DON MATTERA

But Sophiatown also had its beauty; picturesque and intimate like most ghettos. Double-storey mansions and quaint cottages, with attractive, well-tended gardens, stood side by side with rusty wood-and-iron shacks, locked in a fraternal embrace of filth and felony. Among the wealthy were African, coloured, Indian and Chinese people. One rich man, Mabuza, owned a double-storey house which he filled with the most expensive furniture, to the tune of about thirty thousand pounds. Added to this was a three-storey building with a huge dairy and butchery on the ground floor, five bedrooms on the upper storey and a big restuarant sandwiched between. Mabuza, whose son Early became a famous jazz musician, owned another large restuarant on the outskirts of Johannesburg. In Sophiatown, no-one could choose their neighbors, so that alongside the wealthy Mabuzas or the Xumas or the Makhenes or the Rathebes lived the miserably poor and the wretched. All that rich could do, at the time, was build high walls with broken glass cemented on top of them to keep out thieves.

-Don Mattera, Sophiatown: Coming of Age in South Africa (1987).