Fragments of Fietas

On a Sunday morning early in 1977, I rode into Fietas on my bicycle, camera and tripod behind me. The demolitions had begun: houses and shops that had been there a week ago were gone. I met Ossie Docrat walking home with the Sunday papers.

We greeted each other. I said, ‘Mr Docrat, I cannot tell you how ashamed I am. I cannot bear to think that this is being done to you in my name as a white South African.’

He thanked me. Three generations of his family had lived there. The house built by his grandparents, which he had inherited, still stood nearby. The shop that he had taken over from his father, and which he had built into a thriving business, was around the corner. We spoke about the twenty-year struggle against the Group Areas proclamation for Pageview, known to its people as Fietas. He said that the community had fought in every way possible to keep Fietas alive.

‘Now we have to accept that Fietas is dead.’

Then we spoke of the destruction. He said, ‘I feel as though my teeth are being pulled out one by one. I run my tongue over the spaces and I try to remember the shape of what was there.’

These photographs, made between 1949 and 2016, tell of the destruction of a community for a racist dream, and its sequel.

— David Goldblatt, June 2012

Goodman Gallery presents Fragments of Fietas, an exhibition of photographs by David Goldblatt made predominantly in the late 1970s and 1980s, during the years when the community west of Johannesburg was being dismantled under apartheid’s racist laws. They record, in Goldblatt’s words, “the destruction of a community for a racist dream, and its sequel”.

Known officially as Pageview but to its residents as Fietas, it was one of the few areas in the city where people of Indian descent were allowed to trade and lease land, and where those designated as Black, Chinese, or Coloured could live prior to the introduction of the Group Areas Act in 1950. In a racially divided city, it was a rare enclave of social coexistence. Residents shared stoeps and backyards, lived in close proximity, and were bound by the quiet interdependence of ordinary life.

By the late 1950s, that fabric had begun to unravel. Declared a “white area” under the Group Areas Act, the people of Fietas resisted removal while government officials waged a relentless campaign to force them to move to their racially demarcated townships. Families were relocated to distant townships such as Lenasia, Eldorado Park, and Soweto. Homes and shops were demolished. What followed was an act of sanctioned forgetting, as the remnants of shared lives were levelled in the name of racial order.

Baba Sahib opened his butchery early in the twentieth century. In 1940 Sahib was old and ill so his son of 16, Hassimia, joined him. It was a ‘mutton shop’ as most of their customers were Hindu. To reassure Muslims that halaal meat was stocked, it was called the Islamic Butchery. The shop was popular among African workers from the railway yards and Afrikaners from Vrededorp and Brixton.

Over the six decades that Goldblatt photographed Fietas and its surroundings, he returned often to bear witness to its transformation. He photographed life before, during, and after the removals, and recorded the hollow aftermath of apartheid’s ambitions: the futile attempt to build houses for white residents on the ruins of the Fietas community. His photographs focus on the subtle marks left by time, displacement, and memory. Through these fragments he explored how the moral conditions of a society can be read in its architecture, its absences, and its silences.

Fragments of Fietas gathers these images as both testimony and elegy. For Goldblatt, to photograph was an act of moral attention, a way of acknowledging the entanglement of privilege, guilt, and responsibility. In returning to Fietas across decades, he transformed documentation into devotion, a fidelity to people and places marked by loss, and to the belief that fragments, when held and named, might still speak of what was once whole.

Ossie was born in 1928 in his grandparents’ house on De La Rey Street, but grew up with four brothers and two sisters in this. his parents’ house on 20th Street. He inherited the house from his mother. In 1950 he prepared this room for his bride. Sarah. He had the walls decorated with a wavy plaster finish and had this walnut bedroom suite made to order. In 1977, ‘disqualified’ from living in his house, he cut six inches from the width of each of these beds so that they would fit into the bedroom in the Community Development house that he was forced to move to in Lenasia, the Group Area to which he and his family were consigned.

It was a wooden and corrugated iron house. The floors were rickety, so l asked her to please be very still during the fifteen minute exposure. We were standing quietly next to the camera as the light did its work when suddenly there was loud knocking on the front door. She froze in fright, put her finger to her lips and whispered, “Shhhh. It’s the GGs”.

The GGs were the Group Area inspectors who rode in Government Garage cars with GG number plates and served removal notices on racially ‘disqualified’ people. We waited in rigid silence. The knocking went on for a long time and then stopped.

In 1906, she came with her parents from Cape Town to this house in what was then known as Malay Location. Now in her seventies, she faced forced removal. Categorised as a Malay. the Group Areas Act disqualified her from living in the house. She hoped to be sent to an Indian rather than a Coloured Group Area, for in the latter she feared gang violence. She was sent to an Indian area. Tahera Karbelkar’s house was demolished in 1977. In 2025 the plot where her home stood remained empty, home to rats and weeds.

Ossie said, ‘I built the shop up. For my father it was just a sort of a station. But for me it was a viable shop. It became the best known shop in Fietas. Except for clothing and textiles I stocked everything from a pin to an anchor. But it was not only a shopping place. It was a meeting place. Especially in the evening when people came back from work. When there was a cricket or rugby match - in those davs there were only radio commentaries - they all used to come in and listen. I had blackboards outside and l used to put the score up there. Trams and buses used to pass and they would see the score. Sometimes the tram driver would stop his tram and come over and say, “Change your board, they’re three wickets down” or whatever. It was a place where people expected to find news. The customers were my friends. The shop gave me a lot of living.’