Hillbrow is my Home

I was woken up one morning by my flatmate, and she was going on about how the guy who was asking her out won’t come to our place. I looked at her and I asked ‘why’ and she said the most interesting thing that I believe needs to be cleared today. She said “he won’t come because we stay in Hillbrow and he doesn’t want his car to be stolen by Nigerians”, I laughed because three years ago when I moved to Hillbrow I had the same opinion of this place, but back then I feared having my shoes stolen.

When I was told that I would have to stay in Hillbrow in the year 2009 during my first year at Wits to be closer to school, I was reluctant. I started imagining how I was going to be robbed and raped. In fact I was so obsessed with the ideas of something like this happening to me that for three months I followed a plan that whenever I leave my flat I would do the following: clutch my bag, walk against the wall and hopefully become a chameleon and blend in; because I feared being pounced on by what I thought were crazy barbarians ready to kill me. Until one day I just became tired of being afraid, so tired I even went back to wearing miniskirts to walk to school and come back at midnight from studying and nothing would happen to me.

I understand that Hillbrow is flooded with Africa; I mean you will find emigrants from Algeria all the way to Mozambique. However , who am I a mere South African defined by a green ID book and the number of years I have resided in South Africa with no consideration to the probability that my greatest grandparents might be from Zimbabwe, to judge fellow Africans and assume that they are all drug lords, rapists and hijackers? Who am I to make these speculations?

Three years residing in Hillbrow and having Nigerians and Zimbabweans as my neighbours and all I have received from them is respect and they greet me with a smile and they call me their ‘sister’. I might be getting this wrong, but the fact that they are calling me their sister makes me feel as one of their own, at that moment they do not view me as a South African and I do not view them as Zimbabweans or Nigerians, we are Africans. It is a fact though that Hillbrow is flooded with Africans and it is also a chaotic place and it also has this scary ‘I am going to swallow you look’. However, I still do not understand why I haven’t even been assaulted, and I am not asking for it.

My friends from uptown Braamfontein claim that it is all luck after all I stay by the police station, but I have taken tests and I still haven’t been harmed.One is when I walked all the way to the most flooded and apparently dangerous street ‘Claim’ and I stood there talking on the phone, and what I ended up getting were people wondering why I am shouting. Another was when my friend and I walked all the way from Newtown to Hillbrow and instead of being robbed, we got a man who was concerned about young girls arriving home safely.

Contrary, I am originally from a small township in Benoni called Wattville and I have lived there for 18 years. As I was growing up my older sister always told me to get out there so I can be known. I always asked why because at the end of the day my neighbours would gossip about how I was losing weight and they are starting to get curious. I didn’t take my sisters advice, and one evening during my visit for my sisters’ stokvel I got an eye opener.

While there I decided to venture off to the nearest tuck shop, before I went there my sister asked me to hold on to R1500. Afraid because it was night time, she said the money was more safe with me than at the stokvel and I thought ‘of course, this is my hood, I have lived in Wattville since birth nothing interesting happens here’. Curse my words, so I strolled down the streets with the phone in my hands chatting on mxit, and the next thing that happened was absolutely funny. A man jumped from a tree, I stood there because I found it ridiculous that a man so old would do such. Nevertheless, he came to me and demanded that I give him my phone, humoured by such an occurrence I laughed and continued with my stroll. He then dragged me from behind and said that I shouldn’t be stupid. I should just give him my phone. I still curse my mouth for what happened next, I said ‘hell no’, I grasped my phone and prepared to run, but I was clearly not fast enough because what happened next I couldn’t believe. I watched the knife get pierced into my skin, felt its tingliness and the thoughts that were playing in my head were ‘this is home, why am I a victim of crime at a place I grew up in’.
Seeing that I won’t let go of my phone, he stabbed me again and at that point I screamed because of the pain I was feeling and I fell back let go of my phone and I laid there, still thinking ‘how is this happening at a place I trust so much’ and it hit me, this isn’t home any more Hillbrow is my home. It’s not about how long you have stayed at a place; it’s about who you know at the place.

18 years in Wattville compared to the three years I have stayed in Hillbrow and funny as it may sound too many, but I am safer in Hillbrow. This place of chaos in the day and beauty in the night. In its ugliest form, it’s beautiful. Its places like Hillbrow that are filled with people that shouldn’t be feared. It is places with no life, no people that need to be feared, so let’s try to get that right.