Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Section A Introducing the Book
- Section B Narrating: the Politics of Constructing Local Identities
- Section C Recommending: From Understanding Micro-Politics to Imagining Policy
- Section D Politicising: Community-Based Research and the Politics of Knowledge
- Contributors
- Photography Credits
- Acronyms and Abbreviations
- List of Tables, Figures and Boxes
- Index
10 - Leaving Yeoville
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Section A Introducing the Book
- Section B Narrating: the Politics of Constructing Local Identities
- Section C Recommending: From Understanding Micro-Politics to Imagining Policy
- Section D Politicising: Community-Based Research and the Politics of Knowledge
- Contributors
- Photography Credits
- Acronyms and Abbreviations
- List of Tables, Figures and Boxes
- Index
Summary
The way we understand and negotiate the past of our cities often conflates with the understanding of our own past as city dwellers. Memory plays an active role in the construction of our urban identities, as much as in the way we react to urban change. Our residential place in the city is certainly unstable, and we often move during our lives, but these moves are not solely the product of rational choices. How we as urban dwellers understand these moves, and how nostalgia, regret, fear, and longing for lost places combine with the necessity of making a new home elsewhere, were the initial questions behind ‘Leaving Yeoville’.
In addition to the collection of interviews with former Yeovillites of all classes, nationalities, age, race and gender, photo sessions with photographer Lerato Maduna were arranged for our former residents to revisit old haunts in the neighbourhood, as a trigger for the unravelling of their memories of their personal histories and that of the neighbourhood. This work also benefited from the help of Claire Bénit-Gbaffou, Thembani Mkhize and Willy-Claude Hebandjoko Mbelenge.
My father always dreamed of moving to the northern suburbs. Most of the people of Yeoville wished to move out. It was a suburb of great ambition.
BORN: Yeoville (Johannesburg), 1929
LIVED IN YEOVILLE: 1929–1949
FAMILY STATUS (THEN): A child with his parents
LIVES NOW: Hyde Park
FAMILY STATUS (NOW): Married, lives with his daughter
PROFESSION (NOW): Architect/writer
MOVED TO (AFTER LEAVING YEOVILLE): Craighall Park
A large part of my life was our family. Yeoville was much more rural. My grandmother's house at 93 Francis had stables – no horses in my time – but she had a cow. It was a lovely middle-class suburb, little detached houses, with verandas that faced the street and people, a lot of social life occurred on the veranda … you sat on the stoep and watched the street. Yeoville had a large Jewish population but it also had a large Anglican church. It was a white suburb, completely segregated, with a large black population working as, as called at that time, servants. They lived on the premises, in little back rooms. There wasn't a conscious awareness that this was a very unfair society.
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- Politics and Community-Based ResearchPerspectives from Yeoville Studio, Johannesburg, pp. 117 - 128Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2019