Ron Nerio - The Roads to Hillbrow: Making Life in South Africas Community of Migrants

POLIS: Fordham Series in Urban Studies

Edited by Daniel J. Monti, Saint Louis University

POLIS will address the questions of what makes a good community and how urban dwellers succeed and fail to live up to the idea that people from various backgrounds and levels of society can live together effectively, if not always congenially. The series is the province of no single discipline; we are searching for authors in fields as diverse as American studies, anthropology, history, political science, sociology, and urban studies who can write for both academic and informed lay audiences. Our objective is to celebrate and critically assess the customary ways in which urbanites make the world corrigible for themselves and the other kinds of people with whom they come into contact every day.

To this end, we will publish both book-length manuscripts and a series of digital shorts (e-books) focusing on case studies of groups, locales, and events that provide clues as to how urban people accomplish this delicate and exciting task. We expect to publish one or two books every year but a larger number of digital shorts. The digital shorts will be 20,000 words or fewer and have a strong narrative voice.

SERIES ADVISORY BOARD:

Michael Ian Borer, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Japonica Brown-Saracino, Boston University

Michael Goodman, UMass Dartmouth

R. Scott Hanson, The University of Pennsylvania

Annika Hinze, Fordham University

Elaine Lewinnek, California State University, Fullerton

Ben Looker, Saint Louis University

Ali Modarres, University of Washington Tacoma

Bruce ONeil, Saint Louis University

MAKING LIFE IN SOUTH AFRICAS COMMUNITY OF MIGRANTS

Ron Nerio and Jean Halley

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESSNEW YORK2022

Copyright 2022 Ron Nerio and Jean Halley

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Printed in the United States of America

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First edition

To Beverley Ditsie, the memory of Simon Nkoli, and the people of Hillbrow

Ron Nerio

For twenty-three years I longed to revisit South Africa. I wanted to see Hillbrow again. When I knew it in 1990, this one-mile strip of dense urban landscape was the most exciting neighborhood I had ever seen. It was one of South Africas only grey zones, a racially mixed neighborhood of streets lined with cafs, restaurants, bookstores, record shops, and nightclubs. Its sidewalks community had also emerged and made itself visible in a handful of bars and restaurants. In a notoriously conservative and repressive country, the vibe in Hillbrow was cosmopolitan and bohemian, optimistic about the future and perhaps fatalistic at the same time.

The fatalism was warranted. Hillbrow had already grown rough around the edges by 1990, or so it would seem from news reports of widespread criminal activity dating from that era. I was twenty years old at the time and do not remember it that way. I recall walking along Pretoria and Kotze Streets, its main thoroughfares, day or night, alone or with friends, and not thinking for a moment about danger. Anna Hartford notes that as early as 1980, the minister of community development had denounced Hillbrow as a scandal and a slum. This only meant, she writes, that it was the place to go for excitement seekers in a country otherwise so conservative television was banned until 1976.

The ministers description was a laughable exaggeration, but change was imminent and in terms of crime would prove overwhelming. At the dawn of 1991, writes Phaswane Mpe in Welcome to Our Hillbrow, his haunting, elegiac tribute to the beauty and tragedy of the neighborhood, Hillbrow was a menacing monster, so threatening to its neighbors like Berea and downtown Johannesburg, that big, forward-looking companies were beginning to desert the inner city.

By the mid-1990s, Johannesburg was beset by an incredible tsunami of crime, says Clifford Bestall in his documentary Hillbrow: Between Heaven and Hell.

On that first trip, in 1990, I spent only five months in Hillbrow, a total of six and a half in South Africa. Back in the United States, by the end of that year, I found it difficult to follow developments in the neighborhood. That was before the days of the internet. Most news about Johannesburg that filtered its way to US media dwelt on its violent crime rate, which had risen to the highest in the world by the end of the 1990s, without much context. Having had many years of experience in Michigan cities that had at various times the highest crime rates in the USFlint, Saginaw, DetroitI knew that such statistics never tell the full story. I was determined to return, to see what elements of the former Hillbrow had survived and to see what life was like there now.

During the past decade, which tells the stories of recent arrivals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville), and Zimbabwe.