Remembering Fietas, Johannesburg’s vibrant neighbourhood ripped by Apartheid

Growing up in South Africa during the 1960s, Brenda Goldblatt remembers being on a family trip with her father, photographer David Goldblatt, at the wheel. They were driving to visit his mother who still lived in his hometown of Randfontein, a small mining village 40km (25 miles) west of Johannesburg, where they lived. 

“He drove us through Soweto,” Brenda says of the Black township that her father would later end up documenting during the ​’70s. ​“I remember it being very depressing,” she continues. ​“It was a grey day. It felt bleak. I laid down in the back of the car. I didn’t want to look at this place. I was probably seven or eight, and he turned around to me and said: ​‘Sit up and look, damn it! It is unforgivable to look away.’” 

It was an ethos David Goldblatt carried throughout his life. Born in 1930, he came of age just as the National Party rose to power in 1948 and instituted apartheid. As a second-generation Lithuanian Jew born in South Africa, Goldblatt was afforded the privileges his grandfather had been denied in his home country, and never forgot what that meant. 

“Many people said they were opposed to apartheid; my father always said he was complicit in it,” Brenda says. Beginning in ​’48, Goldblatt began photographing communities and conditions across the land where he was born, his images bearing witness to lives shaped by systems of degradation, oppression, and exploitation at the hands of the state. 

• Read next: The white South Africans longing for Apartheid’s return

With Fragments of Fietas (Mack Books), Brenda Goldblatt brings together a lesser known series of works chronicling the neighbourhood of Fietas, located just outside the city centre. The neighbourhood, first known as the Malay Location, was where people designated Malay, African, Chinese, Coloured, and Indian could live and own businesses. It was renamed ​“Pageview” in 1943, but everyone called it ​“Fietas”, its roots said to be from the Cape Malay word, Fietna, meaning ​“lively and loquacious crowd”, and appropriated as Afrikaner slang for ​“disagreeable”. 

By 1962, Fietas was flourishing, with more than 175 shops, four churches, two mosques, Hindu, Tamil, and Islamic schools, cinemas, and sporting grounds. But times were changing, and the land grab was on. Africans were forcibly relocated to Soweto, so-called Coloured people to Eldorado Park. Throughout the 1970s, state efforts at displacement citing the 1950 Group Areas Act – which designated certain areas for different races – were ramped up, with police dogs dispatched as weapons of assault. Only 67 families withstood the onslaught, eventually winning the right to live in their homes. 

Goldblatt photographed Fietas throughout his life, but most intensely between 1979 and 1989, when the changes were most extreme. In 2013, he explained: ​“It was outrage at the monstrous injustice of the racism being wreaked on the people of Fietas that brought me to try, through my camera, to grasp something of their life and what they had built. The loss of what we were destroying was inestimable. One could only pay tribute before it disappeared.” 

• Read next: Misan Harriman: ​“The humanity I bear witness to is extraordinary”

Fietas was one of many communities Goldblatt photographed over 70 years, and perhaps the closest to his heart for their shared love of shopkeeping. His grandfather Zalman fled persecution in Lithuania, taking refuge in Johannesburg in 1890, and opening a general store, which was passed down to Goldblatt’s father, Eli. Goldblatt worked in ​“the shop” until it was sold in 1963. 

“The shop” was Goldblatt’s training ground, a place where he learned the business of running a business and building community. ​“He was an immensely solitary person, very shy but completely driven. His sole interest was photography,” Brenda says. ​“As the apartheid project became realised, he lived in a state of deep, impotent rage, impotent because I think he lacked the courage or political conviction to become a freedom fighter.” 

But what Goldblatt did possess was the determination to witness and to make other people see. With Fragments of Fietas, we see a piece of Goldblatt’s heart and soul. 

Fragments of Fietas (2025) by David Goldblatt published by MACK.

Miss Rosen is a freelance arts and photography writer, follow her on X.

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