I thought that no book about Johannesburg citizens would be quite authentic without a profile of a kombi taxi driver. They loom large in our driverly consciousness. They often, too often, conjure dark and violent thoughts and spontaneous curses. They contribute to a multi billion rand industry, breeding ground for new capitalists; an industry without which, millions of daily commuters would be helplessly handicapped.
Have you ever walked into a taxi rank with the intention of asking a driver to give his story? Suspicious stares greet you. Suddenly everybody becomes deaf and you become invisible. Silence and turned backs are your lot. This freezing happened several times. It would have been be easier of course, if I could speak Zulu or another African language. Later, when I’ve made a few friends, I’m told I look like a cop, or someone from SARS. Me? Goodness! So, I’m coming close to the end of the book with no taxi driver in view. I ask my charlady for help. She speaks to someone out there but somehow we fail to make contact. Then I’m told about a long distance taxi driver, but I wish to speak to an urban driver, preferably on the Soweto run. I begin to feel desperate. One day...
Ravindra [Ravi] Lalla, and his brother Narendra [Naren] started Popular Picture Framers and General Dealers in Main St, Jeppestown, some thirty years ago. From the start, it was successful as a general store and after the later addition of the framing business with its reasonable prices, customers come from far and wide, from all over Johannesburg and surrounds. Visiting this part of the city is an exercise in time travel. Jeppestown with Fordsburg, comprise Johannesburg’s earliest suburbs, established in gold rush days. In the area close to Jeppe Station, renowned for its Art Deco design, Main St, is lined with Victorian buildings housing hardly changed, yesteryear shops. There you will find not only the Lallas’ framing business, but the tailoring business started by Ravi’s dad and continued by his oldest brother. Ravi remembers the trams and electric busses on overhead power lines running up and down Main St. And he recalls a great deal else besides, because in this part of the city he spent his childhood and youth, and he’s worked here all his life.
[[{"fid":"9699","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]":"Old postcard of Electrical Tramway Subway at Jeppe Station"},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"media_adaptive","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Old postcard of Electrical Tramway Subway at Jeppe Station"}},"attributes":{"title":"Old postcard of Electrical Tramway Subway at Jeppe Station","height":429,"width":640,"style":"height: 335px; width: 500px; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right...
I meet and talk to Frans Beleni, a senior official, his title is Production Pillarhead, with the National Union of Mineworkers. He works at Union headquarters, 7 Rissik St, an Art Deco building opposite the old SARS. His lifespan embraces the old South Africa becoming new. His forty five years have been packed with protest, change and emergence.
NUM Building Rissik Street (The Heritage Portal)
Blue plaque on the NUM building (The Heritage Portal)
Beleni, not a born Johannesburger enjoys and values its many amenities but is perturbed by the crime. He became a young activist at school, and later a fugitive from the police. This was followed by a period as a miner on the Free State Goldfields, which provided him with both ‘a convenient place to...
The article below forms part of Mike Alfred's series on Joburg personalities from the first decade of the 21st century. Click here to view Kathy Munro's fantastic introduction and here to view the series index. The stories were written in 2005/6. Please note that the Parktown and Westcliff Heritage Trust transformed into the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation in 2012.
On a Saturday afternoon, an earnest and expectant crowd surrounds a woman in old Brixton Cemetery. They mentally recoil from smashed and overturned memorials, headstones and grave markers in this no longer used, historic gathering place for Johannesburg’s dead. The late summer afternoon sky is piled with thunderheads, but for the moment it’s hot, sunny and still; the wind presaging a highveld storm has not yet stirred. This short, blonde woman, knowledgeable and energetic, stands talking before a family grave. But her audience does not comprise mourners, rather they are visitors enjoying a tour of the graveyard, organized by the Parktown & Westcliff Heritage Trust. [P&W H T]
A scene from Brixton Cemetery (Kathy Munro)
Interred in this family plot are Randlord Lionel Phillips, his wife Florrie who founded the Johannesburg Art Gallery and their son Frank who managed the family farm in Magoebaskloof. Later she tells her listeners about Norman Anstey who ran his department store in the Art Deco building...
Grey haired, Charles Rhangani Furumele, a man exuding great seriousness, gentle courtesy and a yesteryear dignity, saw times tough enough as his young life unfolded, but, it seems, that his major life challenge was to successfully launch his children into a highly demanding world. The great key to advancement, Furumele asserts, is education; and furthermore, the two main door openers are competency in English and Mathematics. His own English is notably expressive and sharp too, is his arithmetic. He enabled his five children to receive their university degrees and college diplomas in financial circumstances which would have caused a less extraordinary man to despair of ever seeing his children move beyond basic, compulsory standards.
Charles Furumele grew ill while we were collaborating on this profile. He died without seeing its completion. I attended his funeral with an enhanced sense of loss. Later, his eldest son, Musa Stefane Furumele, assisted in completing the task. Some of what was first written in the present tense is now unfortunately, written in the past.
Charles, a widower lived with two sons in a house in Chiawelo, Soweto, an area originally designated for residents with Tsonga and Venda affiliations; in other words, those from the far north. It’s a house that no longer resembles its...
It took some hunting to find Kenneth Stanley Birch or KSB as he is sometimes called. With no telephone entry I began to feel like a private eye. I had incorrectly assumed him dead, because the dates on the prints of his memory provoking watercolours of Witwatersrand gold mines went back many years. My wife had found some of those prints buried in a charity shop. Knowing they would interest me, she bought some. They were more than interesting, providing as they did, a pictorial reminiscence of our economic heritage; the basic, golden reason for our existence in this great, forested metropolis on the highveld. I then made a few fruitless enquiries about the artist. Months later, Geoffrey Klass, of the Collectors Treasury (click here to read the essay on the Klass brothers), told me that he’d spoken to Ken Birch who sounded very much alive. But Klass could supply no contact details. After several other queries, someone confirmed that Birch had once been Group Architect for Anglo American Corp. So my quest moved to that company’s administration. Quite by accident, because Birch had taken a lump sum pension and was no longer on the books, a helpful woman ‘found’ the 90 year old. When contacted, he agreed to...
Melanie Yap is a petite, attractive, Chinese South African. Until recently she lived in an old, beautifully restored house in Kensington. Her partner died, causing her to sell the house and move away from the general area in which she’d been living since birth. Speaking to her for this book made me realize that perhaps it’s not well understood that all the ‘dark’ South Africans suffered the indignities and prohibitions of apartheid; no group was exempt. Yap includes a description of such a life in her story which follows.
Melanie Yap (LinkedIn)
I attended the launch of Melanie Yap’s comprehensive history of the Chinese in South Africa, Colour, Confusion and Concessions, written in collaboration with Dianne Leong Man. A short time thereafter I asked her about her next project? As they say here, she looked at me ‘skeef’ [dismissively, if you like], replying that she had absolutely no intention of undertaking any other similar venture. This is also a story about the agonies of writing a documentary history. We may be thankful for Yap’s dedication, for the discipline and correct...
Doris Mosikele has reverted to her maiden name. Her married name was Vilanculos. She came to Johannesburg some thirty years ago from Queenstown in the Eastern Cape. She works as a char four times a week. She lives in her own bitterly-fought-for home in Alexandra with her second daughter who is repeating matric. Her husband and son both died violently. Her first daughter is married and recently presented Doris with a lovely grandson. Her story is probably similar to that of many other women. She tells us about her life in her own words:
I was coming to Johannesburg in 1968, that time I was 18 years. I was living with my grandmother in Queenstown. I come to Johannesburg to earn some money to help my Grandmother. My other auntie was staying in Pimville. I arrived there to Soweto to stay with her and then I looking for a job. The first job was in a fish and chips there by Pimville. I worked there maybe one year. I was helping in the till, taking the money, I was peeling some potatoes, I helped to clean and do everything. I leaving school in standard six. I can read and write but not so very good to write. I speak...
Irving Lissoos earns his living as a highly respected, specialist urologist. He consults and operates from Milpark Hospital. But his life embraces other enthusiasms, among them a love of Johannesburg, partially illustrated by his membership of the Parktown and Westcliff Heritage Trust. Lissoos’s guided tours through Joburg’s old cemeteries in Braamfontein and Brixton are always sell outs. Lissoos lives in Victory Park. He grew up in Berea, attended Yeoville Boys’ and King Edward’s schools. I arrived in his rooms one day armed with a tape recorder and one or two simple questions, asking him to talk about his early life. Nothing had been planned. He quite spontaneously and easily advanced down ‘memory lane.’ He told me with many chuckles and obvious reminiscent enjoyment, about a social existence, the world of his childhood and youth, which no longer exists:
Braamfontein Cemetery (The Heritage Portal)
‘My mom was born in London. Her father was a cabinet maker who came to Johannesburg just after the turn of the 20th century. She went to school in London but never got a chance to...
During those terrible, destructive seconds in a microlight crash, the aircraft’s aluminium tail strut is driven through the pilot’s chest and out of his back, narrowly missing his heart. The strut has to be sawn shorter in order to load the man onto the ambulance helicopter. He’s flown to Johannesburg Hospital directly into the care of the Trauma Unit. Photographs of the man on an operating table put one in mind of the results of medieval jousts between lance bearing knights. One wonders, how can anyone survive such an accident? Today he’s flying again, once more instructing learner pilots. To what agency does that man owe his life? It’s a question that might well be asked by Joburg bomb victims during the eighties, by those hundreds of poisoned schoolgirls, by the survivors of the Ellis Park soccer disaster who were attended to and rendered safe, in a super efficient manner.
Johannesburg Hospital (The Heritage Portal)
Ken Boffard, Professor and Clinical Head, Department of Surgery, University of the Witwatersrand, which incorporates one of the world’s foremost trauma...
