The Building My Mother Warned Me About

Leaving Cala With a Suitcase and a Warning

I grew up in Cala, a small town in the Eastern Cape where everybody's business belonged to everybody, where the taxi rank closed by dark and the loudest thing on a Sunday was the church bell. When the call came that I had got the job in Johannesburg, an entry level admin position at a logistics company in the city, I screamed so loudly that my grandmother's chickens scattered across the yard. My mother did not scream. She sat down on the kitchen step with her hands pressed flat against her knees and said, "Joburg eats people, Aphiwe. It eats them and it does not spit out the bones."

She had never been there herself, not once in her life, but she had heard enough stories from cousins and church members and the evening news to have built a whole city in her mind made only of danger. Hijackings. Buildings falling apart with wires hanging out of the walls. Women disappearing. She packed my bag herself the night before I left, folding my clothes with a kind of grief, as if she was preparing me for war rather than for work. "Stay away from town," she kept saying. "Stay away from those old buildings in the centre. That is where it is worst."

I did not have the heart to tell her that those old buildings in the centre were exactly where I would need to live, because that was what I could afford.

The First Week of Viewings

I arrived with eleven thousand rand to my name, most of it saved from three years of part time work at a hardware shop and a small loan from my uncle that I still feel guilty about. My salary was modest and Johannesburg rental prices did not care about that. I stayed my first four nights in a backpacker's place near Park Station, sharing a dorm with two German backpackers and a woman who worked night shifts at a call centre, and every single day after work I went out searching. I chased every listing for flats to rent I could find, most of them already gone by the time I called or nothing like their photographs.

I saw a flat in Yeoville with damp climbing up the wall like a dark hand. I saw a bachelor unit in Berea where the landlord wanted six months' deposit in cash and would not meet my eyes when I asked for a lease. I saw a room above a shop on Jeppe Street that smelled of cooking oil and old rain. I cried in a stairwell once, from tiredness more than fear, though the fear was there too, sitting quietly under everything, my mother's voice looping in my head about wires and bones.

It was a colleague at work, a woman called Nomvula who had been in Johannesburg for eleven years, who first told me to stop chasing adverts on lamp posts and look properly online instead of trusting whoever shouted the loudest outside the taxi rank. She was the one who showed me a listing for apartments to rent in Johannesburg and told me plainly that not everything in the inner city was a horror story, that some buildings were managed properly, with security downstairs and rules about who came and went. I remember sitting on the pavement outside our office building during lunch, scrolling through it on my cracked phone screen, feeling something loosen in my chest for the first time in a week.

Walking Into Fietas With My Heart in My Throat

The building I eventually viewed was in an area near Fietas, old brick with a name plate above the door that had been repainted so many times you could see the ghost of older colours underneath. I stood outside it for almost ten minutes before I went in, because everything my mother had ever said was standing on my shoulder whispering that I should turn around and go back to the backpackers, back to safety, back to somewhere I understood.

Inside there was a security guard at a small desk who asked for my name before letting me past, and a noticeboard with notices about a stokvel meeting and a lost cat and someone selling second hand school uniforms. The caretaker who showed me the unit was an older man named Mr Zondo who walked with a limp and talked the entire way up the stairs about how long he had worked there and how he liked his tenants to greet him in the mornings, as if that mattered to him more than the rent itself. The flat was small, one room really, with a kitchenette in the corner and a window that looked out over rooftops and washing lines strung between buildings like bunting. It was not fancy. But it was clean, and it had a lock that worked, and when I asked about safety Mr Zondo looked almost offended, as though I had questioned his own house.

I signed the lease two days later with hands that shook slightly, not from fear this time, but from the strange, heavy relief of having somewhere.

Learning the Building

The first month I kept mostly to myself, coming home and locking the door and not speaking to anyone beyond a nod. My mother phoned every evening, and every evening I softened the truth a little, telling her the area was fine, that I felt safe, though I was not yet fully sure I believed it myself.

What changed things was small. A woman on my floor called Thandeka knocked one Saturday morning to ask if I had a spare onion, because the shop downstairs had run out and she was halfway through cooking. I gave her two. The following week she brought back a plate of food I had not asked for and did not expect, and we ended up sitting on the landing talking for an hour about nothing important, about her job at a clinic in Hillbrow and my job in logistics and how neither of us had planned to end up here but somehow here felt less frightening the longer we stayed. There was an elderly man on the ground floor, Baba Mokoena, who sat outside most afternoons on a plastic chair and greeted every single person who passed, calling out their names if he knew them, and I noticed after a while that people greeted him back without exception, the way you would greet an uncle.

By the third month I knew which shop sold the cheapest bread, which taxi to catch to work and which to avoid, and which neighbours would keep an eye on my washing if rain came while I was out. The building had rules about visitors and noise that I had grumbled about at first and grown to appreciate. It was not perfect. There were nights I heard shouting outside, and once a break in on a car parked on the street that had everyone talking for days. But it was also a place where an old man remembered your name and a stranger shared her dinner, and that did not fit anywhere in the version of Johannesburg my mother had built in her head.

Telling My Mother the Truth

When my mother finally visited, nearly eight months after I had moved, she stood in my little kitchenette turning slowly on the spot, taking in the small table I had bought secondhand, the curtains I had sewn myself, the plant on the windowsill that had somehow survived my complete lack of gardening skill. Mr Zondo greeted her by name on the stairs, because I had mentioned her enough times that he already felt he knew her, and I watched something in my mother's face shift and settle.

She still does not love Johannesburg. She probably never will. But she stopped saying the city eats people, and instead she started asking after Thandeka and Baba Mokoena whenever we spoke on the phone, as if they had become characters in a story she was following rather than strangers to fear. When my cousin Zanele finished her diploma last year and asked me for advice on finding a place in the same part of town, I sent her the same kind of listing Nomvula had once sent me, apartments to rent that were properly managed rather than whatever was shouted loudest from a lamp post, because I remembered too clearly what it felt like to search blind and frightened with eleven thousand rand and a mother's warnings ringing in my ears.

I think about that first week of viewings often, the damp walls and the landlords who would not meet my eyes, and I think about how easily I could have given up and gone home to Cala with my tail between my legs. What I found instead, in a building I had been taught to fear before I had even seen it, was not the danger my mother promised but something closer to family. Not the family I was born into, but one I built by accident, one onion and one greeting at a time.