The building across the road

... A continuation of this story

As business moved out of the Johannesburg inner city during the 1990's, many industrial property owners found themselves unable to find tenants or buyers due to crippling debts of unpaid rates and taxes, to the point where these buildings were simply abandoned by their owners and squatters moved in, further accelerating the cycle of urban decay. The squatters were not living for free however, each building was controlled by "owners" who charged poor and desperate people a premium to live in these hell-holes. The City Council would occasionally crack down on these situations, often evicting people onto the pavement in the dead of winter to huddle around in lost groups until they managed to find somewhere else to go with their bed, clothing and pots. Many of these buildings caught fire each winter and hundreds of people lost what little they had and some their lives.

Across the road from where I lived was a building that used to house a tie and scarf factory. There had been attempted auction sale of the building in 2008 but no-one was prepared to buy the building to clean it up. Hundreds of people were crammed into six factory floors which were partitioned with boards, curtains or chipboard into cubicles not much bigger than a bed and there were even people living on the stairwells. Each floor may have had about about 10 toilets at most if all or any of them were working. There may have been some staff showers for factory workers on each floor but in those conditions, I doubt anyone would have used the showers, preferring to bathe in plastic bowls inside their cubicles. There were occasions when I saw people had defecated into plastic bags and thrown the contents onto the street below. The basement was flooded and the courtyard piled high with stinking heaps of garbage. Despite this squalor, many people were friendly and I used to sometimes buy snacks at the small table that one of the building "owners" had set up outside the entrance.

In 2010, there was a fire on the first floor and it was left empty and full of ash for a few months and then people moved back in and the entire structure deteriorated further. When I first moved into the factory across the road, in mid 2008, the inhabitants would sometimes get a skip and remove the garbage and pumped out the basement into the street gutters but this stopped and trash filled up the basement too, forming a floating island which teemed with rats. Later, people started to remove the window frames and sold them for scrap.

With that many people living in one place, it was bound to attract a few bad apples to live there and use the others as cover for their nefarious deeds and it become a regular occurrence to hear screaming in the surrounding streets either late at night or very early in the morning. One night in December 2012, it was my turn.

Like many industrial buildings, the old factory that I lived in had a motor-driven roller-shutter door which required a remote to open. I came home late one night on my motorcycle and realised that the remote wasn't in my pocket. Normally, if I banged on the gate, the caretaker who lived in the basement would open it. It transpired that he had gone to the shops at the time. The street lights weren't working that night and I waited outside in near-total darkness. Suddenly, I felt someone pulling at my arm. Looking around, I saw that I was surrounded by perhaps six men although it was too dark to even see their faces. I saw the glint of a knife blade as it was raised threateningly although nothing was said to me - no demands for cash or a phone, just men trying to to grab hold of me. I broke free from the person trying to get a grip on my biker jacket and moved out of the circle,evaded the hands and started screaming. I had no idea that I could scream as loud as I did but that was the day I discovered that adrenalin can turn even the quietest souls into banshees. Luckily for me, there was a man standing at the corner of the next block who heard the commotion and he also started shouting very loudly, causing the thugs to run off. I got back on the bike and got the hell out of there and went to a nearby shop to phone try and phone the caretaker. No answer. I waited a little while and went back and kept the bike running and hooted outside and was let back inside.

I had already found another place to live in the aftermath of the shooting in September but I was waiting for it to become available. I moved out of the area at the end of February 2013 and I heard later that people who worked at a factory nearby became tired of the regular muggings on their way to and from work and an angry mob attacked the building and threw petrol bombs, setting parts of it on fire. When the fire-brigade and police arrived, the mob blocked access so that the building would burn. Three people, probably innocent, lost their lives in this fire. About a year after that, in 2015, the building was cleared and renovated and turned into rental accommodation with shops on the ground floor. This is what it looks like today. I doubt the current tenants have any idea of the history of the place they live in, which is probably just as well