Found in translation

At Currency, we like to think that we’re on top of local nonfiction writing – after all, we’ve all spent our journalistic careers working on newspapers and magazines, surrounded by astoundingly good creators of the stuff.

That said, having spent a couple of weeks dipping in and out of The Interpreters: South Africa’s New Nonfiction (Soutie Press, 2025), we’ve got to admit that we had not clocked the breadth and depth of sparkling creative nonfiction that has been produced by South African writers in the 21st century.

Editors Sean Christie and Hedley Twidle – both excellent writers themselves – have rounded up work from the literary old guard including Njabulo S Ndebele, J.M. Coetzee, Rian Malan, Bongani Madondo, Jonny Steinberg and Antjie Krog. And alongside them there are fresh voices including Bongani Kona, Zanele Mji, Kimon de Greef and Srila Roy. Really, it’s a glut of compelling work.

“Finding good creative nonfiction in South Africa has been a historically difficult task, as no single publication or platform has consistently sustained this sort of writing. But incredible pieces emerge from time to time, their rarity adding to the reading experience,” says Christie.

“We have been finding, sharing and discussing these works as colleagues and friends for decades,” says Twidle. The Interpreters is the result of this shared fascination.

From IVF journeys to Cape Town artists, the topics tackled in the book range widely, but we chose a piece from the always engaging Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon. I had a tear reading the full feature – it is shocking, fascinating and tragic. It’s also a voorsmakie of the top stuff you can expect from the anthology as a whole.

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DISPOSSESSED VIGILS

Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon

“Home is an appropriated space. It does not exist objectively in reality. The notion of ‘home’ is a fiction we create out of a need to belong. Home is a place where most people have never been to and never will arrive at.” – Santu Mofokeng

On a morning in March 2012, firemen searched the rubble of End Street for bodies. The sky was off-white, the fallen stones ashen brown. A palm tree stood over the waste, a funereal umbrella. A hushed crowd waited for the further revelations of this wreckage. Two bodies had already been disinterred: these young men were to begin their long journey, with their bags of clothes and few possessions, back to Zimbabwe.

The stones of the collapsed building were themselves itinerant: they had travelled from Scotland in the early 20th century to end their journey burnt and broken, surrounded by barbed wire, on the eastern periphery of inner-city Johannesburg. Caledonian Hall was built in 1905 after the South African War by the Johannesburg Caledonian Society, a club of Scottish migrants that had organised militias to fight with the British. Gables had adorned the roof alongside an ornate and ostentatious turret. During the 20th century it had housed a theatre, a warehouse, a carpet business and a dance club from which drugged-up middle-class whites had flowed into the streets of Doornfontein.

By the 2000s the Hall had become one of the “dark buildings” of the city, or a mnyamandawo as they are called in street language – dark places without electricity, filled with detritus and stagnant water, and appropriated by the city’s poorest populations attempting to lay claim to its promise. The term also has resonances with isinyama in isiZulu and umnyama in isiNdebele, words referring to spiritual misfortune.

These buildings are places in which terror and intimacy, sorrow and song, coexist. They are inhabited by both the living and the dead. These buildings are also called the “bad buildings” of Johannesburg by municipal policy makers or “hijacked buildings” by state officials, the media and the middle classes who view them as a blight on the city’s well-being and economy: places of criminality and dirt. And yet they are home to thousands of residents, both South African and from elsewhere, trying to find a decent and dignified life in the city.

I first visited Caledonian Hall several weeks before its collapse, after it had been wrecked by a fire. Its interior was blackened. Groups of men stood around the threshold guarding the path to its inner belly. During the fire a group of Rastafarians, who had a carpentry workshop in the building, built a large structure of beds onto which those fleeing the fire could leap to safety.

Various rumours circulated around the cause of the fire: one was that it was a xenophobic attack against the migrants who lived there; another that it was arson by the owner to claim insurance; and the more prosaic was that a woman had fallen asleep in her room and spilled her paraffin lamp.

A few nights before the fire, a man had been found with his throat slit in one of the rooms. Neighbours had found his body when the smell became rank. One possible reason for the fire and the subsequent collapse and deaths, explained to me by several former residents, was that it had been vengeance for the murder carried out by the murdered man’s ghost. A related theory had been that the man’s Venda relatives had caused the fire through magic, or muthi, to avenge their relative’s loss.

The murdered man, whom I shall call Ezekiel, lived in the building only a few months. Ezekiel had been evicted from a nearby building, known as Chambers, only weeks prior to his death. He had lived with the evictees on the street for a while, before finding shelter in the Hall which was to be his last dwelling.

IN THE EARLY HOURS of a morning in January 2012, the Red Ants, an infamous private security company adorned in red gear and armed with batons and whips, raided Chambers, another of Doornfontein’s dark buildings, forcing its residents onto the street. The eviction came only a month after the Constitutional Court had ruled that evictions, even by private owners, could not be carried out unless the City ensured against homelessness. Yet infighting in the building had led to its residents losing their legal representation.

The dynamics had nearly escalated into violence by a group of able-bodied residents against the visually impaired residents in the building. With social and political tumult in Zimbabwe in the 2000s, and the breakdown of social services, many blind migrants had crossed the Limpopo River along with thousands of Zimbabweans seeking refuge in South Africa. Many knew each other having studied at the Margaretha Hugo School for the Blind, also known as Copota, in the Masvingo area of Zimbabwe. Amid the derelictions of inner-city Johannesburg, they reignited social networks created at the school to find home and support. Even the most well educated were forced to beg for survival on the street. At Chambers, to fast-track legal proceedings, the evicting property company offered alternative accommodation to thirty-five households with blind residents, while pushing forward eviction proceedings for those remaining, including families and children. The blind residents, who left rapidly the previous October, were accused of being traitors and even witches and had to plan their move in secret to accommodation on top of a furniture factory, while the remaining residents would soon be forcibly evicted.

I witnessed the aftermath of the January eviction. As I arrived groups were stripping their mattresses so they could sell the wire – many had been evicted before and this was one more displacement. Mattress fluff floated like pollen through the air. Groups huddled around coal stoves surrounded by buckets and bags, wondering about their futures. A security guard in a Father Christmas hat wandered off at the end of his shift. A gasping woman in a Springbok rugby T-shirt looked for her asthma pump and children fought and played in the streets. A man sat on the paving in furious tears, threatening to go and rob somebody.

Families created rooms made of mattresses in the streets, moved into abandoned cars, and waited for the coming summer rains. A few days after the eviction the metro police came with a municipal truck and carted off many of the group’s remaining possessions, including blankets and mattresses. Those who had remained on the street scattered to other unlawfully occupied buildings, or dark buildings in the area, including Caledonian Hall.

After the fire there, many residents found themselves homeless again. Some continued to shelter in the burnt enclave. Others set to work on a project that would bring renewed destruction: some of the young men in the building began recycling the inner skeleton of the building. They piled floor-high steel beams on small steel trolleys, rolling them off to nearby recycling yards where they could get nearly R1,000 for the steel. They were to extract from the city what the city had stolen from them. The walls began to sway and eventually the structure imploded.

I met one of the men who had been taking the beams, whom I will call Samuel, and who had been living inside the building. After the Hall collapsed, I was sitting in End Street Park, a block away, when an unknown man came up to me. Samuel wore a grey jacket, green hat and torn sneakers. He looked ill and spoke quietly and slowly as if through language he could reconstruct a demolished world. He did not know who I was – I was merely a figure from outside the borders of his speech and thoughts – but he asked if he could tell me his story.

Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon is the author of The Blinded City: Ten Years Inner-City Johannesburg (Picador Africa, 2022), shortlisted for the Sunday Times Literary Awards (Nonfiction category). He is a senior lecturer in anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and holds a doctorate in development studies from the University of Oxford and a master’s in creative writing from Wits.

“Dispossessed Vigils” originally appeared in African Cities Reader III: Land Property and Value, edited by Ntone Edjabe and Edgar Pieterse (Chimurenga and the African Centre for Cities, 2015); elements also appeared in revised form in The Blinded City. © Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon

The Interpreters: South Africa’s New Nonfiction edited by Sean Christie and Hedley Twidle is published by Soutie Press. Available now where all good books are sold, worldwide in paperback and Kindle formats on Amazon, and directly from Soutie Press.