wallow in the glory that came from their songs being on the charts. This was perhaps one of the reasons I was such a loner growing up – I have always felt that I was born in the wrong decade.

Yes, Lennon is a true and typical immortal. A man with an intensely troubled childhood, he was determined to make his name in music. But upon achieving superstardom, the pressures and pitfalls of fame almost destroyed him. After leaving the Beatles in 1969, Lennon’s new identity and life as a somewhat unconventional anti-war activist, influenced greatly by his equally eccentric wife, artist Yoko Ono, brought him once again into the spotlight.

Just eleven years later his life was taken by an apparently deranged fan, Mark David Chapman, who had been stalking Lennon for months. The world continued to turn, the sun continued to shine and the mountains, for the most part, stayed where they had been put. But perhaps little pieces of Lennon’s soul flew into places where they could not be erased, and I would like to think a little piece of him embedded itself into the depths of the heart that would belong to me.

2009 in retrospect

I can’t believe it’s the end of the year, and it’s been a pretty strange one for me. It’s been one of mixed emotions, of failure and of success. I’ve explored some unchartered territories and been bloody scared out of my wits on occasion. But looking back, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

My daughter came home on Thursday with an excellent report from school. I'm very proud that she managed to adapt to a new school halfway through the year and managed not only to catch up, but to excel.

This year I finally come to a place within myself that gave me the courage to start writing, when I’ve known for years that it’s what I should be doing. And while I expected a slew of rejection letters, it came as quite a surprise that a number of my short stories have immediately been accepted for publication in various literary journals.

I’ve met some really wonderful people this year, and I’m all the better for knowing them. And for the people in my life that have not exactly turned out to be panaceas to my soul, I’ve let them go on their path while I’ve continued along mine.

While standing up for yourself and what you believe in is extremely important, this year I learnt that at times stating your position, taking a step back and just having faith is far more powerful than arguing and starting conflicts.

Speaking of faith, this year saw me take a huge leap of it in moving back to South Africa from England. And the person I was putting my faith in was my husband. Now, I’m not a soppy person, but I am allowed to have a moment once in a while. He has supported me through thick and thin this year, as always, and he never ceases to amaze me. For the good, kind, intelligent person he is, and all the things he does for me, I am truly grateful and he deserves all the kudos in the world. For being enthusiastic about my writing, for buying me ice-creams when I was fed up, for building me - with his own hands - my very own writing desk and making supper when he saw I was under the weather, thank you Ahmed, for the support and love.

As nice as being back in England was in some ways, being back in South Africa, which I consider to be my true home, is better. I have my wonderful, supportive parents; I have natural African beauty surrounding me, a beautiful home, I’m within six hours’ drive of one of the wildest, most breathtaking stretches of shoreline in the world and I feel a sense of freedom and joie de vivre that I could never feel in London.

I have also given up one of my biggest addictions – Tab. The Coca-Cola company is evil, I tell you. It has been one month and I’m going strong. This is coming from a person who thought that the only thing water was good for was showering with. Hopefully my memory will start improving now from the lack of aspartame in my system. That’s right – now I will actually remember conversations for longer than 5 minutes after they take place. I think I’m up to 6 now.

Bah! Humbug...

Many things irk me, indeed. And I am usually quite vociferous about them, so you readers already know that. Perhaps it is my British heritage coming out of the woodwork here, but I like to have a little moan and groan now and again. But I find South Africans, white, black, pink and purple, simply have no idea how to complain, and this leads us to being what I think is a terribly exploited country when it comes to consumer goods.

South Africa is a country governed by fat cats. And I’m not just talking about politics. We have allowed big business to make walking a**holes out of us. We are paying far too much for the following:

* Mobile phones
* Fixed line phones
* Electricity
* Supermarket food
* Banking

And those are just the obvious ones. We all know that we pay the highest mobile phone and fixed line phone charges in the world and by the time Eskom is finished with us we will be paying the highest electricity prices in the world. And despite ICASA forcing the cellphone operators to drastically reduce their interconnect fees by next year, I still don’t think that’s good enough.

You could be forgiven for naively thinking that Pick n’ Pay was a distant relative of Tesco in the UK. But I’ve shopped in both shops, and let me tell you where Pick n’ Pay is royally stuffing up. Tesco has a generic brand, a brand which covers just about everything from over-the-counter medicine to chocolates to electronic goods. These products are anything from, I'd estimate, 40 to 75% CHEAPER than the branded product.

This is (stay with me now, South African boys and girls) the whole concept of “we give it to you cheaper because the packaging is cheaper” thing.

So why do we accept Pick n’ Pay’s No-Name brand as being MORE EXPENSIVE than the branded products? And no, it really doesn’t taste any nicer. I have noticed this anomaly on a very wide range of products, from toilet paper to frozen vegetables. Where it is cheaper, it will just be a few cents below the others.

Then Pick n’ Pay has the famous trick of charging you MORE to buy in bulk than to buy the smaller items. Plus they put the bulk item on “special” to make you think it’s cheaper! They should be held accountable for robbing the man on the street for so many years. And it’s not only Pick n’ Pay, to be sure, but they are the ones who are the most blatant and unapologetic about it.

Now on to the banks. I hope that there is a special place in hell reserved for South African bankers. They charge you for everything – including just looking to see how much money you have. They charge you to withdraw money, to deposit money, to write a cheque, to deposit a cheque, to make a transfer, to receive a transfer, to draw a statement, to replace a lost or stolen card, to pay for transactions using your card, and I could go on and on forever.

In the United Kingdom, as bad as the weather is, you don’t pay for banking. Obviously you pay interest and charges on your debts, but that’s just about all. All the things I mentioned above that you have to pay for here in South Africa, are free there. Perhaps that’s why the banks nearly collapsed when we had the economic crash in 2008, because they haven’t spent years and years siphoning money off millions of people who don’t know any better. The South African banks didn’t even bat an eyelid when the recession hit here, because they were too busy sitting in their money tower and diving into the piles of cash like Scrooge MacDuck.

Capitec have recently come out with some ads criticizing their partners in crime peers in the industry for high charges, bad service etc. Their main selling point is that you pay zero fees when you pay for something using your debit card. Whoop-de-do. They still charge for everything else – I’ve seen the charges brochure.

As far as services go, I’ve never seen a country where business is so quick to swallow your money and then laugh at you when you expect good service in return. And don’t even think of asking for a refund – after two hours of listening to elevator music on hold, you’ll just end up having a tantrum like an overgrown 2-year-old because no-one calls you back or answers emails and they’ll still laugh scornfully at you. This is especially true for anything to do with the telecommunications industry.

Perhaps it’s not just a case of the consumer not complaining enough – maybe it’s the media we can place the blame on, for not drawing enough public scrutiny to this matter. And I think we can also blame the people we elected to office for not raising questions and putting pressure on big business on behalf of the ordinary citizen, but on their salaries they can afford to be ripped off.