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07 Oct 2025
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Remembering Fietas, Johannesburg’s vibrant neighbourhood ripped by Apartheid
07 Oct 2025

Growing up in South Africa during the 1960s, Brenda Goldblatt remembers being on a family trip with her father, photographer David Goldblatt, at the wheel. They were driving to visit his mother who still lived in his hometown of Randfontein, a small mining village 40km (25 miles) west of Johannesburg, where they lived.

“He drove us through Soweto,” Brenda says of the Black township that her father would later end up documenting during the ​’70s. ​“I remember it being very depressing,” she continues. ​“It was a grey day. It felt bleak. I laid down in the back of the car. I didn’t want to look at this place. I was probably seven or eight, and he turned around to me and said: ​‘Sit up and look, damn it! It is unforgivable to look away.’”

It was an ethos David Goldblatt carried throughout his life. Born in 1930, he came of age just as the National Party rose to power in 1948 and instituted apartheid. As a second-generation Lithuanian Jew born in South Africa, Goldblatt was afforded the privileges his grandfather had been denied in his home country, and never forgot what that meant.

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