Fietas vanished like dream
UFRIEDA HO
NAIL varnish, like the Fietas aunties wore, and the pretty dresses in the shop windows of the People’s Bazaar caught Salma Patel’s eye when she was girl growing up in the suburb that started life as Joburg’s “Malay camp” in 1893.
Today the suburb, situated in western Johannesburg, is known as Pageview. But back then the Malay camp became Fietas – and was a trading and shopping Mecca that thrived till the 1970s.
But it vanished like a dream by the time the Group Areas Act got hold of it. Still, it’s memories Patel holds on to because she says the 26 parallel streets of the suburb tell a story history should not forget.
By 1904 fears of plague pushed people out of the centre of burgeoning Joburg. Fietas became a working class community of Indians, coloureds, blacks and Chinese.
Patel’s family home was on 21st Street but for the past 25 years she’s lived in the last remaining original Fietas house on 14th Street. The house at number 25 is a newly declared provincial heritage site.
Artist Manfred Hermer’s drawings in his book The Passing of Pageview show residents and shoppers crowding streets, parked cars keeping traders interested and double-storey buildings standing with their proud columns. Author Nat Nakasa wrote that 14th Street was “long overdue for recognition as one of Johannesburg’s most famous streets”.
Patel says: “I had a wonderful childhood. My neighbours were Chinese and Indian families, I didn’t know colour or status and you could buy just about anything on 14th Street.”
Her house is the only double-storey original shop/dwelling of its kind that survived the eviction campaigns that started in 1968. Fietas became Pageview by 1943 and the Group Areas Act of 1950 was intent on making parts of Pageview whites-only.
Buildings were razed to the ground and families ordered to relocate to Lenasia – and to trade in the Oriental Plaza, with its inflated rentals.
Some families moved, others ignored the orders. Even so, by the end of 1977 old Pageview was destroyed. The city’s plans to build homes for white families never took off. Today the suburb is pockmarked with vacant stands, a few new houses, a few old homes, the mosque and number 25.
Author Alan Paton wrote of Pageview: “It is the story of another triumphant operation of the Group Areas Act, another destruction of a place that had a unique inner life, a life that is irrecoverable, for it can never be found again in the soulless townships that replace what has been destroyed.”
Patel’s house was built in 1938. It’s typical of the buildings of the time with shop space at the bottom and three to four residential units on top – two rooms and a kitchen each. There were wide balconies and communal bathrooms.
“This house was built by Mall Hoosein but he never lived here,” says Patel.
As a successful businessman Hoosein had other properties. The Surtee family moved in when the building was finished. The house though was custom-fit for Hoosein, who was nearly 2 metres tall.
“It’s impossible to heat, but there’s a generosity of space with these high ceilings that I love. The architects and builders had to be ingenious too.
“They built up because Paul Kruger didn’t give the community a lot of land,” says Patel. The house has original stained glass windows depicting the Islamic motifs of a star and a crescent moon.
Original green tiles on the facade are mostly intact and are a reminder of the grandeur of the house. Funeral processions of community leaders left from the house and weddings took place in it – including the wedding of Patel’s parents.