Sifiso Ntuli is the "roving Bantu" of Roving Bantu Kultural Konsepts. A natural-born raconteur and self-proclaimed freedom peddler, Ntuli and his partner Ashley Heron have set up headquarters for their cultural venture at the Roving Bantu Kitchen in Brixton, Johannesburg.
"Jazz and freedom is the spirit here," says Ntuli. "We have put together a place that offers people a home in divisive times, irrespective of race and free from hatred and bigotry of all kinds."
Ntuli went into exile in 1981 "to avoid room 1026" - the notorious interrogation room at John Vorster Square. He became involved in the ANC Sechaba cultural group in New York, was a volunteer for the UN observer mission to South Africa, and appeared in the documentary Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony, the story of how music made an impact on the liberation struggle. "South African music has always been highly regarded in the States," he says.
In 1996 he came home, worked for BMG records and then started the famous Politburo Sessions in Yeoville, featuring African bands.
TAILOR-MADE PARTIES
His new spiritual home is on the corner of Caroline and Esher streets, where the Roving Bantu Kitchen provides live music, traditional food and tailor-made parties. Spray-painted portraits of Nina Simone, Madiba and MaBrrr decorate the exterior. And once a month on a Sunday, the Roving Bantu Brixton and Fietas Trek, designed to open people's eyes and hearts to the issues these communities face, begins and ends here.
This is not a whimsical saunter down memory lane. It is a thought-provoking exploration of suburbs that were once home to vibrant mixed communities, then were demolished in the apartheid years to make way for white housing. Many former residents have returned, but face problems of reclamation, land ownership, crime, poverty and homelessness.
"These are the inner-city Jozi blues," says Ntuli. "And we need to ask questions about how we can make these places work. Whose streets are these, whose monuments? Whose parks? Whose homeless people? And whose problem?"
Built in 1961, the 237m Sentech Tower was originally named after the apartheid minister of posts and telegraphs, Albert Hertzog, who famously said South Africa would get TV over his dead body as it was "the devil's own box, for disseminating communism and immorality". In 1976 the Hertzog Tower, first used for radio broadcasts, became Johannesburg's main TV broadcast tower.
— Tower of irony
Our tour begins with a nip up a graffiti-clad "sh*t lane", so named when Brixton was on the bucket system. "Brixton has always been a working-class suburb," says Ntuli. "Blood was spilt on these streets during the mineworkers' strike of 1922."
Today Brixton is home to a mixed community of families, students, slumlords, homeless people and a handful of professionals who hang out at "the inevitably gentrified coffee shop", as Ntuli affectionately refers to his favourite spot, Breezeblock.
Ntuli talks about the efforts of the community to get rid of the derelicts and dealers to make this a safe place for their kids.
"The struggle for freedom and reclamation continues. But how do we positively reclaim these communities and make them safe and viable? Why are our kids playing on tar? Shouldn't they be playing on grass? And who is Kingston Frost anyway?"
From our viewpoint in Kingston Frost Park, the Sentech Tower thrusts ever skyward. First the Albert Hertzog Tower then the Brixton Tower, it has been many things to many people.
"It was once a symbol of National Party propaganda," says Ntuli. "It used to be a symbol of sophistication when it had a public Lobservation deck and restaurant; and then a symbol of national paranoia in the 1980s when the government feared it would be targeted by anti-apartheid insurgents and declared it a strategic location. Now homeless people live beneath it. Watch out for glass and excrement."
We head for Fietas, once home to a lively multiracial community. The name is a translation of "fitters", after the proliferation of men's outfitters that used to trade here. Its famous 14th Street,once compared to London's Savile Row, was bulldozed in the '70s.
POTHOLES AND RAZOR WIRE
Shack dwellers live beneath psychedelic graffiti at the old Freedom Square in Pageview. A block away from a shebeen is an old-age home for white Afrikaners. There are potholes and razor wire ("Brixton bling", as Ntuli calls them) next to a painted slogan from 2010 proclaiming: "A world-class African city".
We stop at a shebeen for a beer. Three young guys in a Citi Golf play sternum-thumping music. "Shoot us, shoot us," say a group of buddies, hamming it up for the camera. On the street, women are doing their washing or selling clothes; youngsters hang out in sunbeams in alleyways; a little girl plays trampoline on an old mattress. "What is her future in Fietas?" Ntuli asks.
One of the few buildings to survive the demolition is now the Fietas Museum, declared a heritage site in 2013. Curator Salma Patel takes us through the collection of testimonies from the heyday.
We stop on the edge of Fietas and gaze at the city skyline. It's Sunday, and on the fields below are soccer players, lovers holding hands, children playing, a father walking his daughter to church.
The trek ends, appropriately, at the monument to Enoch Sontonga, who composed Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika. It's in the Braamfontein cemetery among ancient trees that whisper of history. There are graves of settlers and immigrants, randlords, Canadian soldiers who died in World War 1, Chinese indentured labourers.
And then we are back at the Roving Bantu Kitchen, where the sound of jazz maestro Paul Hanmer's piano fills the room and the conversation is all about making a caring African city. Can it be done? Can communities live peacefully together? Yes they can, according to Ntuli's jazz-and-freedom method.
