Helping Hillbrow see the light again
Foundation reaches out to those who call decaying inner-city home
THE GROUNDS of the Lutheran Outreach Foundation in Hillbrow are a vein of gold hidden within the drab cityscape. From the entrance overlooking a dance studio, the playground and the 100-year-old Friendenskirche, it’s easy to forget you are in Hillbrow.
On a warm day, strolling past the vine-covered walls of the old German church or sitting on the polished wooden benches of the dance studio’s raised-outdoor amphitheatre offers an experience entirely separate from that on the streets. And with the gates kept open most of the day, it’s a space intended for the public.
“You see, Hillbrow has changed,” says Mike Mkhwanazi, a facilitator at the Hillbrow Theatre, which operates within the outreach foundation complex. “Imagine, today, when I walk, I can carry my phone on the street, in the day or at night.”
For Mkhwanazi, the biggest problems the inner-city suburb faces are drugs and alcohol.
“Drugs are being sold like sweets,” he says, adding he believes the police do little to combat this.
Other members of the community share Mkhwanazi’s belief that drugs, coupled with prostitution, are the greatest challenges Hillbrow faces.
“Many people that are illegal occupy the buildings,” says Esther Ntema, “And it poses a huge danger for the children.”
Ntema works as a counsellor for Kids’ Week, an outreach foundation programme designed to give children something to do during the school holidays.
“You find the children having to smoke drugs and they actually end up, some of them, giving their bodies away,” she says.
The point of Kids’ Week is to provide children with a place to escape life on the streets, feel accepted and valued no matter their situation at home. Although it is Christianfocused, Ntema emphasises all are most welcome.
“That’s why you can have Muslim kids coming here,” she says. “It’s to get them to love themselves before they love the rest of the world. It’s to get them to have high self-esteem, because most of the children here struggle; they battle to find reason to love themselves.”
The Hillbrow Theatre is another place children can learn to cope with the situations they encounter on a daily basis. Last year, it celebrated its 10th anniversary.
“We’re basically an after-school programme, so we have children and youths come in after school, doing performing arts activities,” says Gerard Bester, the creative coordinator for the theatre.
At various events throughout the year, students are encouraged to tell their own stories, working through things happening in their lives in the company of a supportive group of peers and mentors.
“A lot of the kids speak about this being a sort of secondary home.
“At the moment, we don’t like to call ourselves a drama school. For me, it’s more about the soft skills. It’s about teamwork, it’s about confidence building,” says Bester.
Johan Robyn, who has worked as a counsellor in Hillbrow for 14 years, agrees that drugs are a big problem, especially for residents who have lost their jobs.
Drawing a grid on a piece of paper, he breaks Hillbrow’s community into four parts. He says the bulk of residents fall into two categories: transient and permanent working class. Transient workers typically work as security guards or cleaners, and move from residence to residence as their situation changes.
Permanent workers tend to commute to work elsewhere in the city, while they live in the nicer accommodation available in Hillbrow.
The two other groups are the vulnerable people living on the streets and the scattering of older white people who have lived in Hillbrow since the apartheid era. These two groups, he says, are smaller and more vulnerable than the other two.
“The vulnerable can be the unemployed worker in transit,” he says. “He just lost his job, he couldn’t get his things together. He kicked his girlfriend out, he kicked his brother out and now he’s losing the flat and ends up on the street.”
The older people are often abandoned by their families and incapable of leaving on their own. These different communities interact in ways that are sometimes positive, and sometimes negative.
“It really is Johannesburg’s first integrated neighbourhood,” says Josie Adler, former co-ordinator for the eKhaya Neighbourhood Improvement Programme, a coalition of building and property managers in Hillbrow. Adler says not only is the area home to South Africans and foreigners but also includes properly managed buildings alongside illegally occupied ones.
“It’s a different model from other places,” says Bafikile Mkhize, eKhaya’s current co-ordinator from her desk in the building alongside the Hillbrow Theatre. She emphasises that other urban-renewal models across the city tend to displace people rather than include them.
“They want to push the people out and build their perfect communities. But those people must be included,” she says.
According to Gerald Garner, author of the book Johannesburg Ten Ahead: a decade of inner-city regeneration exclusivity is important in urban redevelopment.
“If you create a city of just lowerclass people, you create a ghetto,” he says, but notes that gentrification is not desirable either.
Mfaniseni Sihlongonyane, an associate professor of architecture and urban planning at Wits University, agrees: “You shouldn’t actually be displacing different segments of society,” he says. “You should be embracing them.”
Sihlongonyane advocates a bottom-up approach to redevelopment, one that looks at the needs of the people who live in a community, not just the potential for attracting tourists and leisure seekers. In Hillbrow, this approach seems to be gaining momentum.
“They started looking at Hillbrow as not only an area for wealthy people,” he says, citing housing plans designed to accommodate residents of a range of income levels as a sign the community is remaining inclusive.
“When you see the shop ads for kids’ clothes, that’s telling you that a lot of people are staying in Hillbrow – and they’re not going anywhere.
Mkhwanazi sees much the same thing. “Most people living in Hillbrow are people in transit. (But) in the last few years, people are starting to treat Hillbrow as their home.”