The Blinded City: Ten Years In Inner-City Johannesburg

By Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon

Shortlisted for the 2023 Sunday Times Literary Awards

‘One of the best works of narrative non-fiction to emerge from the country in years. Quite simply brilliant.’ – NIREN TOLSI

Amid evictions, raids, killings, the drug trade, and fire, inner-city Johannesburg residents seek safety and a home. A grandmother struggles to keep her granddaughter as she is torn away from her. A mother seeks healing in the wake of her son’s murder. And displaced by the city’s drive for urban regeneration, a group of blind migrants try to carve out an existence.

The Blinded City recounts the history of inner-city Johannesburg from 2010 to 2019, primarily from the perspectives of the unlawful occupiers of spaces known as hijacked buildings, bad buildings or dark buildings. Tens of thousands of residents, both South African and foreign national, live in these buildings in dire conditions. This book tells the story of these sites and the court cases around them, which strike at the centre of who has the right to occupy the city.

In February 2010, while Johannesburg prepared for the FIFA World Cup, the South Gauteng High Court ordered the eviction of the unlawful occupiers of an abandoned carpet factory on Saratoga Avenue and that the city’s Metropolitan Municipality provide temporary emergency accommodation for the evicted. The case, which became known as Blue Moonlight and went to the Constitutional Court, catalysed a decade of struggles over housing and eviction in Johannesburg.

The Blinded City chronicles this case, among others, and the aftermath – a tumultuous period in the city characterised by recurrent dispossessions, police and immigration operations, outbursts of xenophobic violence, and political and legal change. All through the decade, there is the backdrop of successive mayors and their attempts to ‘clean up’ the city, and the struggles of residents and urban housing activists for homes and a better life. The interwoven narratives present a compelling mosaic of life in post-apartheid Johannesburg, one of the globe’s most infamous and vital cities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Picador Africa
• Release date: Jul 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781770107953

Book preview

Contents

Author’s Note

part 1: 2010–11

Chapter 1: In the Light of a Blue Moon

Chapter 2: The Camp and the City

Chapter 3: Chambers

Chapter 4: Love in the Dark

Chapter 5: The Station

part 2: 2012–13

Chapter 6: Place of Rest

Chapter 7: Sisterhood

Chapter 8: Cities of Light and Dark

Chapter 9: Petticoat Government

Chapter 10: Cape of Misfortune

part 3: 2014–15

Chapter 11: The Aftermath

Chapter 12: Zama Zama

Chapter 13: Killed for Beer

Chapter 14: Sweep Out the Dirt

Chapter 15: The Federation

part 4: 2016–17

Chapter 16: ‘We Have Broken Some Bones’

Chapter 17: Zimbabwe

Chapter 18: The Cape York Raid

Chapter 19: Washing

part 5: 2018–19

Chapter 20: Grey Zones

Chapter 21: The Fall

Chapter 22: Departures

Chapter 23: Endings

Chapter 24: Khay’elihle

Postscript: The Pandemic

Notes

Chapter Opening Photographs

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Photo Section

Author’s Note

This book is based on research I conducted in inner-city Johannesburg between 2010 and 2019 on unlawful occupations – so-called ‘hijacked buildings’, ‘bad buildings’ or ‘dark buildings’ – primarily in the areas of Doornfontein, New Doornfontein, the Johannesburg CBD, Berea and Hillbrow, though within the context of the city more widely.

The Blinded City is about life in these spaces, examined within a broader constellation of forces, in particular those of urban renewal, eviction and mass migration. It is about the ways they are haunted by the past, and the hopes they harbour within them.

I have used the real names of those I’ve interviewed where I was granted permission, and the real names of buildings in cases where either they already have legal protections against eviction, or where the buildings’ occupiers have been evicted; in cases where the residents of certain buildings are still subject to potential eviction or deportation, I have anonymised names and locations. Where I have not noted these in-text, I note which names are real and which are pseudonyms in the notes section. In general, I use first names for the key individuals in this book whose stories cut across chapters; otherwise, I use surnames.

In telling these stories I have drawn primarily on my own research. Where I have consulted other sources, or adapted elements from my own previously published articles, I have listed these in the notes at the end of the book, broadly following the narratives within the chapters.

PART 1

2010–11

Chapter 1

In the Light of a Blue Moon

On the night of 22 November 2003, in the Johannesburg General Hospital, Nomsa Ellen Dladla became a grandmother when her daughter Thandeka, aged 17, gave birth to a baby girl. The next morning grandmother and mother carried the baby, whom they named Nomi, through the expansive corridors of the hospital and out into the temperate summer day. They travelled by minibus taxi across the city to their home – 7 Saratoga Avenue.

Saratoga took its name from the house of an early American settler, presumably referring to the battle in the American War of Independence that effectively ended British colonialism. The avenue, one of the city’s principal thoroughfares, runs beneath a koppie of quartzite, grass and dust, which slopes upwards from Doornfontein to Berea and Hillbrow, whose brutalist high-rises stare down over the valley. Doornfontein township was one of Johannesburg’s first mining settlements, just north-east of the rocky patch of land between farms where the city was first formally established, eventually giving rise to the metropolis. The mansions and offices of some of the city’s early mining elite, the Randlords, were built on the avenue. Along its arc and nearby, interspersed between churches and petrol stations, a few of the old homes remain, their corrugated iron roofs now bent and scratched, and their Victorian grandeur anomalous against the frequently fire-scorched yellow of the hill.

Home for Nomsa and her daughter – and now a newborn baby girl – was a far cry from a magnate’s mansion. It was a single room, overlooking a courtyard, on the upper floor of the former office building of an abandoned inner-city carpet factory, surrounded by the high-rises that watched over them. To get there, that warm summer’s day, they had to walk up a driveway of pocked paving, past the old carpet factory made of brick and boarded up, now filled with shacks that had been constructed inside it, and the entangled webbing of illegal electricity wires.

The carpet factory and the now occupied buildings and garages were part of a development of flats that were originally approved in 1951 and built in line with apartheid’s drive for a monumental modernity, which Black South Africans laboured for but could only inhabit as outsiders.

This room was not the first place Nomsa had sought sanctuary, and a home, in the city. She had hoped her daughter would finish her schooling, make something of her life, but the pregnancy had complicated matters. Nomi’s arrival in the world brought with it new challenges, but it also renewed Nomsa’s desire to care for her family, to struggle for her place in the city’s sun. She had no premonition, at that point, of the many trials that lay ahead, or that she, and later her granddaughter, would be thrust into the centre of post-apartheid housing politics.

South African media and politicians had, from the early 2000s, invoked images of ‘hijacked buildings’ as proof of inner-city Johannesburg’s decline from a thriving metropolis to a place of stagnation, despair and crime. The residents of 7 Saratoga Avenue bore the mark of this stigma.

There is no statutory offence of ‘building hijacking’, only of trespassing, unlawful letting or fraud – and cases of unscrupulous characters producing fake title deeds are not unknown. But the terminology of ‘hijacking’ invokes images of armed gangs taking over buildings. This image was exemplified by the 2008 film Jerusalema, which was inspired by a real story set in Hillbrow, neighbouring Saratoga Avenue. It told the story of a slick former car hijacker who proclaimed the philosophy that hijacking was ‘affirmative repossession’ and later turned to taking over buildings under the guise of a housing trust.

In the first decade of the new millennium, the label ‘hijacked buildings’ or ‘bad buildings’ (a term used more widely to refer to buildings in various states of dereliction) became more prevalent among South African journalists and policy-makers, particularly so when the city was preparing for the most prominent international sporting event in the country’s history – South Africa being the host nation for the 2010 FIFA World Cup, which was due to take place in June and July. In preparation, the municipality renovated the areas around stadiums, while a speculative real-estate fever targeted the city’s derelict buildings. But 2010 was also to be the year when the residents of one of these so-called ‘hijacked buildings’ would upend this image – and publicly so.

Organised syndicates had certainly been involved in fraud and forcefully taking over buildings in the new millennium, but were these syndicates really responsible for most rundown, unlawfully occupied or ‘bad’ buildings in the city? And did the image of ‘hijacking’ veil more than it revealed about the housing crisis in Johannesburg and South Africa more widely?

The story of 7 Saratoga Avenue, its residents and their legal struggles, tells a different story – one of intimacy, loss and personal rebirth – and one that had significant consequences for the housing politics and policy of the decade after 2010. The story of a grandmother and her fight to care for her granddaughter exemplifies the untold story of unlawful occupations in Johannesburg.

Nomsa Ellen Dladla, born in 1959, left the mining town of Newcastle in KwaZulu-Natal in the late 1970s, where her parents had laboured on the coal mines and farms. After her mother’s death, and with only one year of secondary education, Nomsa moved to Soweto in 1979 in the wake of the 1976 student uprisings, where she lived with her aunt. A slight, shy and reserved young woman, she had avoided politics.

Like many Black women during apartheid, Nomsa led an itinerant life as a cleaner, child-carer and informal trader and lived in many places in the city – first with her aunt in Soweto, then several buildings in Hillbrow, and the suburban home of a white Italian family. During her time in Hillbrow, she lived in Ponte, meaning ‘bridge’ in Portuguese. An entry point to this vast 54-storey circular icon was Saratoga Avenue, and Nomsa rented a room on one of the upper floors. Hillbrow had become, in the 1980s, one of the first mixed-race residential areas in the city, though social segregation was still strong. Nomsa worked in a bar frequented mainly by whites and took solace in the song and prayer of a basement Zionist church and in the arms of her boyfriend, whom she met in 1984. They went to parties where they would listen to reggae, braai and have a few beers. Although he was often separated from Nomsa, they had a child together. Thandeka was born on 30 January 1986.

With the end of apartheid in 1990 and the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994, Nomsa was free to move and live where she liked, and yet her economic conditions changed little. In the late 1990s, she worked at a stall beside Joubert Park, selling ice-cream and cigarettes. It was there that a fellow trader told her about 7 Saratoga Avenue. When Nomsa first visited Saratoga, carpets were still hanging in an old showroom. The factory was boarded up to create separate rooms. The place offered the bare minimum of facilities: communal toilets, lighting and water. But rent was cheap – R600 a month for a room in the converted office building. Nomsa and her daughter moved into Saratoga Avenue in 1999, into a room with two other women.

Her neighbours were also from KwaZulu-Natal, and Nomsa enjoyed the communal life at Saratoga, which revolved around the rhythms of work, washing and cleaning. It reminded her of the sense of solidarity she had felt as a child in KwaZulu-Natal: the camaraderie while harvesting maize, potatoes and cabbages; the girls collecting firewood from the nearby veld and forests; sitting around the woodstove, telling stories.

The relative stability of Nomsa’s life was disrupted when Thandeka fell pregnant. The pregnancy placed added pressure on Nomsa’s already strained relationship with her partner, contributing to a decisive split.

In 2005, when Nomi was almost two, strange men claiming to represent the building owners began turning up at 7 Saratoga and demanding that the residents vacate the premises. They came during the day when Nomsa was working, so she heard about the visits in the evening. It was then that the residents realised that the man they had been paying rent to, who was also the caretaker, did not represent the building’s real owners. Unbeknown to Nomsa and her neighbours, the previous year a company known as Blue Moonlight Properties 39 had bought the property with the intention to renovate and sell. It had paid just over R1 million for its 2 000 square metres. At the time, inner-city investments were high risk, as the inner city remained associated with crime, but they also promised among the highest yields on any property in the country.

Like the other occupants, Nomsa had thought she was paying rent to the owners through the caretaker. One day, he simply disappeared, taking with him all the money she had paid. Since then, several individuals had claimed to represent the owners, though Blue Moonlight Properties claimed they had received no money.

In February 2006, water was cut off from the building, forcing residents to collect water from a public taxi rank almost a kilometre away.

In May, Blue Moonlight Properties filed eviction proceedings against the occupiers.

In February 2007, men claiming to represent the owners of the building disconnected the residents’ electricity supply. One of these men later threatened that he would return soon to the building ‘with the Red Ants’ to evict the residents. He made good on this threat. Around 4 am in the predawn hours of Monday, 26 February 2007, Nomsa and her family were abruptly woken by a knock on their door. It was the police.

‘The police came knocking at each and every room. The police told us to take our IDs and bank accounts and get out. They took us out,’ Nomsa said. By nature a quiet and contained woman who avoided conflict, Nomsa acquiesced without a fight. Three generations – Nomsa, her daughter and granddaughter – fled with the crowd down the small road towards Saratoga Avenue, with Nomi crying.

Those of her neighbours who resisted had their doors and windows broken. The police, led by a white officer, went into residents’ rooms with flashlights and threatened some with guns. They hit a man with a flashlight and forced his brother out of their room in his underwear. Police lined up residents beside the entry gate, making them kneel and squat and taking their fingerprints, before telling them to go down the short driveway to the street. In Saratoga Avenue, a police barricade and around 15 to 20 vehicles waited alongside a truck full of men the residents presumed to be the notorious private evicting force known as the ‘Red Ants’. In the street, the policeman leading the raid fired rubber bullets at several residents who were walking away. Together, 62 adults and nine children were on the street.

The South African Constitution protects against arbitrary evictions and provides that no eviction can take place legally without a court order. At the time men started showing up at 7 Saratoga in 2007, Nomsa did not know her rights, but one of her neighbours, Themba Koketi, was well informed.

Born in 1979 near Vryheid, a coal mining town in KwaZulu-Natal, after school Koketi had come to Johannesburg to study in 2000, and he moved into Saratoga that same year. ‘It was my home, my community. I did very well with that particular community of Saratoga,’ he said. ‘I liked living there.’ Now he was a sociology and psychology student at the University of the Witwatersrand. He approached the university’s pro bono Wits Law Clinic. In the open office space, Koketi spoke to a candidate attorney in her early 20s called Nomzamo Zondo. She was from the Eastern Cape township of Mdantsane.

Zondo’s parents had met in the pineapple canning factory where they both worked; her father was a pioneering trade unionist in the area. He had died of leukaemia when Nomzamo was only 15, devastating the girl, but he had left her with a desire to take part in legal and civic struggles, a hunger that would lead her to study law, an opportunity denied to her father by the inequalities of apartheid. This aspiration took her to Johannesburg to study law at Wits and, in 2006, to join the Wits Law Clinic. Her encounter with Koketi was fortuitous. Zondo did not get involved in the case at the time, but, seven years later, she would come to play a central role in the lives of the Saratoga community, and particularly that of Nomsa.

Zondo referred Koketi to the Centre for Applied Legal Studies, or CALS, also based at the university, a pro bono legal activist organisation founded in 1978. There, Koketi and others met a young research officer and paralegal named Stuart Wilson, and this spiky-haired Mancunian and his colleagues took on the case. Before the court process could follow its course, however, conditions in Saratoga would radically worsen and Wilson and Koketi would be put into action when the threat of eviction became a reality.

Under South African law, sheriffs are appointed by the court to undertake evictions; it is they who select the eviction companies and bill the owners. They are the intermediaries between the security companies, courts and property owners.

The Red Ants were a private security company that had terrorised poor urban households for years. The company was registered as Wozani Security on 30 December 1998, and its head, Johannes Abraham Bosch, had been part of the apartheid-era army deployed in Angola. Many in South Africa’s security industry are former soldiers and police officers. Wozani received one of its first major contracts in 2001 from the Gauteng Department of Housing, when they were contracted to demolish 3 000 shacks near the banks of the Jukskei River in Alexandra, a township to the north of the city, for relocation. In the summer rains, the river sometimes flooded and shack-living on the banks was precarious. The Red Ants’ work in Alexandra was described in the media at the time as a ‘reign of terror’. Residents accused the organisation of abduction, torture and assault – claims the company denied. Further evictions of thousands throughout the city involved widespread accusations of beatings and theft.

In September 2005, the City of Johannesburg accused Wozani of bribery and misrepresenting its Black Economic Empowerment credentials. An investigation into the City’s Housing Department’s director and vice-director had found irregularities in the renewal of Wozani’s tender and the City vowed not to employ them again.

Despite the City’s request to the sheriff of the court not to contract Wozani, the sheriff said he would continue to employ them, as, unlike other security firms, they offered a ‘paramilitary force’. Bosch continued offering eviction services under a different company name: Red Ant Security Relocation and Eviction Services. Once a label of fear, the ‘Red Ants’ had now been formally registered.

The men who invaded Saratoga refused to identify themselves and had no court order, and yet they conducted the eviction with the support and blessing of the police. It was unclear whether they were the real Red Ants or one of the copycat groups that had begun springing up throughout the city – companies which, like Wozani, employed poor men on low wages.

When the raid began, Koketi phoned Wilson from CALS. Wilson went to Saratoga Avenue first thing in the morning, where he spoke with the white police officer in charge. When asked for a copy of the court order, the policeman was unable to produce one. In spite of the fact that he had ordered residents to take their possessions out of the rooms, he denied it was an eviction. He claimed it was merely a routine search and raid. The police left, leaving the ‘Red Ants’ behind, who threatened the residents with crowbars. They were led by a man, who residents identified as ‘coloured’, in a two-piece suit and carrying a pistol. They broke down the shacks that had been built in the old factory, and stole money and phones.

Wilson left the site to collect Shereza Sibanda, who worked with a group called the Inner City Resource Centre. This non-profit organisation had been formed in 2002, arising out of a movement of inner-city residents campaigning against eviction; it advocated around issues of housing, eviction and water and electricity cut-offs. When they returned, Wilson and Sibanda were threatened and manhandled by the men. They confronted the leader of the ‘Red Ants’, who claimed to be acting on behalf of the owners. After some negotiation, at around 6.45 am the community returned to the property. When the policeman in charge came back, he called Wilson a ‘fucking bastard’ and the residents ‘drug dealers, thugs and criminals’.

The distressing and frightening event was an assault on the residents’ very being and right to live in the city. In the raid, no arms or drugs were found and there was only one arrest of an undocumented migrant living on the property. It later emerged that the Provincial Commissioner of the South African Police Service had authorised the warrantless search-and-seizure raid. And while the men in uniform did not identify themselves, the Commissioner of the Hillbrow Police Station later confirmed in written correspondence to the residents’ lawyers that the ‘residents were to be evicted by the sheriff with the help of Police and the Red-Ants, but the sheriff never came with the necessary order’. Who the men were and who paid them was never definitively resolved. No court order had been granted, and the police did not explain why they had – unlawfully – assisted an eviction without one.

In the new millennium, cordoning off an inner-city block to facilitate raids on the homes of the poor – without warrants or even evidence of wrongdoing – was to become a central way that state authorities dealt with so-called hijacked buildings, and it would be more than a decade before these blunt methods were constitutionally challenged.

The attempted removal of the Saratoga Avenue residents was only the beginning of their fight. For Nomsa, the attempted eviction initiated years in which her home and safety would dissolve. She and her neighbours no longer paid rent after the eviction and return, but living without electricity and in the darkness was tough. ‘It was very bad. It was cold. You had to buy paraffin, candles,’ said Nomsa. ‘People called the building mnyamandawo. It is a bad name, but when there are no tsotsis, no fighting or anything, it’s okay. As long as you know somebody who’s still inside there, it’s not bad.’

The building had become one of the city’s infamous ‘dark buildings’, or an ‘mnyamandawo’ in city slang and grammatically informal isiZulu. The term became widely and variably used by inner-city residents to describe unlawfully occupied and slum buildings in the inner city. It referred both to the lack of electricity, and for many it also had resonances of secrecy and misfortune.

Despite the worsening conditions, the building remained a peaceful space for Nomsa and her neighbours. Everyday life was distant from the popular image of a hijacked building. Frequently, as in the case of 7 Saratoga, those who ‘hijack’ the buildings are not armed criminals but opportunists who take advantage of absent owners to deceive residents. The occupants of the city’s dark buildings are mostly not criminals. Rather, like Nomsa, they are usually informal workers – traders, cleaners – or the unemployed, people who cannot afford rentals in inner-city Johannesburg but need to live there to sustain their livelihood.

They lit the room with candles and paraffin lamps. They cooked on a Primus stove. As there was no water in the taps, their evening routine now included pushing wheelbarrows laden with buckets to a taxi rank in Doornfontein, almost a kilometre away, where they would collect water from an open stand-pipe. Conversation and song lightened these tiresome journeys.

In the evenings, Nomi would sit in the lamplight, listening to stories and singing hymns with her mother and grandmother. Thandeka and Nomi both loved drawing, and they would tape their finished pictures up on the kitchen wall.

At night the courtyard was illuminated by moonlight, the glow of fires and the ambient light from the multi-storey tenements surrounding the old factory. This was where residents would hold community meetings and discuss issues of cleaning and security. For special events like birthdays, residents would arrange instruments to play maskanda, the distinctive trance-like rhythm from rural KwaZulu-Natal, brew traditional beer and dance. The residents’ legal team would also meet in the courtyard to collect affidavits.

Nomi would grow up sharing the yard with friends, playing football and ngendo – a complex game played throughout southern Africa involving juggling an increasing and then a decreasing number of stones in the air – and learning Zulu dances from the community around her.

The residents of Saratoga had recreated a version of the Doornfontein yard culture from almost a century earlier. Amid the dereliction of urban life in the early twentieth century, the yards were places of Black social life: of beer, marabi dance and prophecy. White administrators had annihilated these yards in the drive to cleanse the city of the Black working class – evictions that laid the basis for apartheid-era segregation.

In the ‘new’ South Africa, working-class Black residents would still, almost a century later, be threatened by the forces of eviction in the name of urban renewal. In the twenty-first century, ‘bad buildings’, because of their location in inner-city areas, were not classified by the state as ‘informal settlements’, which would have qualified them for funds for upgrading. They were both multi-storeyed and multi-storied.

Nomsa worked her stall at the park most days, but when she took time off on the weekends she would sit with Thandeka in the courtyard and braid her hair with multi-coloured wool. Thandeka dropped out of school and started attending night classes. She also worked for a while as a waitress in a restaurant near the airport, to the east of the city. ‘She was shy and very quiet,’ Nomsa says of her daughter. ‘She liked pictures. She liked decorations and drawings.’

This home, braided from the thin strands of the city’s hopes, was not to last. Number 7 Saratoga Avenue would be the last home they would know together.

In June 2009, when the family visited their home in Newcastle, Thandeka fell ill. Concerned by her recurrent bouts of vomiting, Nomsa took her to a clinic in Newcastle and later in Johannesburg, but the doctors could not find the cause of the illness. Nomsa believed Thandeka had been poisoned, although she did not know by whom or what the motive could have been. She returned to Newcastle with her daughter and granddaughter. Thandeka died there at 23, on 31 October 2009. Nomsa buried her only daughter in the place she had left three decades earlier. Johannesburg would be no resting place.

Nomsa’s world unravelled. She had lost her only daughter and had to care for six-year-old Nomi in a building without electricity or water. The on-going and seemingly endless legal proceedings, the deteriorating conditions at 7 Saratoga, and the precarious informal work all took their toll on her. Faced with the overwhelming responsibility before her, there were times when she fell into despair. But she knew she had to survive – if only for the sake of her granddaughter. She was now both mother and grandmother. Nomsa recalls that she survived the period ‘like a mother. You have to think what to do. When you want something good for yourself and your family, you must think.’

Meanwhile, during this personal ordeal, the case, which became known as Blue Moonlight, continued. Following the residents’ return to the building in 2007, the occupants’ lawyers launched an application for the City of Johannesburg to be joined to the case.

The average income of the occupiers of 7 Saratoga was below R800 a month, and the cheapest available accommodation in the city was around R850 per month. Considering previous Constitutional Court judgments, the residents and their lawyers argued that the municipal government had to provide temporary emergency housing because eviction would lead to homelessness.

In 2009, the South Gauteng High Court ordered the City to provide a