THE LAND OF MILK AND HONEY

The Hillbrow I know is different to other places. The community is together, whether you are from Zimbabwe or Nigeria. When there are xenophobic attacks around the city it does not affect Hillbrow.

Welly comes from Lusaka. He came to South Africa a few years ago to pursue new opportunities like anyone else. In Zambia they say South Africa is the land of milk and honey.

Welly worked for a few years as an accountant. His wife is a nurse and they have two children. They lived in Soweto. He decided to go back to school full-time to study Business Administration and his wife and him decided to go their separate ways. She moved to Cape Town and he had nowhere to go.

He became a member of our flat community. I shared food with him and we would buy groceries together and keep them in one bucket. We shared cooking. We mostly buy beef bones and cook those with pap and rice.

All this time I have known him he has never gone home. Once I asked him for his parents’ or next of kin contact details in case something bad happened to him. He did not give them. I often wonder what is going on with his family.

David Majoka

NTHUNDI SELLS RAINWATER

It was a cloudy and misty Monday and the rain came pouring down. Not my favourite weather. But it was also a time when we had a very serious water crisis in the inner city of Johannesburg. There was no water. The taps were dry. I desperately needed some water to take some pain medication.

Grace, one of the housemates, went knocking from flat to flat asking for water. Luckily she got some and gave me a glass. Some people went to the drain taps on the street. Others went as far as Braamfontein in search of water.

Then Nthundi, a housemate who sleeps in the kitchen, had an idea. There was rain water coming down the gutter outside the building.

Later I heard a voice shouting, ‘R20! R20. Take it or leave it!’

It was Nthundi advertising his new product. There was a long queue. People desperate to get water were buying his rain water from the gutter at R20 for 25 litres. On that cold, wet and rainy day, Nthundi did pretty well for himself.

David Majoka

JOLA OWES MONEY

Jola, 54 years old, is from Alice. He was once a prison warder but he got fired. He stayed in our flat for more than four years. He worked as a security officer.

When he first arrived in Johannesburg he would wake me up to go with him to the ATM and help him use it. Each time he would choose someone else. Right after withdrawing the money he would buy meat and one of us would cook it for the boys in the flat.

But then Jola lost his job. He couldn’t pay rent. He owed me R60. He also owed other people in the flat quite a bit of money. Jola told us his employers had not paid him for six months. One morning I woke up and saw Jola packing his clothes into a big Shangaan bag. He said he was on his way to get money from his work place. There were others at work like him who hadn’t been paid and that day they were going to fetch the money they had been promised. He said he would come back to the flat to pay everyone and then he was leaving. He wanted to drop his bag at Park Station in the cloak room so he could take an early morning train the next day. Jola left saying he would come back. That was the last time anyone saw him.

David Majoka

COOKING

We all keep our groceries in different buckets in the kitchen. But sometimes if you have a lot of food in your bucket it will get stolen. Welly is a gentleman from Lusaka, Zambia. We sometimes cook together. I like to cook. I learned it from my grandmother when I was 11 years old. My father and grandmother came back very late from work and I was the eldest child, so I helped my grandmother. I like to mix spices to make curry. Being in the kitchen over a stove is one of my favourite things. But I get tired of cooking for others who don’t ever cook or wash dishes. But if someone says they haven’t eaten all day, I always try to help.

David Majoka

SKOP AT BAR 45

Bar 45 is situated in Yeoville, a suburb in the northeast of central Johannesburg. AboMkhaya, Xhosa migrants, come here to relax and drink beer. It’s owned by my aunt, MamBhele. She comes from Umtata, a small town in the Eastern Cape. The bar is always busy, especially on weekends.

Back in 1998, the banks gave Yeoville a red line – no one could get a bond for houses in the area. So those houses became abandoned and were illegally occupied. MamBhele and Ta Paul managed to get a three-bedroom house with an extra room outside. The house was built in the early 1940s and I heard that the original owner of the house emigrated to the UK in the early 1990s, just before our new democracy.

In 2005 I lost my job at Homeless Talk and I didn’t have anywhere to live. MamBhele took me in. But there is nothing for mahala. I had to work in the shebeen. My duty was in the kitchen and cleaning the house. I had to collect beers from the bottle store with a trolley and serve customers till 2:00 am. I had to wipe and mop the floor and prepare the skop, the head of a sheep.

There are four stages to preparing skop. First, burn the hair on the head. Then wash it with pot scrapers and hot water. The third part is to cut it in half with a machete or ‘bush’, as we call it. That is the most difficult part for me. You need to be accurate. Then we wash it again and remove the brain, ubuchopo. We either cook or throw the brain away. If we cook it we prepare it with onions, oil and salt. The way the skop is cooked is simple. You just put it in water to boil for a few hours. Customers add salt or chilli sauce to enjoy it. We normally order 40 heads of sheep. A skop meal at Bar 45 costs R25.

Bar 45 is another home for me. I meet strange and interesting characters. I can write there. My aunt and I understand each other well. She appreciates me and I admire her. I always come back here when I need a place to stay.

David Majoka

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