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The Great Stink is piling hurt upon hurt across Joburg’s Western Areas

In the West Ends of Johannesburg, an accretion of water shortages, electricity blackouts, overflowing sewers and rivulets of sewage, potholes and piles of rubbish have given us our very own iteration of the Great Stink.
Ismail Lagardien
By Ismail Lagardien
19 Sep 2025
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I used to say, facetiously, that my heart was buried in Pennington, a township on the edge of Princeton, New Jersey in the US. Less facetiously, I would say that most of my left lung was buried in Coronationville.

The burial of my heart is, of course, metaphorical. The burial of my piece of lung is more factual, except it’s not actually “buried”, and was probably disposed of many years ago…

That missing piece of my left lung hung over me when I read about the breakdown, public protest, dissent and violence in Coronationville last week. It was disturbing and a reminder of the place that Coronationville and the adjacent areas of Newclare, Westbury and Bosmont hold in my childhood, teenage and early adult life – until I went on a kind of merantau.

My extended family have lived in these areas for many decades after the decline and replacement of Johannesburg’s old Malay Camp and of Fietas (Pageview to the unacquainted) and across Fordsburg and Mayfair.

My ancestral landscape, such as it is, has been remade, parts of which (Fietas, actually) are now in a museum and parts of it have become part of The Great Stink of South African state, society, and the piling of hurt upon hurt across Coronationville, Newclare, Fordsburg and Mayfair.

What this landscape looks like has become dissociated from the purposes it served, purposes which held more meaning than can be shared or even defined. Purpose was lost in the under-texts or early terrains of piled-up hurt and hope. Palimpsests provide new meaning. New meaning is accreted over and again in new structures.

These places were the product of South Africa’s quite painful reordering of society, and upon that has been layered the pain of breakdown, collapse, decrepitude, neglect, mismanagement – and serious decline in social and personal wellbeing. This is the hurt that has been piled onto hurt. It reached across the built environment, the physical structures of the urban landscape.

For instance, to a particular generation with particular sensibilities, the Oriental Plaza remains a discomforting sight and is a lot like an open wound that just will not heal. It is a cursed place.

It’s hard to “move on” when the landscape holds so much hurt, when how it looks is a palimpsest of hurt upon hurt. The Oriental Plaza was created because the state had decided, during the 1950s and 1960s, that Fietas, (Pageview as a whole) was to be a “white area” and its non-white residents had to be kicked out and suitable new places had to be found for traders and, of course, for residents.

White planners of black futures came up with the Oriental Plaza. Most coloured people were moved to places like Eldorado Park, Indian people were moved to Lenasia and black people were pushed to areas of Soweto. Sophiatown of the 1950s was also decimated this way…

Upon that hurt has been placed the hurt of today’s dégringolade across Fordsburg, Mayfair, Eldorado Park, Coronationville, Westbury and Newclare.

I spent brief periods of my childhood in Grahamstown and in District Six where this breakdown and collapse have also occurred.

District Six was, of course, almost completely erased, until gentrification renamed or extended names like Zonnebloem across parts the new/old landscape, with sights, sounds and smells of the middle class, the nattering class, and the caprices of fashion, desperately conspiring to mask or sanitise the “silent, visual testimony to the tyranny of forced removals and the reduction of a vibrant, integrated urban landscape into an immense tract of desolation” that Nadia Davids referred to in her doctoral dissertation at the University of Cape Town.

In the West Ends of Johannesburg, the accretion now gives us the horrors of water shortages, electricity blackouts, overflowing sewers and rivulets of sewage, potholes and piles of rubbish. Decades of accretions have given us our very own iteration of The Great Stink.

Between slumlord greed, denizen apathy and surrender (and devil take the hindmost), and leaps in growth and urbanisation beyond the City of Johannesburg’s capacity to provide public goods and services to the city’s West Ends, the landscape of places across Johannesburg has come to the people who make believe that they care. Johannesburg municipality’s lack of capacity has an early echo of government responses during London’s Great Stink of the 1850s: “More people equals more waste, and London wasn’t prepared.”

During London’s Great Stink, the River Thames and the streets of the city were littered with excrement, food and industrial waste, human and animal corpses. Denizens of London saw, outside their windows, “waste baked on the exposed riverbeds”.

Today, “smelly water runs down the streets” of Johannesburg.

It is not unique to Johannesburg. In Westville, eThekwini, the stench and toxins of overflowing sewage have affected the health of residents. In Makhanda, one resident, Dambisa Nxopho, explained how the municipal drain spilled “raw sewage onto her property and into her home”. Nxopho has had to replace furniture that was ruined by the flows of sewage, and has struggled with a persistent infection in her leg following an operation.

Back along Johannesburg’s West Ends, “Corrie”, once the hospital in Coronationville (established in 1937, reportedly in honour of the coronation of George VI, head of the British Empire), known today as Rahima Moosa Mother and Child Hospital, was one of the icons of the landscape and places that give meaning to communities and colonial society on the land.

Parenthetically, this is what makes it pernicious to think of “land reform” in purely economic terms for “productive use”. Detachment from ancestral landscapes counts more than economics-speak would have us believe.

Rahima Moosa Mother and Child Hospital has not been able to escape the physical breakdown and hazards of neglect and mismanagement that is so evident across other areas of Johannesburg’s West Ends. The same problems with a lack of sanitation, declining care for the poor and the ailing, referred to above, blight this hospital.

This deterioration was evident, also, in healthcare provision during London’s Great Stink, and the intense smell about which Charles Dickens said: “The offensive smells, even in that short whiff, have been of a most head-and-stomach-distending nature.”

The inequality and debilitating health of Londoners were handed down to the generation that followed the Great Stink period. In 1903, Jack London wrote in The People of the Abyss:

“The air he breathes, and from which he never escapes, is sufficient to weaken him mentally and physically, so that he becomes unable to compete with the fresh virile life from the country hastening on to London Town to destroy and be destroyed.

“It is incontrovertible that the children grow up into rotten adults, without virility or stamina, a weak-kneed, narrow-chested, listless breed, that crumples up and goes down in the brute struggle for life with the invading hordes from the country. The railway men, carriers, omnibus drivers, corn and timber porters, and all those who require physical stamina are largely drawn from the country.”

The hospital as an institution represents and identifies with the community around it, and the community reciprocates. If it is true that “landscape” is the relationship between the people who live on it and the built environment, then social and cultural belonging and meaning flow down the rivulets of waste and sewage, sit and stink in the piles of rubbish, along broken curb sides and potholes, and seep into the fetidness, the Great Stink of our politics and society.

There is an aphorism, “you are what you eat”, which I find hard to find useful (if it were so, I would be a dhal curry). But it’s easier to accept that our physical landscape, like places of worship, and our hospitals, streets, curb sides, pavements, all say something about us.

And so we have “Dry taps and empty promises… and the stench of political failure”. The accretion of hurt upon hurt writ large. Just when or how, or what this means for the generations that may follow, remains a mystery.

Oh, and about that lung. Yes, surgeons at the old Coronationville Hospital did carve out a piece of my left lung, with its cavity for the heart, and kept it somewhere for research purposes. DM