PUBLIC MEMORY: Street-level legacy — putting Joburg’s cultural champions on the map

I come at this as something of an “accidental cartographer”, a phrase borrowed from my map collaborator, Bradley Kirshenbaum of Love Jozi. Over more than a decade we’ve mapped this city for tourists, and even plotted its informal booksellers. 

When you make maps, you spend a lot of time with street names. You type them, check them, squint at them on tiny signs, and you soon realise that a street name is never just a street name. It’s a public memory. It’s home. We write it on invitations and give it to strangers asking for directions. And because we say these names so often, it sometimes takes an effort of imagination to stop and ask: why is this person’s name here?

One of the quiet powers of a city is that its streets tell us who mattered.

Joburg has rewritten that story before. A city born of colonial conquest, mining wealth, segregation and apartheid has carried those histories on its signs. The post-1994 project of renaming was a way of reclaiming the landscape, replacing the names of old power with people who fought for freedom, democracy and dignity. Much of it was long overdue.

Then, in 2004, when the city renamed streets in the Newtown Cultural Precinct, it didn’t only reach for politicians and struggle heroes. It put artists, musicians, journalists and cultural workers on the map.

Legendary singer Miriam Makeba replaced Bezuidenhout Street, Drum magazine investigative journalist Henry Nxumalo replaced Goch Street, sculptor Noria Mabasa replaced Sydenham Street and playwright Barney Simon replaced Park Road, while artist Gerard Sekoto took Becker Street. There were more. 

It was an extraordinary act of cultural cartography. The city was saying: these people belong here. Their names would no longer live only in archives, history books or the memories of those who knew them. They would be encountered daily by people who had never heard the music, seen the art or read the work. Geography would teach history.

So who would I choose? 

Honouring a new era

I would like to walk down Maria McCloy Street. Maria, who died in May aged 50, was a DJ, fashion designer, publicist, writer and cultural force with an instinct for finding talent and making connections. She championed African creativity and, crucially, opened doors for others. Her contribution is immeasurable precisely because it happened everywhere: at parties, in conversations, in the careers of people she introduced to one another. 

I'd enjoy travelling along Lebo Malepa Drive. The tourism pioneer behind Soweto's first backpackers and a cycling tour company, who turned a dump site into a thriving community park, Lebo understood what the tourism industry took years to grasp: the best way to experience a city like ours is not to visit a collection of attractions but to meet a collection of people because heritage isn't something you look at from behind a bus window. A “Welcome” sign doesn’t turn a city into a destination; giving someone a reason to stay does.

Then there is Andrew Lindsay Avenue. The artist and founder of Troyeville's Spaza Art Gallery took art onto the street. His mosaics, made with communities of women and young artists who might never have entered a conventional gallery, are scattered across the city. Spaza became a place for exhibitions, poetry, music and workshops, and Drew’s hand-drawn maps invited people to see a version of Joburg in which everyone belonged. 

There should be an Ufrieda Ho Street. A journalist and writer, Ufrieda spent decades looking closely at Joburg. Her memoir, Paper Sons and Daughters, told of growing up Chinese in apartheid South Africa.

She noticed things. She understood that Joburg is not one story but hundreds of overlapping ones. She started a night walk in Kensington that brought a fractured community together in the most enchanting way. When she died in March, aged 52, we lost someone who had a gift for making us see the city in all its contradictions, disorder and beauty.

Gail Wilson deserves one too. An artist, photowalker, urban sketcher and tireless documenter of Joburg's heritage, she championed the city as she found it, cared for its cemeteries, and was constantly reminding us of the traces of people and places most rushed past.

An education

There are others, but I have a strict word limit. And what binds these five is a generosity of spirit and a vision of this city far larger than daily life suggests. None of them changed laws, sat in Parliament or led political parties, but they changed how we see a city. 

That is where our street-naming conversation should go next. The City’s own policy allows for it: it recognises outstanding South Africans from all walks of life, prioritises naming unnamed features and stresses community participation. So let’s honour the curator who gave an artist a first show, the DJ who introduced a generation to a new sound, the writer who documented a neighbourhood before it vanished, the photographer who recorded a city changing beneath our feet. 

We need the activists and the artists, the politicians and the poets: people who fought for democracy and people who made culture worth fighting for. The Newtown renaming understood that a cultural icon on a street sign isn’t merely an honour. It’s an education.

When we rename a street, we mostly think of the person whose name goes up, but think of whoever walks beneath it many years from now, and what they might discover. 

This city wasn't made only by those who ruled it, or even those who freed it. It was made by people who make this difficult, glorious, maddening place more alive. I think that’s something worth putting on a map. DM

Laurice Taitz-Buntman is an avowed urbanist and the founder of Johannesburg In Your Pocket, a city guide and media platform dedicated to reframing Johannesburg through storytelling, travel and urban experience.

Daily Maverick’s Joburg Bureau is for people who love this city. Get the latest Joburg news, events and conversations sent straight to your phone every Friday. Join the WhatsApp Community.