Something happened, that’s for sure. You are driving through Hilbrough, Johannesburg’s original all night inner city stomping ground and there are virtually no people around.
For a moment it’s just you the night and one stroppy whore. This is Johannesburg’s most densely populated region, four years into a relatively unreported crack cocaine war.
No People.
Pulling into a petrol station behind the Mamosa Inn a Nigerian merchant approaches and within minutes brings us a rock. We hadn’t once told him what drug we were looking for.
Interviewer: Tell me how do you think the New South Africa is going to be?
Black South African Man: I think we are going to establish a better life in this country, as you know that. All the promises I know that, are going to be fulfilled, that’s what I do believe. Ya, I think that’s all.
Mamtu, Pretoria Street 1998: There are lots of drastic changes in a short time. Even the flats, the flats that used to be decent and clean are filthy, and they are dirty and they smell of urine and there’s too much overcrowding.
Mamtu: Places has turned very very corrupt and the rate of crime has escalated. I think because of these people who come from outside.
It was four years ago that democracy opened Hill rise door to the rest of the continent. And within those first few heady months a new drug was to emerge on the streets. A syndicate of Nigerian merchants took over a now notorious residential hotel called the Sands and with it the city’s Crack Cocaine trade. No single development has inflamed local’s xenophobia quite as much as the spread of that Nigerian cartel into eight Hilborough hotels over the next two years.
Black Man: Foreigners, you see they are most of them are to sell those drugs or that shit you see.
Cardin: Well instead of getting bad, real bad as in two years back, that’s when you need to study like becoming real worse. Now as I am talking like this is worse, is real worse. Nobody appreciates life here, nobody appreciates life here.
As crack dominates 70% of Hillbroughs drug market, the area has sunk further in to the underground, a shelter for illicit trading.
Cardin: There’s quite a lot of young Africans that are doing that there’s a lot of white African brothers, elders that are doing that. White young brothers that are doing that. So it has really affected a lot of people you know. I cannot really say this person that person because I know a lot of people that are dealing cracks at the moment, that are smoking cracks every day, you know what I mean.
Where ever it has been Crack has totally changed the social fabric of the area. In a sense drugs historically became a political war when crack emerged.
Dee: I think it’s conquest when you eventually get the hit I think it’s supposed to be you if you like you’ve not just won the war but own the world.Most of the time of course you are just practising you waste a lot of money practising. Laugh Oh No!
Adam: Over the years it started of fun, it was a fun drug at the beginning. No paranoia, you could go anywhere and do it, any clubs. You could go into the toilets and smoke nobody would know. Well at that time nobody knew about the drug other than, they knew Cocaine, the powder you snorted. …you go through stages at the beginning it’s all fun and then it becomes really terrible, ….some people walk away from it other peoples can’t. I’m one of them that cannot. I smoke every single day.
Crack is, simply put, cocaine that has been cooked and reduced to its original base state, and then smoked in a pipe.
Dee: I have been smoking crack for longer than it has been available in South Africa. This was a whole new thing to me, buying rocks. I always used to cook my own. I used to check for purity before I even used to cook it. I love being an addict but I do like to know what I am addicted to.
Since 1989 when it began to be mass produced and put on the street in rock form, Crack has steadily come to control the underground economy of Hillbrough. Even spoiling it’s own subsidiary industries. You can today drive into this Hillbrough garage for example and be offered a range of pipes to buy.
Seller: There is only one left and it is twenty bucks.White man: This is a regular ten-buck pipe I want a decent big pipe.
Seller: Thicker?
Today there’s only one twenty-four hour restaurant left in the area and that could well be mistaken for a prison canteen. Music
In the past few months three more nightclubs have closed their doors.
What is emerging though is that Hillbrough is beginning to fashion its own form of a red light zone. The only fresh paint to be found on the walls belongs to the strip clubs.
As more and more prostitutes have taken to the street, increasingly operating from the Nigerian run hotels and increasingly witnessed interacting with the police.
Dee: I could take you now to at least four buildings where there are at least two people in separate rooms cooking.
I mean this is a twenty-four hour thing, somebody has to keep the pot boiling. You smoke you give up. Fine. Maybe you’re just a little bit on your nerves so maybe you have a joint to just cool off a bit Now it comes time to sleep. You can’t sleep Because you’re wired. So you either got to go and buy another rock or you take I don’t know, something nice and interesting, a little cocktail Fesprex, Mandrax and then you go to sleep.
But Hillbrough never sleeps. Crack has to be available twenty-four hours a day and the hotels have come to rely on an increasingly complex set of transactions to keep going. One thing is simple though, you’ll see on the street are prostitutes, merchants and the police.
Daniel: I work and I don’t have any family here. Life is very difficult for me.
Daniel: I went to Mamousa where a lot of Nigerians tried to look for work but it is impossible and a friend I knew there introduced me to drugs. To start selling drugs.
Interviewer: What drugs?
Daniel: Cocaine.
Interviewer: Cocaine or crack cocaine?
Daniel: Crack cocaine.
Other sources, however, suggest a more organised grouping.
Franco: Like with the Nigerian syndicates that
run the crack. They will operate from a certain hotel, and then you got about eight hotels, probably about five main hotels, which all the dealers, the main head of each little family get together and control it from that hotel. And each hotel have their own people that stick together that don’t interfere with each other, the hotels when they do there is just straight outright murder. For the newcomers you can’t just go in there and decide to deal crack. You got to work your way through. And you stick with those families you get protection, you get your accommodation and I mean on the local side there’s nothing like that.
Dee: Its almost like form of communism ok. You are all given the same. You start with the same basic material. How much you make depends on your selling abilities ok. And of course the easiest way to build up clientele is to get hold of hooker. Because if she has just that one hit, the hit, which is why everybody becomes an addict, ok. If he can get her to have that hit, it may not be the first hit or the second hit, but if she has it, every time she turns a trick she’s going to be back across the road to the hotel. And eventually, ok, he’s not going to be so nice to her anymore and it’s not going to be as cheap as it was and its not going to be as big as it was and she is going to start owing him. And sooner or later he will collect, one way or another. Sex is hardly part of the equation anymore, crack is what keeps the fire burning.
Pam: You take a client to the room and you smoke one or two rocks with your money first and you do the client and then afterwards you want more rocks so you take yourself in with them.
Pam: The hotel’s full of Nigerians, he can’t complain. It’s like a big business out here. Watch me get into that car now ok, follow me.
Adam: Well most of the clients they pick up the prostitutes in the dark, you still get their clients, the ones that are picking them up are all on crack, or most of them, I’d say 65 % of them or are old men. All of them are having one bag just to go with the flow. That I do in the Nigerian’s room.There is no more, before you used to book into a hotel and do it then, now you actually go into the Nigerians room, should be smoking coke while you take advantage of her. That’s how it works.
Interviewer: and is it expanding fast?
Man: rapidly, yes all over the place.
Dee: it’s one of the few drugs that somebody has to introduce you to. Crack is not something that someone starts all on their own. It’s somebody may decide to smoke grass and go and ask the garden boy to get them a little box or something and try it. I don’t know anybody ok, I’ve never heard of anybody, right, asking the maid to go and get them a rock, and a pipe and knowing what to do.
Adam: When we started betting you had to put another friend on with it, on to it so you knew that you and that and that’s how it started spreading and its just took a big bill. And I know doctors and lawyers and all of them are into betting.
Even though the knocks get harder you still come back for more. That’s just the way it is with crack. You go back to Hillbrough.
Franco: There are a lot more addicts on the streets hassling on the streets for money. Ripping people off and just staying, you know, just to make sure that they can stay with crack, its to organised.
Dee: They get very good at concealing, and besides it’s not as if you are rolling a joint and making a big smell or as if you’ve got track marks all over you. Its something you can just pop into the toilet and have a quick hit and pop back out all bright eyed and bushy tailed. You don’t come out reeking like drugs or something, you don’t have that sort of look that drawn horrible look. Well I mean you may end up looking like that but by that stage you don’t have to worry about your reputation. Very very secretive drug is crack, terribly secretive.
Originally there were three syndicates operating from Hillbrough when the Nigerians, controlled by a local drug lord squeezed the others out.
Adam: Nigerians, they have come in and they run every thing from Hillbrough down to the lower port of Hillbrough, Burtchens, Yeovil, Dees valley, the north, east coast side, its all over in the lawney suburbs in the poor suburbs, it’s the Nigerians all over. They, the big suppliers they are selling, they supply to the locals.
Residents are not convinced that the massive police presence in the area means the streets are safer for them.
Pam: Guys that used to look out for the girls on the street are beating girls up and they got to pay protection money.
But a pimp does not mean protection a pimp means a drug dealer.
Lebo: The cops of today they are not the cops the ones which you used to see in the video, the cinema, television no. The cops of number four I can tell you There’s nothing that will say these cops they’ve done a very nice thing. No.
Lebo: Everyone is complaining.
Other woman: especially if you are a prostitute.
Lebo: yeah
Number four, Hillbrough police station.
Man: I once met a policeman who wanted to even sell his gun to me, a gun.Ricky: yeah I’ve been, lawsuits against certain policemen
Ricky: already, in the past. And I always say the cops don’t want to handle any of the files when they walk in, they are drunk on duty. And I have endless hassles with the police force.
The only people hated more than the Nigerians seem to be the police. It’s sold mainly by Nigerian drug dealers who control much of the trade in cocaine in South Africa.
Policeman: It states here that he was wanted by a group of criminals and his FBG papers were stolen from him. Which normally is not the fact.
Franco: If someone gets busted, they got to get of, they get bust and the next person to take their place is either someone who’s here has been running on the streets and has worked their way up and can be trusted. Or it’s someone who operates from home from their country or from somewhere overseas and they come…it depends how high the person is who’s been bust and how its affected the family.
As the Nigerians moved into Hillbrough, locals were squeezed out and the bloody spate of revenge killings that followed was to witness forty deaths.
In Bertrams down the road from Hillbrough we met up with Adam.
Adam: They don’t ever force you to take on Nigerians any more. First of all look at the fighting between them, they don’t stand together. The Nigerians stand together. I mean, there’s countless, many of them. Locals are too scared to take them on I think.
Thirteen fires on thirteen street corners in Bertrams and at each fire a merchant and four runners. They are selling less and less Mandrax and more Crack.
Franco: Different groups stick to their own. And deal their own drugs from these families. And then the local guys are also very strong and stick together but they first of all the supply, they are not in the same ball game as the crack dealers. And they have been dealing since the sixties, the seventies, their father and now to their kids. And you know, its, they still carry on dealing Mandrax.
Dee: I don’t think they wanted to compete with the Nigerians because they didn’t want to operate in the areas that the Nigerians were operating in. And the Nigerians turned it into those areas they have created, it’s like a Ghetto. There was a time that police here were the other. Today they cruise the scene very much a part of it.
Adam: There’s cops that deliver crack here, there’s cops that deliver Mandrax. There’s cops that bust Hillbrough and bring the crack down here. I know one local merchant that’s getting supplied from a Nigerian and the Nigerian being supplied from a cop.
Adam: I’ve smoked with cops, I’ve smoked with cops from robbery action. I’ve made busts with cops and smoked. I’ve set up chaps for them and my pay was Crack. This evening the local stadium is playing host to the world athletic championships. One wonders why a force this size can’t be deployed in Hillbrough.
Travelling through Hillbrough at 12:30 on a Tuesday morning, our suspicions were aroused when we saw this man and a friend apparently negotiating with a policeman. So we followed them. Coming round the corner we saw that the police car had stopped outside a hotel. The man and his friend, both wearing identical jackets, entered the hotel. For about two and a half hours we watched as prostitutes and other men in jackets entered the hotel carrying with them unmarked white packets.
Later a vehicle pulled up alongside ours, more jackets, we filmed the passengers smoking pipes. We noticed six or seven cars circling the block repeatedly before stopping, being visited by people in the same jackets.
Gradually the same groups of people we’d seen enter the hotel left the premises. And as the jackets dispersed out came the policemen we had first followed to the hotel. If so much change has taken place in just four years in Hillbrough, then what will the current generation of kids playing soccer in the inner city be inheriting.
Already we are told urban school kids are taking Crack from standard eight up.
Mike: My friends are like a lot more stuffed up over it. Its screws round with your mind, you always want more. It like never stops, you just want another hit all the time.
Cardin: We want the intelligent philosophers to set up a proper security for the youth.
Cardin: for the next Millennium, for the next century. Because at the moment we don’t know whether we’ll reach thirty years from now as in we are in the twentieth century. We don’t know if we’ve got ten years or if we got the next five years of the next four days because drugs is just everywhere.
For a moment it’s just you the night and one stroppy whore. This is Johannesburg’s most densely populated region, four years into a relatively unreported crack cocaine war.
No People.
Pulling into a petrol station behind the Mamosa Inn a Nigerian merchant approaches and within minutes brings us a rock. We hadn’t once told him what drug we were looking for.
Interviewer: Tell me how do you think the New South Africa is going to be?
Black South African Man: I think we are going to establish a better life in this country, as you know that. All the promises I know that, are going to be fulfilled, that’s what I do believe. Ya, I think that’s all.
Mamtu, Pretoria Street 1998: There are lots of drastic changes in a short time. Even the flats, the flats that used to be decent and clean are filthy, and they are dirty and they smell of urine and there’s too much overcrowding.
Mamtu: Places has turned very very corrupt and the rate of crime has escalated. I think because of these people who come from outside.
It was four years ago that democracy opened Hill rise door to the rest of the continent. And within those first few heady months a new drug was to emerge on the streets. A syndicate of Nigerian merchants took over a now notorious residential hotel called the Sands and with it the city’s Crack Cocaine trade. No single development has inflamed local’s xenophobia quite as much as the spread of that Nigerian cartel into eight Hilborough hotels over the next two years.
Black Man: Foreigners, you see they are most of them are to sell those drugs or that shit you see.
Cardin: Well instead of getting bad, real bad as in two years back, that’s when you need to study like becoming real worse. Now as I am talking like this is worse, is real worse. Nobody appreciates life here, nobody appreciates life here.
As crack dominates 70% of Hillbroughs drug market, the area has sunk further in to the underground, a shelter for illicit trading.
Cardin: There’s quite a lot of young Africans that are doing that there’s a lot of white African brothers, elders that are doing that. White young brothers that are doing that. So it has really affected a lot of people you know. I cannot really say this person that person because I know a lot of people that are dealing cracks at the moment, that are smoking cracks every day, you know what I mean.
Where ever it has been Crack has totally changed the social fabric of the area. In a sense drugs historically became a political war when crack emerged.
Dee: I think it’s conquest when you eventually get the hit I think it’s supposed to be you if you like you’ve not just won the war but own the world.Most of the time of course you are just practising you waste a lot of money practising. Laugh Oh No!
Adam: Over the years it started of fun, it was a fun drug at the beginning. No paranoia, you could go anywhere and do it, any clubs. You could go into the toilets and smoke nobody would know. Well at that time nobody knew about the drug other than, they knew Cocaine, the powder you snorted. …you go through stages at the beginning it’s all fun and then it becomes really terrible, ….some people walk away from it other peoples can’t. I’m one of them that cannot. I smoke every single day.
Crack is, simply put, cocaine that has been cooked and reduced to its original base state, and then smoked in a pipe.
Dee: I have been smoking crack for longer than it has been available in South Africa. This was a whole new thing to me, buying rocks. I always used to cook my own. I used to check for purity before I even used to cook it. I love being an addict but I do like to know what I am addicted to.
Since 1989 when it began to be mass produced and put on the street in rock form, Crack has steadily come to control the underground economy of Hillbrough. Even spoiling it’s own subsidiary industries. You can today drive into this Hillbrough garage for example and be offered a range of pipes to buy.
Seller: There is only one left and it is twenty bucks.White man: This is a regular ten-buck pipe I want a decent big pipe.
Seller: Thicker?
Today there’s only one twenty-four hour restaurant left in the area and that could well be mistaken for a prison canteen. Music
In the past few months three more nightclubs have closed their doors.
What is emerging though is that Hillbrough is beginning to fashion its own form of a red light zone. The only fresh paint to be found on the walls belongs to the strip clubs.
As more and more prostitutes have taken to the street, increasingly operating from the Nigerian run hotels and increasingly witnessed interacting with the police.
Dee: I could take you now to at least four buildings where there are at least two people in separate rooms cooking.
I mean this is a twenty-four hour thing, somebody has to keep the pot boiling. You smoke you give up. Fine. Maybe you’re just a little bit on your nerves so maybe you have a joint to just cool off a bit Now it comes time to sleep. You can’t sleep Because you’re wired. So you either got to go and buy another rock or you take I don’t know, something nice and interesting, a little cocktail Fesprex, Mandrax and then you go to sleep.
But Hillbrough never sleeps. Crack has to be available twenty-four hours a day and the hotels have come to rely on an increasingly complex set of transactions to keep going. One thing is simple though, you’ll see on the street are prostitutes, merchants and the police.
Daniel: I work and I don’t have any family here. Life is very difficult for me.
Daniel: I went to Mamousa where a lot of Nigerians tried to look for work but it is impossible and a friend I knew there introduced me to drugs. To start selling drugs.
Interviewer: What drugs?
Daniel: Cocaine.
Interviewer: Cocaine or crack cocaine?
Daniel: Crack cocaine.
Other sources, however, suggest a more organised grouping.
Franco: Like with the Nigerian syndicates that
run the crack. They will operate from a certain hotel, and then you got about eight hotels, probably about five main hotels, which all the dealers, the main head of each little family get together and control it from that hotel. And each hotel have their own people that stick together that don’t interfere with each other, the hotels when they do there is just straight outright murder. For the newcomers you can’t just go in there and decide to deal crack. You got to work your way through. And you stick with those families you get protection, you get your accommodation and I mean on the local side there’s nothing like that.
Dee: Its almost like form of communism ok. You are all given the same. You start with the same basic material. How much you make depends on your selling abilities ok. And of course the easiest way to build up clientele is to get hold of hooker. Because if she has just that one hit, the hit, which is why everybody becomes an addict, ok. If he can get her to have that hit, it may not be the first hit or the second hit, but if she has it, every time she turns a trick she’s going to be back across the road to the hotel. And eventually, ok, he’s not going to be so nice to her anymore and it’s not going to be as cheap as it was and its not going to be as big as it was and she is going to start owing him. And sooner or later he will collect, one way or another. Sex is hardly part of the equation anymore, crack is what keeps the fire burning.
Pam: You take a client to the room and you smoke one or two rocks with your money first and you do the client and then afterwards you want more rocks so you take yourself in with them.
Pam: The hotel’s full of Nigerians, he can’t complain. It’s like a big business out here. Watch me get into that car now ok, follow me.
Adam: Well most of the clients they pick up the prostitutes in the dark, you still get their clients, the ones that are picking them up are all on crack, or most of them, I’d say 65 % of them or are old men. All of them are having one bag just to go with the flow. That I do in the Nigerian’s room.There is no more, before you used to book into a hotel and do it then, now you actually go into the Nigerians room, should be smoking coke while you take advantage of her. That’s how it works.
Interviewer: and is it expanding fast?
Man: rapidly, yes all over the place.
Dee: it’s one of the few drugs that somebody has to introduce you to. Crack is not something that someone starts all on their own. It’s somebody may decide to smoke grass and go and ask the garden boy to get them a little box or something and try it. I don’t know anybody ok, I’ve never heard of anybody, right, asking the maid to go and get them a rock, and a pipe and knowing what to do.
Adam: When we started betting you had to put another friend on with it, on to it so you knew that you and that and that’s how it started spreading and its just took a big bill. And I know doctors and lawyers and all of them are into betting.
Even though the knocks get harder you still come back for more. That’s just the way it is with crack. You go back to Hillbrough.
Franco: There are a lot more addicts on the streets hassling on the streets for money. Ripping people off and just staying, you know, just to make sure that they can stay with crack, its to organised.
Dee: They get very good at concealing, and besides it’s not as if you are rolling a joint and making a big smell or as if you’ve got track marks all over you. Its something you can just pop into the toilet and have a quick hit and pop back out all bright eyed and bushy tailed. You don’t come out reeking like drugs or something, you don’t have that sort of look that drawn horrible look. Well I mean you may end up looking like that but by that stage you don’t have to worry about your reputation. Very very secretive drug is crack, terribly secretive.
Originally there were three syndicates operating from Hillbrough when the Nigerians, controlled by a local drug lord squeezed the others out.
Adam: Nigerians, they have come in and they run every thing from Hillbrough down to the lower port of Hillbrough, Burtchens, Yeovil, Dees valley, the north, east coast side, its all over in the lawney suburbs in the poor suburbs, it’s the Nigerians all over. They, the big suppliers they are selling, they supply to the locals.
Residents are not convinced that the massive police presence in the area means the streets are safer for them.
Pam: Guys that used to look out for the girls on the street are beating girls up and they got to pay protection money.
But a pimp does not mean protection a pimp means a drug dealer.
Lebo: The cops of today they are not the cops the ones which you used to see in the video, the cinema, television no. The cops of number four I can tell you There’s nothing that will say these cops they’ve done a very nice thing. No.
Lebo: Everyone is complaining.
Other woman: especially if you are a prostitute.
Lebo: yeah
Number four, Hillbrough police station.
Man: I once met a policeman who wanted to even sell his gun to me, a gun.Ricky: yeah I’ve been, lawsuits against certain policemen
Ricky: already, in the past. And I always say the cops don’t want to handle any of the files when they walk in, they are drunk on duty. And I have endless hassles with the police force.
The only people hated more than the Nigerians seem to be the police. It’s sold mainly by Nigerian drug dealers who control much of the trade in cocaine in South Africa.
Policeman: It states here that he was wanted by a group of criminals and his FBG papers were stolen from him. Which normally is not the fact.
Franco: If someone gets busted, they got to get of, they get bust and the next person to take their place is either someone who’s here has been running on the streets and has worked their way up and can be trusted. Or it’s someone who operates from home from their country or from somewhere overseas and they come…it depends how high the person is who’s been bust and how its affected the family.
As the Nigerians moved into Hillbrough, locals were squeezed out and the bloody spate of revenge killings that followed was to witness forty deaths.
In Bertrams down the road from Hillbrough we met up with Adam.
Adam: They don’t ever force you to take on Nigerians any more. First of all look at the fighting between them, they don’t stand together. The Nigerians stand together. I mean, there’s countless, many of them. Locals are too scared to take them on I think.
Thirteen fires on thirteen street corners in Bertrams and at each fire a merchant and four runners. They are selling less and less Mandrax and more Crack.
Franco: Different groups stick to their own. And deal their own drugs from these families. And then the local guys are also very strong and stick together but they first of all the supply, they are not in the same ball game as the crack dealers. And they have been dealing since the sixties, the seventies, their father and now to their kids. And you know, its, they still carry on dealing Mandrax.
Dee: I don’t think they wanted to compete with the Nigerians because they didn’t want to operate in the areas that the Nigerians were operating in. And the Nigerians turned it into those areas they have created, it’s like a Ghetto. There was a time that police here were the other. Today they cruise the scene very much a part of it.
Adam: There’s cops that deliver crack here, there’s cops that deliver Mandrax. There’s cops that bust Hillbrough and bring the crack down here. I know one local merchant that’s getting supplied from a Nigerian and the Nigerian being supplied from a cop.
Adam: I’ve smoked with cops, I’ve smoked with cops from robbery action. I’ve made busts with cops and smoked. I’ve set up chaps for them and my pay was Crack. This evening the local stadium is playing host to the world athletic championships. One wonders why a force this size can’t be deployed in Hillbrough.
Travelling through Hillbrough at 12:30 on a Tuesday morning, our suspicions were aroused when we saw this man and a friend apparently negotiating with a policeman. So we followed them. Coming round the corner we saw that the police car had stopped outside a hotel. The man and his friend, both wearing identical jackets, entered the hotel. For about two and a half hours we watched as prostitutes and other men in jackets entered the hotel carrying with them unmarked white packets.
Later a vehicle pulled up alongside ours, more jackets, we filmed the passengers smoking pipes. We noticed six or seven cars circling the block repeatedly before stopping, being visited by people in the same jackets.
Gradually the same groups of people we’d seen enter the hotel left the premises. And as the jackets dispersed out came the policemen we had first followed to the hotel. If so much change has taken place in just four years in Hillbrough, then what will the current generation of kids playing soccer in the inner city be inheriting.
Already we are told urban school kids are taking Crack from standard eight up.
Mike: My friends are like a lot more stuffed up over it. Its screws round with your mind, you always want more. It like never stops, you just want another hit all the time.
Cardin: We want the intelligent philosophers to set up a proper security for the youth.
Cardin: for the next Millennium, for the next century. Because at the moment we don’t know whether we’ll reach thirty years from now as in we are in the twentieth century. We don’t know if we’ve got ten years or if we got the next five years of the next four days because drugs is just everywhere.