Sue Jean Taylor

Yeoville is one of the oldest suburbs of Johannesburg, established around 1890 soon after the discovery of gold. During the early 20th century, Yeoville (and neighbouring Bellevue) was a middle- and working-class hub for European immigrants, especially Jews. Then, under the apartheid Group Areas Act, Yeoville became a whites-only neighbourhood, although many coloured and Asian residents secretly took up residence there. Yeoville went through a funky, alternate phase during the 1980s, but this era is a thing of the past. This article is about tracking down a remnant of Yeoville’s multi-racial past by finding a shop that was once a thriving Rockey Street men’s outfitter business run by Mr K B Patel.

Taking photos in Yeoville in the 1980s

In 1988 I did a photojournalism course and our group went to Rockey Street in Yeoville to capture images of life on this street. I took photographs of Mr Patel and his tailoring and men’s outfitter shop. Since then, I haven’t been to Yeoville at all. I drove around recently to try and find out where Mr Patel’s shop used to be and I couldn’t find it because almost everything has changed. Many of the old shop fronts have been repurposed and covered up with new hoardings and signage and substantial and often brutal burglar bars. Metal roller doors abound and the mechanism for these doors often obscures any remaining vintage signage. Using my 1988 photographs, Google Earth and an actual visit, I was able to find Mr Patel’s original shop.

[[{"fid":"15774","view_mode":"media_adaptive","fields":{"format":"media_adaptive","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"KB Patel Shop...

The above painting by Frank Lewis Emanuel, 1899, shows a rather gothic view of early Johannesburg rickshaw men ferrying their passengers through a dust storm. Emanuel (1865–1948) was a painter, printmaker, draughtsman and writer who was born in London. Most of his art tackled British seaside towns and seaside vistas, so the Johannesburg painting is a bit unusual. There is no information on when Emanuel came to Johannesburg.

Rickshaws or rickshas are small two-wheeled cart-like passenger vehicles, often with a fold-down top, and pulled by one person, formerly widely used in Japan and China, and also called jinrickshaws or jinrickshas.

Rickshaws in early Johannesburg

Most photographs of early Johannesburg, when scrutinised, do not show any rickshaws. Instead, the early streets of Johannesburg are filled with carts, cabs and wagons which are horse, mule or oxen-drawn. Later on there were horse-drawn or electric trams, bicycles, or motor vehicles, depending on the era. Yet rickshaws were part of the bustling city landscape and remained in use until the 1960s.

Market Square in the early 20th century showing a rickshaw in the foreground. (SAR Tourism and Publicity and Travel Department. DRISA. ZA 0375-N-N01283)

Rickshaws for a growing city

As the city grew, rickshaws were still catered for as a...

This article explores the presence of an Asian freshwater food snail species discovered in Zoo Lake in Johannesburg in 2019. These non-indigenous snails could be a fascinating, living legacy of anonymous Chinese indentured labourers brought to work on the Witwatersrand gold fields in the early 1900s.

In 1904, 64 000 Chinese indentured workers were brought to Johannesburg to work on the newly established gold mines to overcome a shortage of mine labour. Other than a few photographs, the identity of these individuals is long since lost, but perhaps not entirely forgotten. It is possible that these migrants brought the freshwater snails with them as food items for informal aquaculture, and that these snails quietly live on in and around the old Witwatersrand goldfields.

Zoo Lake is an urban impoundment fed by the Parktown Spruit from a nearby Westcliff ridge and by the storm water drains of the catchment. The water is habitually heavily polluted and experiences seasonal algal blooms.

A peaceful scene at Zoo Lake, Johannesburg, 2019 (Sue Taylor)

An unusual water snail is discovered

In 2019, I noticed a single large water snail on the northern weir and took a photograph. The photograph was sent to Dr Chris Appleton, a retired mollusc specialist in South Africa, and he passed the image on to Dr Nelson Miranda, another...

Each year since 2011, walls in Newtown, Jeppestown and the Johannesburg CBD have been decorated by both international and local graffiti artists who are invited to decorate designated buildings with high-quality graffiti and wall art. The annual graffiti festival was originally in 2011 established with the aim of marketing Johannesburg as an international graffiti viewing destination and to dispel the negative notions associated with this art form. Although it never seems well advertised at the time, the outputs, especially in Newtown, are really spectacular.

The Public Art Festival and Pinki’s Inn, Jules Street, Jeppestown

It is now 2023, about eight years after the 2015 Johannesburg Graffiti Art Festival. By some unknown arrangement, the outside walls of a very old corner shop building in Jeppestown, and  operating as “Pinki’s Inn”, were painted with world class graffiti during the 2015 graffiti art festival.  While many of the Newtown examples of wall art have been painted over with new art several times to retain their quality and originality, this wall  art has been allowed to deteriorate.

The original Jules Street and Auret Street corner shop art work, showing work in process in 2015. Art work by SOLO ONe from Britain. Jeppestown, 2015 (Unity Murals)

[[{"fid":"15172","view_mode":"media_adaptive","fields":{"format":"media_adaptive","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Google Earth Street...

Before the discovery of gold in 1886, the Witwatersrand rang with the sound of sparkling springs, streams and waterfalls. These springs and streams are now hard to find as they have been put in pipes or canals under the city. Even if you can find the outfalls of these original springs and spruits (small streams), they are badly polluted. Sewage spills and uncollected rubbish, along with acid mine drainage and other chemical contamination, have put water quality into crisis in the heavily populated and industrialised Witwatersrand landscape.

It was of interest to me to find one of these hidden streams in the City and Suburban area of Johannesburg next to the N2 motorway. The current manifestation of this stream is a concrete and dressed stone canal and its toxic outflow. The quality of the emergent water is so bad that is must surely be emblematic of Johannesburg’s severe water pollution, decaying infrastructure and waste disposal challenges. Over a distance of about 2 km between a possible pristine ground water source to the north and the outflow, terrible contamination of the water occurs as it flows underground. This deadly-looking water flows south, untreated, into more natural river systems to become part of the Vaal system.

Between its hidden source and the outflow, there is an underground pipe and then an open air canal with four road bridges before the stream flows out into the open. One does have to wonder why there is a pipe in one section and a canal...

The South African Airways Museum, run entirely by volunteers, is a gem of a museum located next to the Rand Airport, Germiston. The museum is easily accessible from the M2 heading east towards Germiston and is a fascinating destination for a weekend outing. 

SAA Society Museum purpose and history

The South African Airways Museum Society was founded in 1986 by a group of individuals from within South African Airways, along with outside entities, with the aim of preserving the history of the South African Airways (SAA) as well as that of civil aviation in general in South Africa. The museum aims to create an awareness of the greatness of South African aviation and the role it has played in South African society as well as preserve South Africa’s Civil Aviation History, and seems to do this very well.

The first aircraft secured for the SASA Museum was a Lockheed Lodestar, registered ZS-ASN, which was rescued in 1973 from a storage building at the South African Railways Museum. The aircraft was fully restored and the success of this venture inspired many others to volunteer to preserve South Africa’s aircraft for future generations to enjoy.

The Lodestar, a model L18-08, formed part of the SAA fleet from 1939 until 1955 and was eventually parked in a field and forgotten about. It was restored between 1973 and 1975. The significance of this aircraft is that it is the oldest aircraft in existence in South Africa that saw service with SAA.

[[{"fid":"14868","view_mode":"media_adaptive","fields":{"format":"media_adaptive","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"The Lockheed...

Years ago, a friend who grew up in Parkview told me a story. She said that one of the Indian elephants at the Zoo ‘went crazy’ during one of the rides. The full details of this event are not recorded, but the children must have been rescued. My friend recalled that, instead of the elephant being retired after its years of service, it was shot. While I was unable to confirm the event, the story brought back my own memories of elephants at the Johannesburg Zoo.

Remembering childhood visits to the Johannesburg Zoo

Because we also lived in Parkview, we regularly visited the Johannesburg Zoo in the 1960s, walking there from Galway Road. As a child, I remember the dark Victorian-type dungeon cages for the lions, polar bears and hyenas, and we could always hear the lions roaring at night as well as the weird cries of the hyenas. I also remember the rides on the two Indian elephants, but I was too little (five years old) to try these rides. Below are some of the photographs my father took at the zoo in the 1960s.

Indian elephant being given peanuts at the Johannesburg Zoo (Victor Hearn, 1961)

[[{"fid":"14643","view_mode":"media_adaptive","fields":{"format":"media_adaptive","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Elephant ride at the Zoo - Victor...

Many of the railway stations and railway lines of Johannesburg no longer have the network of wires, cables, beams, insulators and transformers above the tracks that they used to. The sky is clear above these stations – and this is not a good situation.

I started my investigation of Denver station using Google Earth to explore the area between Jules Street and the railway line and came across the rather impressive 1930s Station Hotel in Berlein Street which had once served passengers from Denver station. I decided to go and take my own photographs of the hotel and the Denver station precinct and get a sense of the atmosphere of the place, as well as investigate the impact of time on this old Johannesburg hotel. Denver station is on the railway line that links Johannesburg’s Park Station to Germiston and the East Rand.

While I had hoped to write about the picturesquely ruined Station Hotel and quaint Sixth Street station precinct at Denver Station, my visit led me to appreciate a more notorious concern: the destruction of South Africa’s urban commuter rail network (MetroRail) through cable theft and vandalism. In recent times, railway infrastructure has been deliberately stripped for its cash value, specifically valuable electrical infrastructure (notably copper cables) and anything metal along the railway lines and in the waiting rooms. The same has happened with the national freight rail system.

The railway line that NZASM built

Denver Station is one of the stations on the railway line south of...

Kenneth Charles ‘Ken’ Bath (1915-1985) was a professional photographer in the 1930s and went on to run the photographic division for Anglo American. The family of Ken Bath have made his collection of photographs available to The Heritage Portal (click here for details of the collection). The photographs selected for this article are of the Braamfontein Yards and the impressive Braamfontein Coal Stage used for filling the coal tenders of the outgoing trains. It is estimated that the photographs were taken in the late 1940s or into the 1950s.

 Class S shunter in the Braamfontein Yards. The building in the upper centre of the image is the Market Cold Storage building which is still in existence. (Bath Family Archive)

Massive Braamfontein Coal Stage (Bath Family Archive)

When the Witwatersrand started its rapid development following the discovery of gold in 1886, industrial infrastructure was almost totally absent in the Transvaal because of its agrarian economy. It soon became clear...

Of all the remaining old houses on the Sunnyside South campus in Pretoria, one seems uglier than the others. It is cheaply built, without a scrap of architectural merit. This is Building 20, now abandoned and full of junk.

The west side of the Sunnyside South ‘ugly house’, also known as Building 20 (Sue Taylor)

Between 2003 and 2008, this derelict house was lived in by the builders doing construction work at the Sunnyside South locality. While the western section of the house they occupied was pretty horrible, the eastern side of the house seemed even more unpleasant and industrial in some way.

“This place is haunted,” a young security guard told me recently. The young man then explained that the building was once used as a mortuary and that sometimes ‘ghost tours’ visit the house at midnight. There is very convincing blood spatter on many of the interior walls.

I set out to investigate the circumstances behind the guard’s statement. At first, I studied aerial photos and satellite images and examined the heritage report and Sunnyside campus Master Plan (Cultmatrix 2013) looking for any mention of such a bizarre function for Building 20. I could not find any mention of a mortuary in this locality. Even academic literature offered no clues. Perhaps this...