The way we understand and negotiate the past of our cities often conflates with the understanding of our own past as city dwellers. Memory plays an active role in the construction of our urban identities, as much as in the way we react to urban change. Our residential place in the city is certainly unstable, and we often move during our lives, but these moves are not solely the product of rational choices. How we as urban dwellers understand these moves, and how nostalgia, regret, fear, and longing for lost places combine with the necessity of making a new home elsewhere, were the initial questions behind ‘Leaving Yeoville’.

In addition to the collection of interviews with former Yeovillites of all classes, nationalities, age, race and gender, photo sessions with photographer Lerato Maduna were arranged for our former residents to revisit old haunts in the neighbourhood, as a trigger for the unravelling of their memories of their personal histories and that of the neighbourhood. This work also benefited from the help of Claire Bénit-Gbaffou, Thembani Mkhize and Willy-Claude Hebandjoko Mbelenge.

BORN: Yeoville (Johannesburg), 1929

LIVED IN YEOVILLE: 1929–1949

FAMILY STATUS (THEN): A child with his parents

LIVES NOW: Hyde Park

FAMILY STATUS (NOW): Married, lives with his daughter

PROFESSION (NOW): Architect/writer

MOVED TO (AFTER LEAVING YEOVILLE): Craighall Park

A large part of my life was our family. Yeoville was much more rural. My grandmother's house at 93 Francis had stables – no horses in my time – but she had a cow. It was a lovely middle-class suburb, little detached houses, with verandas that faced the street and people, a lot of social life occurred on the veranda … you sat on the stoep and watched the street. Yeoville had a large Jewish population but it also had a large Anglican church. It was a white suburb, completely segregated, with a large black population working as, as called at that time, servants. They lived on the premises, in little back rooms. There wasn't a conscious awareness that this was a very unfair society.