With every gust of wind that rushes through Nugget Street, 53-year-old Nonzuzo Mthembu falls silent for a moment. It’s pointless to continue talking, the loudly flapping pieces of brown plastic that hang in front of the gaping hole in her room make so much noise. One day, a few years ago, all the windows suddenly broke. “Nobody knows why,” says Mthembu. “The building is probably slowly collapsing.” She sighs. “Everything here is breaking down.”
Together with her three children and six grandchildren, Mthembu has been living without electricity, gas and water for more than a decade. Cooking here is done on an open fire, the walls and ceilings are blackened. Toilets haven’t worked for years. The elevator shafts function as a dumping ground and are filled up to the third floor with a mountain of rotting waste. The steel fire escapes have been sawn away and sold for scrap, long streams of urine flow from the stairwell into the dark corridors.
Remington House, as the building is called, is one of Johannesburg’s most notorious buildings - it has been ‘hijacked’ by criminals. Passers-by are regularly dragged into the building with a knife to their throat and robbed. Several women were raped in the structure. And when criminals disappear into the building with the police on their heels, the officers abandon their pursuit, fearing a possible ambush. Only during large-scale police operations do officers dare to enter the premises.
The heart of wealthy Johannesburg, once the cradle of Nelson Mandela’s struggle for a new South Africa, is in decline. With the elections around the corner, the rest of the country is wondering: is this our future? Read the whole story here.