CITICHAT 47 ‘/2002 - 29 November 2002
Jeppe Phakamisu Ubuntu
Another great example of the stirrings of ‘urban revitalisation through education’ and this time in one of the forgotten inner city suburbs, Jeppestown!
A 1997 drive to clean up the neighbourhood gave birth to a unique initiative. The drive brought together 4000 children from 8 schools plus local police, traffic and fire departments. I have always been sceptical of any real value of such actions because they are generally not sustainable. But a unique dynamic to halt urban decay and turn the neighbourhood around emerged from this one, Jeppe Phakamisu Ubuntu - ‘JPU” - ‘Upliftment and Fellowship in the Community’ In 1998, a Saturday afternoon enrichment programme for the chldren in the area was initiated by the School of Practical Philosophy, and it is still offered every Saturday and going from strength to strength. It offers art, music, physical activities, stories, environmental awareness, singing and good company to local children. Then, in 1999, a day school, St James Preparatory School (which will provide High School classes by 2004) was established by the School of Practical Philosophy which itself uses the School buildings in the evenings for a wide variety of teaching and activities. From all of this, a broader, emerging ethos through the children themselves of reclaiming the area for the community, by the community.
Jeppestown was founded by CEG Julius Jeppe, who moved from Pretoria to Johannesburg in 1886. The Ford and Jeppe Estate Company was established by Julius Jeppe Snr together with his son, Sir Julius Jeppe, and their partner LP Ford. An 1894 description of the suburb says it comprised “421 buildings, two churches, a masonic temple, St Mary’s Collegiate for Girls and a library” adding that “there were even rumours of electric light for each house”. By 1896 there were 5 647 people living in Jeppestown which, in1897 was described as “the most ambitious and the best area” among the “neat little suburbs on the outskirts of the town proper.” I’m not sure how accurate that description is as the area was acknowledged as a ‘mixed area in terms of social class, Jeppe essentially forming part of the mining perimeter of old-established white working-class districts.’ Clive M Chipkin (Johannesburg Style) quotes an 1897 description of the inner city suburbs of those times as “rural Booysens in the south, grimy Fordsburg in the west, patrician Doornfontein on the north-east and domesticated Jeppe ‘for the man of limited purse’ in the south-east.
In 1890 St Michael’s School for Boys was opened and was the forerunner of the well known Jeppe High School for Boys. St Mary’s School for Girls was established subsequently charging 12s6d a month for high school classes, 7s6d, for middle and 5s6d for lower. The Julius Jeppe Oval existed initially as an open piece of land formalised into a park in about 1890 and still boasts the first commemorative monument erected in Johannesburg to the memory of Julius Jeppe. In 1938 Bertha Solomon, MP for Jeppe, stated a soup kitchen for the poor which she organised for 20 years and which developed into the current Recreation centre that bears her name.
The east-end of the suburb became known as ‘Belgravia’ where there existed a number of “desirable residences in a locality where social advantages are to be obtained.” It was in fact in Belgravia that Julius Jeppe built his mansion, later used as Lord Kitchener’s headquarters and still later as a boys hostel serving Jeppe High School. It now is no more! The Jeppe House was however described as “the ducal palace.” The transition between Jeppestown and Belgravia was marked by a toll-gate across the roadway next to Salisbury House and the toll road was described as “Jeppe House’s long tree-lined driveway.” The trees are still there providing a wonderful shady avenue.
It was through Salisbury House that I wandered on Wednesday. Built in 1903, the building boasted ground floor retail whilst the upper level provided residential accommodation with verandahs edged in cast iron “broekie lace”. An example of Victorian architecture and construction, its verandah style design was based on assembling cast-iron components ordered from a catalogue of the Glasgow foundry of Walter Macfarlane. As with so many of our jewels supposedly in the safe-keeping of public authorities, the building has been raped by vandals. Many of the magnificent panelled and lead lighted doors are gone, all brassware and many floors of broad oregon pine floor-boards are gone as are the fireplace surrounds and sanitaryware. But the good news is that the building is being leased from the Council by the School of Practical Philosophy who are seeking funding to restore the building and place it back into everyday use as a much needed extension to their educational facilities. The SPP owns and occupies the original St Mary’s school building directly to the north of Salisbury House where they have established the St James Preparatory School.
It was at this remarkable school that my morning had started, attending assembly. Established only three years ago in its current accommodation, the school starts at Grade 00 and its already 120 pupils (about 20% white) go through to Grade 6. A new grade is started each year. All the children and teachers were present at the daily assembly where the headmaster read a portion of the Ten Commandments and then probed the understanding of the children. Great competition and enthusiasm to answer but equally great discipline exercised. I grimaced inwardly – “thou shalt not steal” - whilst the environment around the school evidences the pillaging of the built environment. Yet the philosophy of the school resonates with what we are all working to achieve. “In a world where values are in confusion, there is a real need to create love and reverence in the minds and hearts of our young people for all that is great and good. We need to remind them of the dignity and the excellence of human life, through which simple but profound virtues may shine for the well-being of all. The hope is that this generation may find the strength to live truthful, upright, magnanimous and disciplined lives that will serve to support the principles of unity in the family, the nation and the world.” And even in a short hour visit to the school one sees and experiences the philosophy resonating through pupils and teachers.
Those who have been working in the area for some time tell me that the environment has improved immeasurably. The palpable fear that permeated the streets has gone and a real community is starting to emerge. Beneath the grime and decades of neglect are some great jewels and the growth of the Schools of Practical Philosophy and St James Preparatory are slowly touching on some of the physical gems as they touch on the lives of the community. Such a gem is the now unused Synagogue, a remnant of the days when Lithuanian Jews settled in the area. The exterior of the shul is under extreme pressure from vandalism, its adjoining house overrun with illegal squatters who have decimated that building. But the JPU aims to develop the suburb into a Centre of Excellence by upgrading existing facilities of nursery school, recreation and sports centre, and the senior citizens’ home whilst providing additional community needs such as a crisis centre. There are numerous open erven between existing houses almost all belonging to the Council offering a great opportunity for infill housing. Currently they are used as dumping grounds and are clearly seldom if ever visited by the Council’s refuse collection service. Manhole covers are long gone, sold to scrap iron merchants, leaving pavements dangerous to negotiate. Yet there isn’t the pall of gloom that one usually experiences in such areas. Somehow the sheer potential of the place excites one, here is an urban regeneration opportunity within a low income community that can be a model for other areas, and it’s started and started by the community.
So now is the time for Council to provide support, an extension of the urban design framework that was done for the commercial area to the west – enforcement of by-laws to rid the area of the remaining illegal squatters and clamping down on slumlording, the presence of the Metro Police, a housing infill project and support for the great work being done by the School of Practical Philosophy and St James Preparatory School.
Can you go wrong when the philosophy results in “assemblies centred on worship and singing …teachers enjoying the company of their pupils…children respecting their teachers….classrooms providing quiet places of learning….pupils being taught to pay close attention….that art is about fine drawings and accurate observation….pupils listening to the best music… the Bible, Shakespeare and scripture from both east and west being revered …. learning by heart is a basic practice…. grammar the essential discipline behind language….the Classics introducing the epic dimension….good lives, great deeds and the fine words forming the basis for history…. debating skills and fine speech being valued highly… sport being taught to instill fair play and team spirit.”
A great foundation for revitalising lives and communities, regards, neil
Friday, November 29, 2002
Friday, November 22, 2002
Mary Fitzgerald Citichat 22 November 2002
CITICHAT 46/2002 - 22 November 2002
Mary Fitzgerald
‘Pickhandle Mary’
About three years ago my wife and I spent a fascinating couple of days exploring the Cape’s West Coast. Our time would have been incomplete without lunching at least once at the famous ‘Muisbosskerm’ beach ‘restaurant’ where we happened to meet another Joburg couple who were also taking a break. Probably about a year later I bumped into Mike Alfred again and discovered that he had a great knowledge of Johannesburg and, in fact, also undertook a fair amount of city guiding. We have worked together from time to time since then and he recently sent me an article he has written on the feisty Mary Fitzgerald after whom the Newtown Square was named. Mary Fitzgerald Square in Newtown has of course been transformed as part of the revitalisation of that area of the city, today providing a great urban space for all city users. In the Square’s paving are set three large circles each using fibre-optic technology to depict the night skies over Johannesburg on three significant dates; our first democratic election – 14th April 1994; the opening of the transformed Square by the President on the 16th December last year and the date when Mary Fitzgerald defied the government of the day at a mass meeting of trade unionists on what was then Market Square – the 14th July 1913.
Mike writes: “Eighteen year-old, attractive, red-haired, fair-skinned Mary Sinnott arrived in Cape Town from Ireland with her father in 1900. Her mother and syblings followed. There she met and married handsome tram-driver John Fitzgerald. The now enlarged family moved to Johannesburg in 1902 where, struggling, living in a sprawling Belgravia house, all needed to contribute to the family’s livelihood. The town was recovering from war and former residents as well as new immigrants were streaming in. The mines were again producing but slowly. The City of Gold, now under Alfred Lord Milner’s administration, was hopefully poised for another period of expansion. Growing conflict between cost-cutting mine owners and their struggling-to-make-ends-meet workers, characterised the socio-economic climate.
Mary grew to maturity in the Victorian era. Economic necessity, an Irish protest spirit combined with her headstrong, powerfully responsive personality, enabled her to abandon traditional conventions. She lived a life of activism, easily recognisable today as feminist and thoroughly modern. She was never a homebody. Her first husband, Fitzgerald, wished and cajoled in vain for a more traditional wife. Although she bore five children, she left them in the care of her mother and returned quickly to work. Work usually became indistinguishable from crusade. Her first job, as a short-hand typist with the Transvaal Miner’s Association ( forerunner of the Miner’s Union) brought her face to face with the scourge of phthisis, the occupational lung-disease, which offered a living death. Mary herself wrote; “Once phthisis got hold of them there was no cure. It was just a matter of time till the end.” She was appalled at the family woes caused by mine owners who invalided phthisis sufferers without compensation. Thus started her first intense period of action. She became ‘a familiar sight as she pedalled her bicycle along duty roads with a collection sheet to ensure that the latest victim of phthisis could at least have a decent burial and not the indignity of a pauper’s funeral.”
She developed into a prominent, and the first, woman trade union organiser in the country, rapidly earning her place alongside men on speakers’ platforms throughout the Reef. Her rousing speeches delivered in her attractive brogue, made her popular with miners but caused her to be seen as an agitator by owners. The press promoted her as an eminently newsworthy personality. As labour problems in the industry grew in the period before the First World War, so she became more anti-capitalist, more pro-socialist in outlook and radical in behaviour. She played major roles in the strikes of 1907, 1913 and 1914.
Her first direct taste of power came when she orgainsed a work boycott by Johannesburg waitresses which resulted in their improved pay and conditions. She went on to form women commandos, which, in supporting their miner menfolk, often violently attacked non-strikers. She fell under the spell of a feminist journalist Nina Boyle, who convinced her of the power of the press. She joined fellow unionist Archie Crawford’s weekly ‘Voice of Labour’. There she became successively business manager, the country’s first woman master printer and co-owner of the press. She also became Archie’s lover, and later, after her divorce from Fitzgerald, Crawford’s devoted and emotionally fulfilled wife.
Fitzgerald’s chronicle offers a long list of ‘firsts’; first and only woman to attend the first conference of the SA Labour Party in 1908; first to lie on tramlines preventing scab drivers leaving the depot during the 1911 Tramways strike; first to retrieve a ‘momento’ pickhandle dropped by mounted police in their desperate efforts at crowd-control; first to stick a hatpin in a Dragoon’s horse pinning her to a wall during the riot on Market Square which made the 1913 strike so notorious; first woman trade unionist to be incarcerated in Johannesburg Fort; first woman elected to Johannesburg council; first woman deputy mayoress. The list is extensive.
Her appearance was described thus: “Mary was never to be seen in anything but the streetwear clothing of Eurpoe…it was severe, dignified perhaps; an ankle lenghth costume which could be maroon, olive green, navy or black – with a crisp white blouse and a tie and with shoes, hat and handbag imported from England. It became a distinctive uniform.”
The 1914 strike was immediately and forcible quelled by Interior Minister Smuts. He refused to contemplate the riotous outbreaks, injuries, arson and deaths that marred the infamous 1913 strike. Part of his powerful medicine involved the deportation of the ‘treasonous’ strike leaders. Archie Crawford was amongst those who, bearing little more than the clothes they wore , an overcoat, a spare shirt or two and a towel, compliments of the Union Government, were secreted aboard a ship bound for England. The deportees were feted in Britain, where Archie and a now divorced Mary who joined him, addressed trade unionists and socialists all over the country, ultimately speaking to a vast Albert Hall audience. Under intense pressure, Smuts organised the almost equally quiet return of the deportees after the outbreak of war.
Marriage to Archie Crawford seemed to quieten Mary. Her activism became more conventional and sedate but no less energetic after she was elected to the Johannesburg Town Council in 1915. Her success was all the more unusual at that time, as it would be another 15 years before South African white women would become voters. Her election poster showed her with the famous pickhandle which obviously appealed to underdog voters. As a councillor she became involved in child welfare, public health matters and poor relief for both white and black. In 1918 she was re-elected to the Council and in 1920 became Chairperson of the Public Health committee. When a resurgent Labour Party gained control of the Council at the end of 1920, Mary was elected deputy Mayor to Mayor John Christie. From 1921 Mary’s involvement in the Council waned and she did not stand for election again. Her grateful constituents bought her a car – the first to be owned and driven by a Johannesburg woman. She thereafter became the less visible helpmeet behind her husband who had become a national representative to the International Labour Organisation which had been formed after the First World War.
Neither Archie Crawford, renowned for his non-violent politics, nor Mary, played powerful roles in the 1922 “Rand Rebellion”. In 1924 when Mary was forty and more fulfilled than at any time in her life, her beloved Archie died of enteric fever. His death profoundly affected her and she withdrew from public life. There is rumour that she began drinking heavily. Little is known about her later years, she died in 1960 at the age of 78. She merited obituaries in the national press and the Mayor of Johannesburg described her as ‘the outstanding, indomitable woman who had made a great contribution to the early history of Johannesburg’. In 1986, Johannesburg’s centenary year, the Council renamed Newtown’s Market Square in Mary Fitzgerald’s honour. At the end of 2001 it became her splendid monument.”
Thanks, Mike. My favourite mind-image of Mary Fitzgerald is encapsulated in a black-and-white photograph of her displayed some time ago in Museum Africa. Tall and lissome in her ‘crisp white blouse’ and dark skirt – hurling a brick at a policeman! Of such are great cities made!
Regards, neil.
Mary Fitzgerald
‘Pickhandle Mary’
About three years ago my wife and I spent a fascinating couple of days exploring the Cape’s West Coast. Our time would have been incomplete without lunching at least once at the famous ‘Muisbosskerm’ beach ‘restaurant’ where we happened to meet another Joburg couple who were also taking a break. Probably about a year later I bumped into Mike Alfred again and discovered that he had a great knowledge of Johannesburg and, in fact, also undertook a fair amount of city guiding. We have worked together from time to time since then and he recently sent me an article he has written on the feisty Mary Fitzgerald after whom the Newtown Square was named. Mary Fitzgerald Square in Newtown has of course been transformed as part of the revitalisation of that area of the city, today providing a great urban space for all city users. In the Square’s paving are set three large circles each using fibre-optic technology to depict the night skies over Johannesburg on three significant dates; our first democratic election – 14th April 1994; the opening of the transformed Square by the President on the 16th December last year and the date when Mary Fitzgerald defied the government of the day at a mass meeting of trade unionists on what was then Market Square – the 14th July 1913.
Mike writes: “Eighteen year-old, attractive, red-haired, fair-skinned Mary Sinnott arrived in Cape Town from Ireland with her father in 1900. Her mother and syblings followed. There she met and married handsome tram-driver John Fitzgerald. The now enlarged family moved to Johannesburg in 1902 where, struggling, living in a sprawling Belgravia house, all needed to contribute to the family’s livelihood. The town was recovering from war and former residents as well as new immigrants were streaming in. The mines were again producing but slowly. The City of Gold, now under Alfred Lord Milner’s administration, was hopefully poised for another period of expansion. Growing conflict between cost-cutting mine owners and their struggling-to-make-ends-meet workers, characterised the socio-economic climate.
Mary grew to maturity in the Victorian era. Economic necessity, an Irish protest spirit combined with her headstrong, powerfully responsive personality, enabled her to abandon traditional conventions. She lived a life of activism, easily recognisable today as feminist and thoroughly modern. She was never a homebody. Her first husband, Fitzgerald, wished and cajoled in vain for a more traditional wife. Although she bore five children, she left them in the care of her mother and returned quickly to work. Work usually became indistinguishable from crusade. Her first job, as a short-hand typist with the Transvaal Miner’s Association ( forerunner of the Miner’s Union) brought her face to face with the scourge of phthisis, the occupational lung-disease, which offered a living death. Mary herself wrote; “Once phthisis got hold of them there was no cure. It was just a matter of time till the end.” She was appalled at the family woes caused by mine owners who invalided phthisis sufferers without compensation. Thus started her first intense period of action. She became ‘a familiar sight as she pedalled her bicycle along duty roads with a collection sheet to ensure that the latest victim of phthisis could at least have a decent burial and not the indignity of a pauper’s funeral.”
She developed into a prominent, and the first, woman trade union organiser in the country, rapidly earning her place alongside men on speakers’ platforms throughout the Reef. Her rousing speeches delivered in her attractive brogue, made her popular with miners but caused her to be seen as an agitator by owners. The press promoted her as an eminently newsworthy personality. As labour problems in the industry grew in the period before the First World War, so she became more anti-capitalist, more pro-socialist in outlook and radical in behaviour. She played major roles in the strikes of 1907, 1913 and 1914.
Her first direct taste of power came when she orgainsed a work boycott by Johannesburg waitresses which resulted in their improved pay and conditions. She went on to form women commandos, which, in supporting their miner menfolk, often violently attacked non-strikers. She fell under the spell of a feminist journalist Nina Boyle, who convinced her of the power of the press. She joined fellow unionist Archie Crawford’s weekly ‘Voice of Labour’. There she became successively business manager, the country’s first woman master printer and co-owner of the press. She also became Archie’s lover, and later, after her divorce from Fitzgerald, Crawford’s devoted and emotionally fulfilled wife.
Fitzgerald’s chronicle offers a long list of ‘firsts’; first and only woman to attend the first conference of the SA Labour Party in 1908; first to lie on tramlines preventing scab drivers leaving the depot during the 1911 Tramways strike; first to retrieve a ‘momento’ pickhandle dropped by mounted police in their desperate efforts at crowd-control; first to stick a hatpin in a Dragoon’s horse pinning her to a wall during the riot on Market Square which made the 1913 strike so notorious; first woman trade unionist to be incarcerated in Johannesburg Fort; first woman elected to Johannesburg council; first woman deputy mayoress. The list is extensive.
Her appearance was described thus: “Mary was never to be seen in anything but the streetwear clothing of Eurpoe…it was severe, dignified perhaps; an ankle lenghth costume which could be maroon, olive green, navy or black – with a crisp white blouse and a tie and with shoes, hat and handbag imported from England. It became a distinctive uniform.”
The 1914 strike was immediately and forcible quelled by Interior Minister Smuts. He refused to contemplate the riotous outbreaks, injuries, arson and deaths that marred the infamous 1913 strike. Part of his powerful medicine involved the deportation of the ‘treasonous’ strike leaders. Archie Crawford was amongst those who, bearing little more than the clothes they wore , an overcoat, a spare shirt or two and a towel, compliments of the Union Government, were secreted aboard a ship bound for England. The deportees were feted in Britain, where Archie and a now divorced Mary who joined him, addressed trade unionists and socialists all over the country, ultimately speaking to a vast Albert Hall audience. Under intense pressure, Smuts organised the almost equally quiet return of the deportees after the outbreak of war.
Marriage to Archie Crawford seemed to quieten Mary. Her activism became more conventional and sedate but no less energetic after she was elected to the Johannesburg Town Council in 1915. Her success was all the more unusual at that time, as it would be another 15 years before South African white women would become voters. Her election poster showed her with the famous pickhandle which obviously appealed to underdog voters. As a councillor she became involved in child welfare, public health matters and poor relief for both white and black. In 1918 she was re-elected to the Council and in 1920 became Chairperson of the Public Health committee. When a resurgent Labour Party gained control of the Council at the end of 1920, Mary was elected deputy Mayor to Mayor John Christie. From 1921 Mary’s involvement in the Council waned and she did not stand for election again. Her grateful constituents bought her a car – the first to be owned and driven by a Johannesburg woman. She thereafter became the less visible helpmeet behind her husband who had become a national representative to the International Labour Organisation which had been formed after the First World War.
Neither Archie Crawford, renowned for his non-violent politics, nor Mary, played powerful roles in the 1922 “Rand Rebellion”. In 1924 when Mary was forty and more fulfilled than at any time in her life, her beloved Archie died of enteric fever. His death profoundly affected her and she withdrew from public life. There is rumour that she began drinking heavily. Little is known about her later years, she died in 1960 at the age of 78. She merited obituaries in the national press and the Mayor of Johannesburg described her as ‘the outstanding, indomitable woman who had made a great contribution to the early history of Johannesburg’. In 1986, Johannesburg’s centenary year, the Council renamed Newtown’s Market Square in Mary Fitzgerald’s honour. At the end of 2001 it became her splendid monument.”
Thanks, Mike. My favourite mind-image of Mary Fitzgerald is encapsulated in a black-and-white photograph of her displayed some time ago in Museum Africa. Tall and lissome in her ‘crisp white blouse’ and dark skirt – hurling a brick at a policeman! Of such are great cities made!
Regards, neil.
Mary Fitzgerald Citichat 22 November 2002
CITICHAT 46/2002 - 22 November 2002
‘Pickhandle Mary’
About three years ago my wife and I spent a fascinating couple of days exploring the Cape’s West Coast. Our time would have been incomplete without lunching at least once at the famous ‘Muisbosskerm’ beach ‘restaurant’ where we happened to meet another Joburg couple who were also taking a break. Probably about a year later I bumped into Mike Alfred again and discovered that he had a great knowledge of Johannesburg and, in fact, also undertook a fair amount of city guiding. We have worked together from time to time since then and he recently sent me an article he has written on the feisty Mary Fitzgerald after whom the Newtown Square was named. Mary Fitzgerald Square in Newtown has of course been transformed as part of the revitalisation of that area of the city, today providing a great urban space for all city users. In the Square’s paving are set three large circles each using fibre-optic technology to depict the night skies over Johannesburg on three significant dates; our first democratic election – 14th April 1994; the opening of the transformed Square by the President on the 16th December last year and the date when Mary Fitzgerald defied the government of the day at a mass meeting of trade unionists on what was then Market Square – the 14th July 1913.
Mike writes: “Eighteen year-old, attractive, red-haired, fair-skinned Mary Sinnott arrived in Cape Town from Ireland with her father in 1900. Her mother and syblings followed. There she met and married handsome tram-driver John Fitzgerald. The now enlarged family moved to Johannesburg in 1902 where, struggling, living in a sprawling Belgravia house, all needed to contribute to the family’s livelihood. The town was recovering from war and former residents as well as new immigrants were streaming in. The mines were again producing but slowly. The City of Gold, now under Alfred Lord Milner’s administration, was hopefully poised for another period of expansion. Growing conflict between cost-cutting mine owners and their struggling-to-make-ends-meet workers, characterised the socio-economic climate.
Mary grew to maturity in the Victorian era. Economic necessity, an Irish protest spirit combined with her headstrong, powerfully responsive personality, enabled her to abandon traditional conventions. She lived a life of activism, easily recognisable today as feminist and thoroughly modern. She was never a homebody. Her first husband, Fitzgerald, wished and cajoled in vain for a more traditional wife. Although she bore five children, she left them in the care of her mother and returned quickly to work. Work usually became indistinguishable from crusade. Her first job, as a short-hand typist with the Transvaal Miner’s Association ( forerunner of the Miner’s Union) brought her face to face with the scourge of phthisis, the occupational lung-disease, which offered a living death. Mary herself wrote; “Once phthisis got hold of them there was no cure. It was just a matter of time till the end.” She was appalled at the family woes caused by mine owners who invalided phthisis sufferers without compensation. Thus started her first intense period of action. She became ‘a familiar sight as she pedalled her bicycle along duty roads with a collection sheet to ensure that the latest victim of phthisis could at least have a decent burial and not the indignity of a pauper’s funeral.”
She developed into a prominent, and the first, woman trade union organiser in the country, rapidly earning her place alongside men on speakers’ platforms throughout the Reef. Her rousing speeches delivered in her attractive brogue, made her popular with miners but caused her to be seen as an agitator by owners. The press promoted her as an eminently newsworthy personality. As labour problems in the industry grew in the period before the First World War, so she became more anti-capitalist, more pro-socialist in outlook and radical in behaviour. She played major roles in the strikes of 1907, 1913 and 1914.
Her first direct taste of power came when she orgainsed a work boycott by Johannesburg waitresses which resulted in their improved pay and conditions. She went on to form women commandos, which, in supporting their miner menfolk, often violently attacked non-strikers. She fell under the spell of a feminist journalist Nina Boyle, who convinced her of the power of the press. She joined fellow unionist Archie Crawford’s weekly ‘Voice of Labour’. There she became successively business manager, the country’s first woman master printer and co-owner of the press. She also became Archie’s lover, and later, after her divorce from Fitzgerald, Crawford’s devoted and emotionally fulfilled wife.
Fitzgerald’s chronicle offers a long list of ‘firsts’; first and only woman to attend the first conference of the SA Labour Party in 1908; first to lie on tramlines preventing scab drivers leaving the depot during the 1911 Tramways strike; first to retrieve a ‘momento’ pickhandle dropped by mounted police in their desperate efforts at crowd-control; first to stick a hatpin in a Dragoon’s horse pinning her to a wall during the riot on Market Square which made the 1913 strike so notorious; first woman trade unionist to be incarcerated in Johannesburg Fort; first woman elected to Johannesburg council; first woman deputy mayoress. The list is extensive.
Her appearance was described thus: “Mary was never to be seen in anything but the streetwear clothing of Eurpoe…it was severe, dignified perhaps; an ankle lenghth costume which could be maroon, olive green, navy or black – with a crisp white blouse and a tie and with shoes, hat and handbag imported from England. It became a distinctive uniform.”
The 1914 strike was immediately and forcible quelled by Interior Minister Smuts. He refused to contemplate the riotous outbreaks, injuries, arson and deaths that marred the infamous 1913 strike. Part of his powerful medicine involved the deportation of the ‘treasonous’ strike leaders. Archie Crawford was amongst those who, bearing little more than the clothes they wore , an overcoat, a spare shirt or two and a towel, compliments of the Union Government, were secreted aboard a ship bound for England. The deportees were feted in Britain, where Archie and a now divorced Mary who joined him, addressed trade unionists and socialists all over the country, ultimately speaking to a vast Albert Hall audience. Under intense pressure, Smuts organised the almost equally quiet return of the deportees after the outbreak of war.
Marriage to Archie Crawford seemed to quieten Mary. Her activism became more conventional and sedate but no less energetic after she was elected to the Johannesburg Town Council in 1915. Her success was all the more unusual at that time, as it would be another 15 years before South African white women would become voters. Her election poster showed her with the famous pickhandle which obviously appealed to underdog voters. As a councillor she became involved in child welfare, public health matters and poor relief for both white and black. In 1918 she was re-elected to the Council and in 1920 became Chairperson of the Public Health committee. When a resurgent Labour Party gained control of the Council at the end of 1920, Mary was elected deputy Mayor to Mayor John Christie. From 1921 Mary’s involvement in the Council waned and she did not stand for election again. Her grateful constituents bought her a car – the first to be owned and driven by a Johannesburg woman. She thereafter became the less visible helpmeet behind her husband who had become a national representative to the International Labour Organisation which had been formed after the First World War.
Neither Archie Crawford, renowned for his non-violent politics, nor Mary, played powerful roles in the 1922 “Rand Rebellion”. In 1924 when Mary was forty and more fulfilled than at any time in her life, her beloved Archie died of enteric fever. His death profoundly affected her and she withdrew from public life. There is rumour that she began drinking heavily. Little is known about her later years, she died in 1960 at the age of 78. She merited obituaries in the national press and the Mayor of Johannesburg described her as ‘the outstanding, indomitable woman who had made a great contribution to the early history of Johannesburg’. In 1986, Johannesburg’s centenary year, the Council renamed Newtown’s Market Square in Mary Fitzgerald’s honour. At the end of 2001 it became her splendid monument.”
Thanks, Mike. My favourite mind-image of Mary Fitzgerald is encapsulated in a black-and-white photograph of her displayed some time ago in Museum Africa. Tall and lissome in her ‘crisp white blouse’ and dark skirt – hurling a brick at a policeman! Of such are great cities made!
Regards, neil.
‘Pickhandle Mary’
About three years ago my wife and I spent a fascinating couple of days exploring the Cape’s West Coast. Our time would have been incomplete without lunching at least once at the famous ‘Muisbosskerm’ beach ‘restaurant’ where we happened to meet another Joburg couple who were also taking a break. Probably about a year later I bumped into Mike Alfred again and discovered that he had a great knowledge of Johannesburg and, in fact, also undertook a fair amount of city guiding. We have worked together from time to time since then and he recently sent me an article he has written on the feisty Mary Fitzgerald after whom the Newtown Square was named. Mary Fitzgerald Square in Newtown has of course been transformed as part of the revitalisation of that area of the city, today providing a great urban space for all city users. In the Square’s paving are set three large circles each using fibre-optic technology to depict the night skies over Johannesburg on three significant dates; our first democratic election – 14th April 1994; the opening of the transformed Square by the President on the 16th December last year and the date when Mary Fitzgerald defied the government of the day at a mass meeting of trade unionists on what was then Market Square – the 14th July 1913.
Mike writes: “Eighteen year-old, attractive, red-haired, fair-skinned Mary Sinnott arrived in Cape Town from Ireland with her father in 1900. Her mother and syblings followed. There she met and married handsome tram-driver John Fitzgerald. The now enlarged family moved to Johannesburg in 1902 where, struggling, living in a sprawling Belgravia house, all needed to contribute to the family’s livelihood. The town was recovering from war and former residents as well as new immigrants were streaming in. The mines were again producing but slowly. The City of Gold, now under Alfred Lord Milner’s administration, was hopefully poised for another period of expansion. Growing conflict between cost-cutting mine owners and their struggling-to-make-ends-meet workers, characterised the socio-economic climate.
Mary grew to maturity in the Victorian era. Economic necessity, an Irish protest spirit combined with her headstrong, powerfully responsive personality, enabled her to abandon traditional conventions. She lived a life of activism, easily recognisable today as feminist and thoroughly modern. She was never a homebody. Her first husband, Fitzgerald, wished and cajoled in vain for a more traditional wife. Although she bore five children, she left them in the care of her mother and returned quickly to work. Work usually became indistinguishable from crusade. Her first job, as a short-hand typist with the Transvaal Miner’s Association ( forerunner of the Miner’s Union) brought her face to face with the scourge of phthisis, the occupational lung-disease, which offered a living death. Mary herself wrote; “Once phthisis got hold of them there was no cure. It was just a matter of time till the end.” She was appalled at the family woes caused by mine owners who invalided phthisis sufferers without compensation. Thus started her first intense period of action. She became ‘a familiar sight as she pedalled her bicycle along duty roads with a collection sheet to ensure that the latest victim of phthisis could at least have a decent burial and not the indignity of a pauper’s funeral.”
She developed into a prominent, and the first, woman trade union organiser in the country, rapidly earning her place alongside men on speakers’ platforms throughout the Reef. Her rousing speeches delivered in her attractive brogue, made her popular with miners but caused her to be seen as an agitator by owners. The press promoted her as an eminently newsworthy personality. As labour problems in the industry grew in the period before the First World War, so she became more anti-capitalist, more pro-socialist in outlook and radical in behaviour. She played major roles in the strikes of 1907, 1913 and 1914.
Her first direct taste of power came when she orgainsed a work boycott by Johannesburg waitresses which resulted in their improved pay and conditions. She went on to form women commandos, which, in supporting their miner menfolk, often violently attacked non-strikers. She fell under the spell of a feminist journalist Nina Boyle, who convinced her of the power of the press. She joined fellow unionist Archie Crawford’s weekly ‘Voice of Labour’. There she became successively business manager, the country’s first woman master printer and co-owner of the press. She also became Archie’s lover, and later, after her divorce from Fitzgerald, Crawford’s devoted and emotionally fulfilled wife.
Fitzgerald’s chronicle offers a long list of ‘firsts’; first and only woman to attend the first conference of the SA Labour Party in 1908; first to lie on tramlines preventing scab drivers leaving the depot during the 1911 Tramways strike; first to retrieve a ‘momento’ pickhandle dropped by mounted police in their desperate efforts at crowd-control; first to stick a hatpin in a Dragoon’s horse pinning her to a wall during the riot on Market Square which made the 1913 strike so notorious; first woman trade unionist to be incarcerated in Johannesburg Fort; first woman elected to Johannesburg council; first woman deputy mayoress. The list is extensive.
Her appearance was described thus: “Mary was never to be seen in anything but the streetwear clothing of Eurpoe…it was severe, dignified perhaps; an ankle lenghth costume which could be maroon, olive green, navy or black – with a crisp white blouse and a tie and with shoes, hat and handbag imported from England. It became a distinctive uniform.”
The 1914 strike was immediately and forcible quelled by Interior Minister Smuts. He refused to contemplate the riotous outbreaks, injuries, arson and deaths that marred the infamous 1913 strike. Part of his powerful medicine involved the deportation of the ‘treasonous’ strike leaders. Archie Crawford was amongst those who, bearing little more than the clothes they wore , an overcoat, a spare shirt or two and a towel, compliments of the Union Government, were secreted aboard a ship bound for England. The deportees were feted in Britain, where Archie and a now divorced Mary who joined him, addressed trade unionists and socialists all over the country, ultimately speaking to a vast Albert Hall audience. Under intense pressure, Smuts organised the almost equally quiet return of the deportees after the outbreak of war.
Marriage to Archie Crawford seemed to quieten Mary. Her activism became more conventional and sedate but no less energetic after she was elected to the Johannesburg Town Council in 1915. Her success was all the more unusual at that time, as it would be another 15 years before South African white women would become voters. Her election poster showed her with the famous pickhandle which obviously appealed to underdog voters. As a councillor she became involved in child welfare, public health matters and poor relief for both white and black. In 1918 she was re-elected to the Council and in 1920 became Chairperson of the Public Health committee. When a resurgent Labour Party gained control of the Council at the end of 1920, Mary was elected deputy Mayor to Mayor John Christie. From 1921 Mary’s involvement in the Council waned and she did not stand for election again. Her grateful constituents bought her a car – the first to be owned and driven by a Johannesburg woman. She thereafter became the less visible helpmeet behind her husband who had become a national representative to the International Labour Organisation which had been formed after the First World War.
Neither Archie Crawford, renowned for his non-violent politics, nor Mary, played powerful roles in the 1922 “Rand Rebellion”. In 1924 when Mary was forty and more fulfilled than at any time in her life, her beloved Archie died of enteric fever. His death profoundly affected her and she withdrew from public life. There is rumour that she began drinking heavily. Little is known about her later years, she died in 1960 at the age of 78. She merited obituaries in the national press and the Mayor of Johannesburg described her as ‘the outstanding, indomitable woman who had made a great contribution to the early history of Johannesburg’. In 1986, Johannesburg’s centenary year, the Council renamed Newtown’s Market Square in Mary Fitzgerald’s honour. At the end of 2001 it became her splendid monument.”
Thanks, Mike. My favourite mind-image of Mary Fitzgerald is encapsulated in a black-and-white photograph of her displayed some time ago in Museum Africa. Tall and lissome in her ‘crisp white blouse’ and dark skirt – hurling a brick at a policeman! Of such are great cities made!
Regards, neil.
Friday, November 15, 2002
CIDA Citichat 15 November 2002
CITICHAT 45/2002 - 15 November 2002
One answer to last week’s question! The CIDA City Campus.
One of the institutions that has found the CBD an ideal venue for its operations and which is all about equipping youngsters from historically disadvantaged backgrounds and economically deprived communities so that they can enter the mainstream of the country’s economy is CIDA City Campus. I first wrote about how impressed I was with the philosophy of CIDA City Campus in Citichat some years ago just after it had opened its doors. Although this is its third year of operation, today week ago was its official inauguration and what a joyful occasion it turned out to be.
CIDA (Community and Individual Development Association) City Campus had its beginnings in the townships in the mid-nineties when the current directors ran projects in township schools to upgrade the level of education. They had a belief, now reinforced with the successes achieved over these last three years, that inside every student is a potential which, when unlocked, contributes to the full development of the person and thus to the social and economic development of the community and ultimately of the country. They took the rural saying “It takes a village to raise a child” and inverted it to create one of their slogans; “It takes a child to raise a village”. Their work at that time resulted in a dramatic increase in pass rates and this created the impetus for starting an African tertiary education institution. The problem they were confronting was that high school students would pass their final year – with a great deal of effort often under impossible conditions – but had no prospects to further their education and little possibility of finding employment.
In sub-Saharan Africa only 3% of individuals (6% in South Africa) over the age of 20 have a post-school educational qualification. World Bank research reflects an 89% co-relation between the levels of tertiary education in a nation and economic indicators such as GDP per capita or labour productivity per capita.
But the cost of tertiary education is extremely high. In South Africa the average cost to the country to educate a university student is between R35 000 and R 40 000 per year and averages at over R100 000 per degree. AND, only 15% of students currently graduate with their degree or diploma. The true cost of producing a graduate can therefore be interpolated at between R700 000 and R1.3 million. How does one provide high quality education at the lowest possible cost?
Taddy Blecher, CIDA’s visionary CEO, is a young actuary who worked for a number of years for international management consulting firm Monitor Company. Together they established a think tank to conceptualise a workable higher education model which would encourage human, economic and social development at very low cost. The outcome was CIDA City Campus.
The first CIDA Campus is located at 55 Fox Street in the previous head office building of Investec who has provided the building for CIDA’s use. The building houses the current 1600 students every one of which is on a tuition scholarship. CIDA’s cost structure, a tenth of that of the country’s formal universities, is R2 500-00 per year. The student pays R350-00 in year one and R100-00 per month in years 2, 3 and 4. The balance is in scholarships provided by the private sector currently representing R64 million in scholarships. A further 1 000 students will be housed in a building donated by FNB from 2003 and the scholarships which will be made available for these students amounts to a further R40 million provided by corporate South Africa.
CIDA provides a fully accredited, practical four year Bachelor of Business Administration qualification that emphasises entrepreneurship, business science and technology. Students can specialise in Accountancy, Information Technology, Finance, Marketing, Human Resource Management and Entrepreneurship. A venture capital fund is being established to provide students with the means to start their own businesses.
CIDA differs in many ways from the typical South African formal tertiary education institutions – other than in its quality of teaching which is outstanding! Working with historically disadvantaged students demands a great deal more in terms of time, tuition and effort. So the approach adopted is based on a seven to nine hour day (compared to the standard 3 to 4) and between 40 and 44 weeks per year (compared to the standard 34 to 39) and covers four years instead of three. In addition they have implemented about 280 innovations to reduce cost including the use of multimedia technology and the students help to run the campus and administration offices which provides valuable hands-on experience.
During 2001 CIDA students in turn trained 300 000 youth about AIDS and money management in communities across the country, that figure has now increased to one million youth and unemployed. The target is to reach two million a year with courses that include starting and running a small business.
Already in its short life CIDA has received many accolades, the organisation for instance recently won the grand prix award in the “Age of Innovation competition 2002” for the most innovative organisation in South Africa, was mentioned by the President in a speech in Parliament and Taddy Blecher was recently honoured with a prestigious “Global Leader for tomorrow Award”, held by only 100 people in the world.
Over the next five years the intention is to have between 5000 and 9000 students in the Johannesburg city centre.
I mentioned earlier that the inauguration was a joyful occasion and I really meant that. The Minister of Education, Professor Kader Asmal, who did the honours, commented that he had never seen so many, “captains, kings and queens of industry” I would have added that for many it was their first visit to the CBD for years! But the joyfulness didn’t come from the dour donors but from the students themselves exuding a pride in their institution and a-belief and confidence in themselves that one seldom experiences on this great continent. The CIDA City Campus choir is extraordinary, I have had the privilege of hearing them on a number of occasions and they are truly something else, their CD to be released soon will be well worth buying.
Last week I said “We need a plan, a BIG and BOLD plan!” CIDA City Campus is one - only it is no longer a plan but a reality.
Regards, neil
One answer to last week’s question! The CIDA City Campus.
One of the institutions that has found the CBD an ideal venue for its operations and which is all about equipping youngsters from historically disadvantaged backgrounds and economically deprived communities so that they can enter the mainstream of the country’s economy is CIDA City Campus. I first wrote about how impressed I was with the philosophy of CIDA City Campus in Citichat some years ago just after it had opened its doors. Although this is its third year of operation, today week ago was its official inauguration and what a joyful occasion it turned out to be.
CIDA (Community and Individual Development Association) City Campus had its beginnings in the townships in the mid-nineties when the current directors ran projects in township schools to upgrade the level of education. They had a belief, now reinforced with the successes achieved over these last three years, that inside every student is a potential which, when unlocked, contributes to the full development of the person and thus to the social and economic development of the community and ultimately of the country. They took the rural saying “It takes a village to raise a child” and inverted it to create one of their slogans; “It takes a child to raise a village”. Their work at that time resulted in a dramatic increase in pass rates and this created the impetus for starting an African tertiary education institution. The problem they were confronting was that high school students would pass their final year – with a great deal of effort often under impossible conditions – but had no prospects to further their education and little possibility of finding employment.
In sub-Saharan Africa only 3% of individuals (6% in South Africa) over the age of 20 have a post-school educational qualification. World Bank research reflects an 89% co-relation between the levels of tertiary education in a nation and economic indicators such as GDP per capita or labour productivity per capita.
But the cost of tertiary education is extremely high. In South Africa the average cost to the country to educate a university student is between R35 000 and R 40 000 per year and averages at over R100 000 per degree. AND, only 15% of students currently graduate with their degree or diploma. The true cost of producing a graduate can therefore be interpolated at between R700 000 and R1.3 million. How does one provide high quality education at the lowest possible cost?
Taddy Blecher, CIDA’s visionary CEO, is a young actuary who worked for a number of years for international management consulting firm Monitor Company. Together they established a think tank to conceptualise a workable higher education model which would encourage human, economic and social development at very low cost. The outcome was CIDA City Campus.
The first CIDA Campus is located at 55 Fox Street in the previous head office building of Investec who has provided the building for CIDA’s use. The building houses the current 1600 students every one of which is on a tuition scholarship. CIDA’s cost structure, a tenth of that of the country’s formal universities, is R2 500-00 per year. The student pays R350-00 in year one and R100-00 per month in years 2, 3 and 4. The balance is in scholarships provided by the private sector currently representing R64 million in scholarships. A further 1 000 students will be housed in a building donated by FNB from 2003 and the scholarships which will be made available for these students amounts to a further R40 million provided by corporate South Africa.
CIDA provides a fully accredited, practical four year Bachelor of Business Administration qualification that emphasises entrepreneurship, business science and technology. Students can specialise in Accountancy, Information Technology, Finance, Marketing, Human Resource Management and Entrepreneurship. A venture capital fund is being established to provide students with the means to start their own businesses.
CIDA differs in many ways from the typical South African formal tertiary education institutions – other than in its quality of teaching which is outstanding! Working with historically disadvantaged students demands a great deal more in terms of time, tuition and effort. So the approach adopted is based on a seven to nine hour day (compared to the standard 3 to 4) and between 40 and 44 weeks per year (compared to the standard 34 to 39) and covers four years instead of three. In addition they have implemented about 280 innovations to reduce cost including the use of multimedia technology and the students help to run the campus and administration offices which provides valuable hands-on experience.
During 2001 CIDA students in turn trained 300 000 youth about AIDS and money management in communities across the country, that figure has now increased to one million youth and unemployed. The target is to reach two million a year with courses that include starting and running a small business.
Already in its short life CIDA has received many accolades, the organisation for instance recently won the grand prix award in the “Age of Innovation competition 2002” for the most innovative organisation in South Africa, was mentioned by the President in a speech in Parliament and Taddy Blecher was recently honoured with a prestigious “Global Leader for tomorrow Award”, held by only 100 people in the world.
Over the next five years the intention is to have between 5000 and 9000 students in the Johannesburg city centre.
I mentioned earlier that the inauguration was a joyful occasion and I really meant that. The Minister of Education, Professor Kader Asmal, who did the honours, commented that he had never seen so many, “captains, kings and queens of industry” I would have added that for many it was their first visit to the CBD for years! But the joyfulness didn’t come from the dour donors but from the students themselves exuding a pride in their institution and a-belief and confidence in themselves that one seldom experiences on this great continent. The CIDA City Campus choir is extraordinary, I have had the privilege of hearing them on a number of occasions and they are truly something else, their CD to be released soon will be well worth buying.
Last week I said “We need a plan, a BIG and BOLD plan!” CIDA City Campus is one - only it is no longer a plan but a reality.
Regards, neil
Friday, November 8, 2002
Urban Poor; Cornelius House Citichat 8 November 2002
CITICHAT 44/2002 - 8 November 2002
Urban Poor – Cornelius House
WILL THE POOR BE WITH US…..ALWAYS?
Out of a number of significant events in the life of the city this week two focused my mind on the issue of the urban poor.
The first was the AGM of the Johannesburg Trust for the Homeless (JTH) which was held in Cornelius House. The second was the opening of the CIDA City Campus which I’ll cover next week. And the other ‘significant events’? Approval by the Inner City Committee of the Spatial Framework for the Braamfontein Regeneration Project and a report at our monthly Business Coalition meeting by one of the members of 20 000 square metres of Grade A office letting over the past four months – the new tenants from ‘out of town’. Yeah!!!!
Back to the JTH and Cornelius House. For a number of years after the CJP was established in 1992, our work focused on the reasons for the decline in the inner city and investigating possible solutions. One of the issues that we established early on was that, in comparison to cities in developed countries, we suffered from a distinct lack of intermediaries of all types. For instance, when we looked at residential accommodation in the United States we found that literally dozens of organisations had developed in that country to support a whole range of aspects of the provision of housing at all levels. In comparison, at that time we literally had the standard financial institutions, in fact we were then experiencing the disappearance of the traditional ‘building society’ as they became absorbed into the banking industry, and little else. There was no Johannesburg Housing Company, Cope, Social Housing Foundation, National Housing Finance Corporation, or Nurcha all of which became subsequent responses to the lack of any sophisticated models in the marketplace.
We decided that part of our work should therefore be to introduce organisations that could concentrate on specific aspects of market failure or of market lack. .Two of the first such organisations we established were ICHUT, the Inner City Housing Upgrading Trust and the JHT. The latter was conceived originally as a co-ordinating body for all the disparate players in the homeless field at that time. ICHUT was originally conceived as an intermediary to assist previously disadvantaged individuals to obtain housing in the inner city. We believed that this would start to provide some stabilisation in the housing market and in the inner city itself. At that time, the early 1990s there was also a very visible problem in regard to homelessness – at one stage there were about six thousand homeless people in the CBD itself, thousands of whom were living at Park Station. The CBD was dotted around with communities that had set themselves up in rudimentary shelter on pavements, parks and abandoned buildings.
The CJP, through an analysis of the provision of housing in the early ‘90s also determined that in the continuum of the provision of housing, from homelessness at one end to affordable housing at the other, there were serious gaps – two of these were the provision of social housing and some form of housing to bridge the gap between traditional shelters and social housing. We thought that the gap could be filled with ‘transitional housing’ examples of which we had seen in the USA, so the JTH set about establishing a local model. Cornelius House was the result.
The building is situated on the South-Eastern edge of the inner city in a mainly older industrial/warehousing environment. It was an industrial building with a fairly large floor plate, ground floor plus four storeys. With funding from ICHUT and USAID, the Trust purchased the building and created good quality communal accommodation on floors 1 to 3. The ground floor was kept as space for training but there were insufficient funds to do anything with the fourth floor at the time. The accommodation consists of single and double rooms with communal bathroom facilities and a large communal kitchen. The management of the building offered a steep learning curve to Chris Lund the CE of the JTH, and today it has settled into a well-run facility. For the first three years the building ran at a loss but with the completion of additional accommodation on the fourth level this year, the building is now breaking even. These are larger rooms than on the other floors offering family accommodation. Range of rentals is R165.00 per month ($16.00 currently!) for a single room or for a double room for husband/wife; R330,00 for two same sex sharing a double room whilst the family rooms are around R450.00 to R550.00 per month. The economics of the building does of course rely on assistance from the local authority in the form of rates rebates.
The building now boasts a successful spaza shop, a ladies hairdresser and a tailor and offers a variety of training opportunities to residents. Twice a year a Quantas crew give up their free time in the city to work at the building helping to clean or providing training especially related to catering. One of the objectives of the Trust is to provide training to the occupiers in order that they might be able to find employment or improve their employment opportunities and eventually move on to better quality accommodation.
This is what urban renewal is all about – trying to understand the issues on the ground – developing relevant responses, implementing initiatives and being prepared to learn through trial and error. Yet I can’t help but wonder if our focus hasn’t resulted in a blind spot developing in relation to the urban poor. The urban poor constitute a huge dichotomy and practical difficulty for which we don’t appear to have developed a specific plan. We have thousands of people living in unacceptable and often unsafe conditions in the inner city which impacts negatively on their quality of life and also negatively on the fabric of the city itself. We have to find suitable accommodation for them without removing them from the opportunities that only a city can offer. It is a huge problem because they constitute the poorest sector of our community.
Let me quantify the size of the problem. The ‘joburg 2030’ report estimates our metropolitan population at 2 900 million people. But it also reveals that 33% of our population is housed in what is termed ‘less than adequate accommodation’ but percentages hide the real figures for that translates to just under a million people. 14.8%of households live in informal settlements, that translates to nearly half a million people and another 13.6% representing nearly another half a million households are located in backyard shacks. Another recent report states that we have 954.605 persons in employment in the metro but that nearly half that figure or 400 000 potentially economic active people, are unemployed. Now whilst these figures relate to the metro area they do not include the huge numbers of ‘illegal’ immigrants who live in the inner city – I wouldn’t be surprised if the inner city figures alone are not close to the ‘official’ metro figures!
‘joburg 2030’ has the following as one of the tenets or elements of its long term strategy “The starting premise is that a better city and a better quality of life for its citizens is fundamentally based on the ability of the city’s economy to grow.” There can be no argument with that statement. My concern though, is how the poorest of the poor and that huge number of unemployed people are being specifically addressed or are they just being by-passed on the basis that as our economy grows they will be absorbed into the system. If so what about their lack of skills? The late Dan Sweat, who ran a city organisation in Atlanta, once said that if cities failed to deal constructively with the urban poor, the urban poor would deal destructively with cities. He didn’t mean this as an aggressive response but as a natural consequence and we certainly experience that in Johannesburg..
I believe that we have ‘turned the corner’ or ‘come off the bottom’ in terms of urban regeneration, Our challenge, as the process of change accelerates, must now be to address the extremely difficult but critical issue of preparing the urban poor so that they can be absorbed into the economy with the same vigour that we addressed the regeneration of the city. That preparation must deal with the issue of appropriate shelter and appropriate skills if we are to succeed. We need a plan, a BIG and BOLD plan!
Regards, neil
Urban Poor – Cornelius House
WILL THE POOR BE WITH US…..ALWAYS?
Out of a number of significant events in the life of the city this week two focused my mind on the issue of the urban poor.
The first was the AGM of the Johannesburg Trust for the Homeless (JTH) which was held in Cornelius House. The second was the opening of the CIDA City Campus which I’ll cover next week. And the other ‘significant events’? Approval by the Inner City Committee of the Spatial Framework for the Braamfontein Regeneration Project and a report at our monthly Business Coalition meeting by one of the members of 20 000 square metres of Grade A office letting over the past four months – the new tenants from ‘out of town’. Yeah!!!!
Back to the JTH and Cornelius House. For a number of years after the CJP was established in 1992, our work focused on the reasons for the decline in the inner city and investigating possible solutions. One of the issues that we established early on was that, in comparison to cities in developed countries, we suffered from a distinct lack of intermediaries of all types. For instance, when we looked at residential accommodation in the United States we found that literally dozens of organisations had developed in that country to support a whole range of aspects of the provision of housing at all levels. In comparison, at that time we literally had the standard financial institutions, in fact we were then experiencing the disappearance of the traditional ‘building society’ as they became absorbed into the banking industry, and little else. There was no Johannesburg Housing Company, Cope, Social Housing Foundation, National Housing Finance Corporation, or Nurcha all of which became subsequent responses to the lack of any sophisticated models in the marketplace.
We decided that part of our work should therefore be to introduce organisations that could concentrate on specific aspects of market failure or of market lack. .Two of the first such organisations we established were ICHUT, the Inner City Housing Upgrading Trust and the JHT. The latter was conceived originally as a co-ordinating body for all the disparate players in the homeless field at that time. ICHUT was originally conceived as an intermediary to assist previously disadvantaged individuals to obtain housing in the inner city. We believed that this would start to provide some stabilisation in the housing market and in the inner city itself. At that time, the early 1990s there was also a very visible problem in regard to homelessness – at one stage there were about six thousand homeless people in the CBD itself, thousands of whom were living at Park Station. The CBD was dotted around with communities that had set themselves up in rudimentary shelter on pavements, parks and abandoned buildings.
The CJP, through an analysis of the provision of housing in the early ‘90s also determined that in the continuum of the provision of housing, from homelessness at one end to affordable housing at the other, there were serious gaps – two of these were the provision of social housing and some form of housing to bridge the gap between traditional shelters and social housing. We thought that the gap could be filled with ‘transitional housing’ examples of which we had seen in the USA, so the JTH set about establishing a local model. Cornelius House was the result.
The building is situated on the South-Eastern edge of the inner city in a mainly older industrial/warehousing environment. It was an industrial building with a fairly large floor plate, ground floor plus four storeys. With funding from ICHUT and USAID, the Trust purchased the building and created good quality communal accommodation on floors 1 to 3. The ground floor was kept as space for training but there were insufficient funds to do anything with the fourth floor at the time. The accommodation consists of single and double rooms with communal bathroom facilities and a large communal kitchen. The management of the building offered a steep learning curve to Chris Lund the CE of the JTH, and today it has settled into a well-run facility. For the first three years the building ran at a loss but with the completion of additional accommodation on the fourth level this year, the building is now breaking even. These are larger rooms than on the other floors offering family accommodation. Range of rentals is R165.00 per month ($16.00 currently!) for a single room or for a double room for husband/wife; R330,00 for two same sex sharing a double room whilst the family rooms are around R450.00 to R550.00 per month. The economics of the building does of course rely on assistance from the local authority in the form of rates rebates.
The building now boasts a successful spaza shop, a ladies hairdresser and a tailor and offers a variety of training opportunities to residents. Twice a year a Quantas crew give up their free time in the city to work at the building helping to clean or providing training especially related to catering. One of the objectives of the Trust is to provide training to the occupiers in order that they might be able to find employment or improve their employment opportunities and eventually move on to better quality accommodation.
This is what urban renewal is all about – trying to understand the issues on the ground – developing relevant responses, implementing initiatives and being prepared to learn through trial and error. Yet I can’t help but wonder if our focus hasn’t resulted in a blind spot developing in relation to the urban poor. The urban poor constitute a huge dichotomy and practical difficulty for which we don’t appear to have developed a specific plan. We have thousands of people living in unacceptable and often unsafe conditions in the inner city which impacts negatively on their quality of life and also negatively on the fabric of the city itself. We have to find suitable accommodation for them without removing them from the opportunities that only a city can offer. It is a huge problem because they constitute the poorest sector of our community.
Let me quantify the size of the problem. The ‘joburg 2030’ report estimates our metropolitan population at 2 900 million people. But it also reveals that 33% of our population is housed in what is termed ‘less than adequate accommodation’ but percentages hide the real figures for that translates to just under a million people. 14.8%of households live in informal settlements, that translates to nearly half a million people and another 13.6% representing nearly another half a million households are located in backyard shacks. Another recent report states that we have 954.605 persons in employment in the metro but that nearly half that figure or 400 000 potentially economic active people, are unemployed. Now whilst these figures relate to the metro area they do not include the huge numbers of ‘illegal’ immigrants who live in the inner city – I wouldn’t be surprised if the inner city figures alone are not close to the ‘official’ metro figures!
‘joburg 2030’ has the following as one of the tenets or elements of its long term strategy “The starting premise is that a better city and a better quality of life for its citizens is fundamentally based on the ability of the city’s economy to grow.” There can be no argument with that statement. My concern though, is how the poorest of the poor and that huge number of unemployed people are being specifically addressed or are they just being by-passed on the basis that as our economy grows they will be absorbed into the system. If so what about their lack of skills? The late Dan Sweat, who ran a city organisation in Atlanta, once said that if cities failed to deal constructively with the urban poor, the urban poor would deal destructively with cities. He didn’t mean this as an aggressive response but as a natural consequence and we certainly experience that in Johannesburg..
I believe that we have ‘turned the corner’ or ‘come off the bottom’ in terms of urban regeneration, Our challenge, as the process of change accelerates, must now be to address the extremely difficult but critical issue of preparing the urban poor so that they can be absorbed into the economy with the same vigour that we addressed the regeneration of the city. That preparation must deal with the issue of appropriate shelter and appropriate skills if we are to succeed. We need a plan, a BIG and BOLD plan!
Regards, neil
Friday, November 1, 2002
Heritage Citichat 1 November 2002
CITICHAT 43/2002 - 1 November 2002
HERITAGE - COMING FROM BEHIND BUT CATCHING UP, FAST!
Over the past eighteen months or so I have voiced the frustration of many in regard to the apparent lack of Council commitment to the rich heritage of this city exemplified in their total disregard for its heritage buildings. The disastrous situation at Drill Hall, previously illegally occupied and the site of two fires that claimed a number of lives; the Rissik Street Post Office which was fast becoming a prime example of ‘demolition by neglect’; the sorry tale of the Bertram’s “pepper pot” houses, etc etc etc. Well, the good news is that, following a number of recent workshops, a heritage policy has been thrashed out for Drill Hall that shortly will go for approval to SAHRA and the Executive Mayor and the initial report on alternative uses for the Rissik Street Post Office will be discussed at the end of next week. But that’s not all!
Just 5 months ago, (Citichat 21/2002 dated 31 May), I wrote of a critical meeting held the previous week between the South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA), various local heritage organisations and the Executive Mayor, senior councillors and officials.
I reported that we had met to try to find a joint solution to another of the many dichotomies that the city has inherited. Heritage and other buildings abandoned by the private sector and now illegally occupied as residential accommodation but constituting a danger to the occupants or a serious blot on the urban fabric. Heritage buildings owned by the public sector and falling into “demolition by neglect”. A lack of funding, a lack of suitable housing and, in the opinion of some around the table, a lack of interest in preserving a heritage that may be repugnant to many. The Executive Mayor agreed to appoint a Heritage Task Team that would, in the short term, address the immediate crisis of “bad buildings” in the Inner City and, in the longer term, ‘align and integrate development and heritage strategies’. Another Task Team, another Talk Shop?
Not this time! The Task Team was duly established under the capable direction and chairmanship of Eric Itzkin (author of ‘Gandhi’s Johannesburg’) the Deputy Director, Immovable Heritage which falls under the Arts, Culture and Heritage Department of the City of Johannesburg. The Task Team agreed that it was critical, in the first place, to develop an accurate knowledge-base of the city’s heritage assets, something that the city, surprisingly, does not possess. There had been a number of surveys undertaken by the Council previously but these were architectural in nature rather than heritage based. RAU had undertaken a survey in the mid-70s but it too was heavily architecturally slanted. In fact, at least one notable building was lost as a result of the architectural bias of that report. It failed to record and register the Starlite Cinema, 44 President Street, which was a popular ‘black bioscope’ during the apartheid years, because the building didn’t have any architectural merit. The building was thus demolished to make way for what Eric gently refers to as a “ rather undistinguished parking garage” Makes you want to cry, just look at the resurgence around the historic Apollo Theatre on 125th Street in Haarlem, New York. Sorry, I wander!
The Task Team met again yesterday to receive a report on progress achieved regarding some of the ‘crisis buildings’ in the city and also Phase One of a Report that had been commissioned in response to the need to develop a ‘heritage audit’. Not bad considering that only some five months has elapsed since the meeting with the Executive Mayor!
The aims of the heritage audit were to
investigate the cultural significance of the city’s building stock
develop a workable inventory of heritage buildings
satisfy the needs of Development Planning, Heritage and other functions, and
supply information for the Provincial Heritage Register.
The Report was compiled by Johann and Catharina Bruwer who were able to work together with the ‘foot survey’ team assembled by the Region 8 Director, Yakoob Makda. This ‘non-heritage team’ under Martin New is developing a report on the condition of all buildings in the inner city and using the opportunity to record and take action against all zoning, planning and by-law infringements. The ‘heritage team’ found that the ‘foot survey’ team had decided to start with an area which co-incidentally corresponded roughly to the founding ‘footprint’ area of the city, Diagonal to Joubert and Pritchard to Commissioner.
The brief to Johann Bruwer was to identify and assess all buildings and significant open spaces including checking archival records, consulting with relevant specialists and roleplayers and transferring all collected material onto a user-friendly database. From a so far cursory look at the report he has also included a lot of fascinating historical data even related to what buildings preceded the current structures. For example;“Halfway between Commissioner and Market Streets on this site by 1900, was the Gaiety Theatre (1893) facing Kort Street. On the south-western corner of the site originally, stood a single storey building (with basement for storage) of brick with an iron roof, now demolished. It was the property of Messrs Waldorf Hotel Off-Sales. The building was divided into three sections: a ‘Non-European-‘ and a ‘European’ Off-Sales section and an undesignated shop. The architect of this non-descript building was I. Wayburn.”
When the whole report is completed and released it will provide an excellent record of what is and was but also evidence of an increasingly committed City Council.
Early in the 20th Century Oswald Spengler wrote; “We cannot comprehend political and economic history at all unless we realise that the city…..is the determinative form to which the course and sense of higher history generally conforms. World history is city history”
Regards, neil.
HERITAGE - COMING FROM BEHIND BUT CATCHING UP, FAST!
Over the past eighteen months or so I have voiced the frustration of many in regard to the apparent lack of Council commitment to the rich heritage of this city exemplified in their total disregard for its heritage buildings. The disastrous situation at Drill Hall, previously illegally occupied and the site of two fires that claimed a number of lives; the Rissik Street Post Office which was fast becoming a prime example of ‘demolition by neglect’; the sorry tale of the Bertram’s “pepper pot” houses, etc etc etc. Well, the good news is that, following a number of recent workshops, a heritage policy has been thrashed out for Drill Hall that shortly will go for approval to SAHRA and the Executive Mayor and the initial report on alternative uses for the Rissik Street Post Office will be discussed at the end of next week. But that’s not all!
Just 5 months ago, (Citichat 21/2002 dated 31 May), I wrote of a critical meeting held the previous week between the South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA), various local heritage organisations and the Executive Mayor, senior councillors and officials.
I reported that we had met to try to find a joint solution to another of the many dichotomies that the city has inherited. Heritage and other buildings abandoned by the private sector and now illegally occupied as residential accommodation but constituting a danger to the occupants or a serious blot on the urban fabric. Heritage buildings owned by the public sector and falling into “demolition by neglect”. A lack of funding, a lack of suitable housing and, in the opinion of some around the table, a lack of interest in preserving a heritage that may be repugnant to many. The Executive Mayor agreed to appoint a Heritage Task Team that would, in the short term, address the immediate crisis of “bad buildings” in the Inner City and, in the longer term, ‘align and integrate development and heritage strategies’. Another Task Team, another Talk Shop?
Not this time! The Task Team was duly established under the capable direction and chairmanship of Eric Itzkin (author of ‘Gandhi’s Johannesburg’) the Deputy Director, Immovable Heritage which falls under the Arts, Culture and Heritage Department of the City of Johannesburg. The Task Team agreed that it was critical, in the first place, to develop an accurate knowledge-base of the city’s heritage assets, something that the city, surprisingly, does not possess. There had been a number of surveys undertaken by the Council previously but these were architectural in nature rather than heritage based. RAU had undertaken a survey in the mid-70s but it too was heavily architecturally slanted. In fact, at least one notable building was lost as a result of the architectural bias of that report. It failed to record and register the Starlite Cinema, 44 President Street, which was a popular ‘black bioscope’ during the apartheid years, because the building didn’t have any architectural merit. The building was thus demolished to make way for what Eric gently refers to as a “ rather undistinguished parking garage” Makes you want to cry, just look at the resurgence around the historic Apollo Theatre on 125th Street in Haarlem, New York. Sorry, I wander!
The Task Team met again yesterday to receive a report on progress achieved regarding some of the ‘crisis buildings’ in the city and also Phase One of a Report that had been commissioned in response to the need to develop a ‘heritage audit’. Not bad considering that only some five months has elapsed since the meeting with the Executive Mayor!
The aims of the heritage audit were to
investigate the cultural significance of the city’s building stock
develop a workable inventory of heritage buildings
satisfy the needs of Development Planning, Heritage and other functions, and
supply information for the Provincial Heritage Register.
The Report was compiled by Johann and Catharina Bruwer who were able to work together with the ‘foot survey’ team assembled by the Region 8 Director, Yakoob Makda. This ‘non-heritage team’ under Martin New is developing a report on the condition of all buildings in the inner city and using the opportunity to record and take action against all zoning, planning and by-law infringements. The ‘heritage team’ found that the ‘foot survey’ team had decided to start with an area which co-incidentally corresponded roughly to the founding ‘footprint’ area of the city, Diagonal to Joubert and Pritchard to Commissioner.
The brief to Johann Bruwer was to identify and assess all buildings and significant open spaces including checking archival records, consulting with relevant specialists and roleplayers and transferring all collected material onto a user-friendly database. From a so far cursory look at the report he has also included a lot of fascinating historical data even related to what buildings preceded the current structures. For example;“Halfway between Commissioner and Market Streets on this site by 1900, was the Gaiety Theatre (1893) facing Kort Street. On the south-western corner of the site originally, stood a single storey building (with basement for storage) of brick with an iron roof, now demolished. It was the property of Messrs Waldorf Hotel Off-Sales. The building was divided into three sections: a ‘Non-European-‘ and a ‘European’ Off-Sales section and an undesignated shop. The architect of this non-descript building was I. Wayburn.”
When the whole report is completed and released it will provide an excellent record of what is and was but also evidence of an increasingly committed City Council.
Early in the 20th Century Oswald Spengler wrote; “We cannot comprehend political and economic history at all unless we realise that the city…..is the determinative form to which the course and sense of higher history generally conforms. World history is city history”
Regards, neil.
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