Rosettenville: Home is where
Neighbours turn away, authorities wash their hands — the story of this house is of neglect, despair and nyaope
Awell-thumbed novel lies open on the floor, centimetres away from used condoms and empty plastic bankies, with traces of a white powder still inside them. The book is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped; it begins with a journey to a ruinous place of fear and evil.
The book and other discarded items lie in a place that was once a home. That was before the spaza shop. Before the sex workers and their pimps moved in. Before the anger of the residents spilled over into a blaze. Before even the nyaope addicts. This is 18 Norman Street in Rosettenville, Johannesburg. This is the story of a house.
Quiet neighbourhood
At 18 Norman Street, a father opened his gate on a Sunday morning dressed in his shirt, tie and polished shoes. The squeals and excited banter of his young children carried from the backyard. In early 2013, the corner of Victoria and Norman streets was quiet. Neighbours knew each other by name. They looked out for each other.
The area was dominated by elderly people, says a 64-year-old neighbour to Number 18.
Now, his house is surrounded by reinforced palisade and electric fencing, the perimeter monitored by closed-circuit cameras. “The Nigerians” lingers on fearful lips like a bogeyman. The neighbour refuses to reveal his name for fear of reprisals.
Rosettenville residents talk of “the Nigerians” as the ringleaders of the drug and sex worker rings that have mushroomed in the suburb — whether they are Nigerians could not be verified by the Mail & Guardian.
The people who moved in after the family left the house were all young men. It didn’t take residents long to realise they were now living near a brothel.
When the neighbour emerged from behind his security cordon, the taunts started: “Get out! Get out!” or “You better sell your house!”
The pavement outside his house became a no-go zone after nightfall. In his letterbox, he routinely found threatening notes demanding he sell his house.
“I have picked up condoms and tissue paper from people having sex against my fence at night. It’s happened so many times. I can’t even walk the streets anymore,” he said at his gate, appearing eager to return to the safety of his yard, behind his 2.5m reinforced steel gate.
At 18 Norman Street, the yard is littered with condoms — there are dozens, used and unused — empty alcohol bottles and items of women’s clothing.
The neighbour carries pepper spray at all times and asked his brother to move in with him. Every trip out of his home is accompanied by a thorough security check.
Another neighbour, a 20-year-old woman, said “everything changed when the Nigerians came three years ago”. Her father raised their wall soon after their arrival, only to have their house burgled anyway.
Now, a sense of fear dominates her attitude towards the neighbourhood. “My mom is terrified to walk out the front door. They deliberately target the school kids. They look for the uniforms, give them nyaope and get them hooked. They give them freebies and demand payment later,” she said. “A friend of mine got involved with them. When she didn’t pay up, they cut her face,” she said.
Tuck shop
Kadir Kasem (46) opened his general dealer “Saad tuck shop” in the garage of 18 Norman Street in August 2015, selling bread, milk and nonperishable food, fresh vegetables, cleaning products, cigarettes and airtime. He named the shop after his son and got one of his Ethiopian countrymen to live in the room adjacent to it, in the corner home’s yard.
For six months business continued smoothly. Kasem paid R3000 rent to a man who had already occupied the house. He never asked who he was or whether he owned the house. While delivering stock every week, Kasem said he received no reports of “crimes” happening in the house.
Kasem hired locals to paint advertisements of items for sale on the outside walls soon after it opened: rice, washing powder, sunflower oil, brown sugar and maize meal.
Two years later, these painted adverts are the only signs of a time when the house did not stir up controversy or hatred among its neighbours.
“Everything went fine when I opened, business was very good,” Kasem said this week. “The street was quiet. Mothers and children came to the shop all the time to buy sweets. Children played in front of the shop.”
But, by December 2016, residents of Rosettenville had grown impatient with law enforcement’s inaction about their complaints over brothels and drug dens, and Kasem had noticed a marked increase in the number of men loitering at street crossings.
“There used to be many people standing on corners and women coming to cars,” he said. “I wanted to close it that time but people were still buying from the shop.”
The dealers who lived in the house had an established system, known to their customers, to sell the drugs.
“One of the guys would stand at the bottom of the road and, when you pass there with the car, you give him the money,” said one Rosettenville resident. “At the top, here at the corner where the house is, there will be another Nigerian guy with big muscles waiting. He gives you the drugs, then you drive off.”
Two months later, in February, 18 Norman Street was one of the Rosettenville residents’ first targets in fighting the drug scourge. Frustration erupted into vigilante justice. The house was attacked with petrol bombs and the furniture carried outside and torched on the pavement. Kasem’s shop was looted.
“They took everything, everything. They didn’t even leave one packet of food or soap. Only shelves [were left],” he said. He lost nearly R25 000 to looting that day.
When the M&G visited the house the day after the attack, five men were cleaning up and repairing the electrical box in Kasem’s shop.
Sex and drugs
Residents of Victoria and Norman