Heritage Personalities

In late October 2023, friends and family gathered in Johannesburg to celebrate Flo Bird's 80th birthday. Flo has been a tireless campaigner for Johannesburg and South Africa's heritage for several decades. Below is the speech delivered by Kathy Munro to mark the big occasion.

Flo and your family, welcome and to all our heritage community, we welcome you. Today we have the extraordinary privilege of coming together to celebrate a momentous occasion - an 80th birthday.

But this is no ordinary 80th birthday; it's an opportunity to honour a life that has left an indelible mark on Johannesburg and our heritage community.

Flo Bird unveiling a plaque on Doveton Road, Parktown

Flo is a born and bred Johannesburger. She has always lived in Parktown and is descended from Johannesburg pioneers. She has spent her entire adult life committed to her city – researching and writing about Johannesburg, She founded the Parktown and Westcliff Heritage Trust and in 2012 she founded the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation. She is still engaged in the heritage fight and still sits on the Joint Plans Committee - its meetings are a fixed date in her calendar.

It is due to her efforts that we do not have another motorway slicing through Parktown, that at least...

Carol Hardijzer is a prolific contributor to The Heritage Portal. He has built one of the largest private collections of historic photographs in South Africa and has written a spectrum of articles on the history of photography (click here to browse). You have been on countless research journeys with Carol over the years and now you can get to know him a little better...

Tell us a little about where your name and surname originate from.

I am a first-generation South African – a born-and-bred Pretorian. My father originated from Holland (he arrived in South Africa at 27), whilst my mother is of German descent. She grew up in Namibia. I inherited my first name from my maternal grandfather. It is not an uncommon Germanic name and originates mainly from Poland. The family narrative has it that my great-great grandfather, as a young man, did some work for King Carol of Romania (1839 -1914). The King was also of German descent. So impressed was my great-great grandfather by the King, that he decided to name his son (my grandfather) Carol. Pope John Paul II, born in Poland, also had the first name Karol. Only seven individuals in South Africa carry the Hardijzer surname, five of whom were born with it. 

What draws you to historical photographs?

I have often paused to ask this question myself. What is the attraction? There are several possible answers to this question.

Firstly, I am a natural collector with a strong visual orientation. Here there might be a deeper-lying...

Lucille Davie recently hit the milestone of 100 articles on The Heritage Portal (click here to browse). You know her stories and now you can get to know her a little better...

What are your favourite articles from your archive?

I feel privileged, as a journalist with an interest in history, to have interviewed some of the people relevant to our recent history over the 14-year period when I was writing these stories. Some of the memorable interviews and stories I’ve written over some years: Dorothy Molefe and Antoinette Sithole, Hector Pieterson’s mother and sister; Nomkhitha Mashinini, Tiestsi Mashinene’s mother; several former Constitutional Court judges; George Bizos; Don Mattera, Chris van Wyk, Revil Mason, Phillip Tobias, Willem Boshoff; Jurgen Schadeberg; Westdene Dam disaster survivors; Reverend Sam Buti; Arthur Ginsberg, the creator of Chappies bubblegum, and exploring the cave in which the Foster Gang committed suicide, and writing the story.

Foster Gang Cave 

I enjoyed researching and writing about the Amawasha in Joburg, the entrepreneurial washer men from KwaZulu-Natal; and Nongoloza, the rebel Zulu who turned criminal in Joburg, and whose legacy is felt in prisons systems to this day, 75 years later. In 2003 I went down into the safety deposit vault basement of Somerset House in the Joburg inner city, originally housing the United Building Society, and, together with the owner, we found...

There are very few people in the heritage world that don't know the name Kathy Munro. She is a writer, speaker, reviewer, activist, teacher, mentor, organiser, friend and so much more. We asked her a few questions about her life in heritage and beyond...

What excites you at the moment?

The case of the Ocean Terminal complex and the Durmarine building in Durban – important modernist buildings dating back to 1962. The intention of Transnet is to demolish, flatten and create an unimaginative, historically rootless car export parking area for storing and shipping cars for export. I find this makes me angry because it is the approach of a philistine to think it is OK to demolish; there is an opportunity to work with all those dreams and realities created in the past by fine architects; for a heritage building to live it must have a future purpose but it is imagination that can give us that opportunity. A fine example of conversion so that a heritage building can live again is the Gauteng Legislature created from the Johannesburg City Hall complex done by the late Marcus Holmes and Mira Fassler.

Ocean Terminal Building (Kathy Munro)

What books are your reading?

The Man before the Mahatma, MK Gandhi , Attorney at Law by Charles DiSalvo; a biography of Milner by...