Pretoria — a new story emerges among the ghosts of the city’s past

The old-age home is a red-brick, four-storey complex south of Meintjieskop and the Union Buildings in Pretoria, the capital of the Republic of South Africa.

Managed by the orthodox Gereformeerde Kerk, the 57-unit block also accepts Christians of other denominations. Many who live here, including my childhood friend with whom I stayed overnight, no longer watch TV or read newspapers.

The radio is the main artery to life outside (and listened to mostly on the loo). Other than that, the retired do churchy things, knit in the sunroom, read, listen to music or secretly scroll through TikTok.

If you don’t keep up, the city and its history comes to sit in your head like old furniture gathering dust. When Steve Biko Drive still registers as Beatrix and Mears streets and Voortrekker Road in the old map in your head, it’s time to get out.

Grow up in Pretoria and you will come to understand the difference between the Nederduitsch Gereformeerde Kerk (NGK), the Gereformeerde Kerk (GK), the Nederduitsch Hervormde Kerk (HK) and the Afrikaanse Protestantse Kerk (APK), to which can be added new pentecostal movements. You can navigate your way, so to speak (in Afrikaans, naturally).

Here you don’t touch people on their pulpits.

Snor City (snor means moustache), as rock icon Bernoldus Niemand called it, paying tribute to the choice of facial adornment worn by the security police and government officials, was a place you fled from in the old days. But it lingers.

Still standing

What doesn’t fade is the quality of the light, the nature of the clouds and the ochre and sandstone colours of the city. Its Boer history still looms in and between the new Tshwane, cool, casual and getting on with it.

And so it was that a trip to Church Square was proposed to several sceptical Pretoria residents who had last visited the heartbeat of the Jacaranda City more than a decade ago.

We all grew up in the north in lower-middle-class suburbs like Capital Park, Mayville, Gezina and Parktown Estate, and shared many collective memories.

These were the suburbs the notorious paedophile Gert van Rooyen and his accomplice, Joey Haarhoff, cruised in the late 1980s, abducting young girls. It was from the row of tiled-roof bus stops next to the high court that Haarhoff picked up her last victim, Joan Booysen, who later escaped.

And there, in the mild winter sunlight, Church Square and its familiar buildings, which have been painstakingly renovated and preserved over several years, revealed itself to its own residents.

On the corner of Parliament and WF Nkomo streets, the doors of the famous Café Riche, made from the wood of the Toringkerk, the second and last church in the square with a tower, stood open. Inside, renovations were taking place.

Declared a heritage building, the interior is well preserved, but flooding a few years ago damaged the basement. The stone owl on the building’s pedestal has been a silent witness to history since the 1900s.

Anton Jansen, Pretoria architect, restoration expert and heritage consultant, has been involved in the refurbishment of the square, a popular tourist attraction as well as a site of political protest.

There they stand in splendour: the old Raadsaal, the high court, the old Reserve Bank and Post Office, with its Art Deco copper counters (still functional) and the Post Office Museum next door, where you can buy stamps of Cupcake (also known as Cyril Ramaphosa).

The magnificent 1930s Capitol Theatre flanking the Raadsaal, with its marble foyer and kitsch plaster pillars, still stands. The cinema auditorium is now a parking lot, the foyer and entrance are intact and have in fact been used for pop-up performances. There are plans afoot to revive the venue.

And in the shadow of Oom Paul, schoolchildren played football in the sunshine.

Eugene de Kock

The dark side of Pretoria can be found further to the north, usually. This is where, in a butchery, you will overhear a conversation about Eugene de Kock, local resident, out of jail, destitute and with no means to pay legal fees. De Kock, former Vlakplaas commander, has been auctioning off old police uniforms, jackets and other memorabilia, signed with a permanent marker, to raise money.

Yet, at the same butchery a Mercedes-Benz glides into the parking lot. A confident black man gets out and enters without concern. These are people he knows. All those who grew up here know them.

In these moments, one recalls the symbolism and irony of an event that occurred on 31 May 2001, the 40th anniversary of what would have been Republic Day. That day, a colossal sculpture of the head of apartheid leader JG Strijdom – which we had watched being erected in the 1970s – disappeared into an underground parking lot that had collapsed.

“There is a hole where the monument used to be,” a reporter said from the scene at the time.

Marking the spot today is Lilian Ngoyi Square, named after one of the women who led the 1956 Women’s March protesting against Strijdom’s pass laws. There is a symmetry to this tale of two cities. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.