The Night Walkers

We humans search out light; our diurnal selves turn to the sun by instinct to wake up, to get busy and to get on with things.

But our 24-hour day is bifurcated. Darkness arrives with each sunset and our biology signals us to hunker down, to sleep, to dream. But modern humans are governed by more than just biology and the revolutions of a tilted planet making its way around the sun.

Our societies have become complex, stratified and unequal. Our surge to urbanise has made more of us city dwellers. We live in giant anonymous urban clots, but we have strangers for neighbours. This mash up of realities, along with the disease of high crime and gender-based violence has turned our streets, at night time especially, into no-go zones.

But there are women in South Africa who refuse to lose the night to anxiety and fear and are finding ways to step out into the dark with the intention of recovering the freedom of being able to walk the streets.

Nomsa Mazwai, a Soweto local, is the founder of #FunkItI’mWalking. She started her last Thursday of the month walks in 2016. The idea came to her in 2014. She says: “I did my masters in New York but when I got back home to Soweto I started feeling quite depressed. A few months later I got a residency in Newcastle [in England]. While I was there in the UK it struck me that the reason I felt so down at home in Soweto was because I didn't feel safe to walk there. And that’s when I said to myself ‘f*ck it, I’m walking, when I get back home’.”

In 2016 she “made the name a little bit more savoury” and launched her last Thursday of the month walks as #FunkItI’mWalking.

“It started with me wanting to be able to walk in the streets in any condition, and not have to stress and worry. A lot women in South Africa live in that nervous condition,” says Mazwai, who's now a mother to two young daughters

The night walks started with friends bringing along other friends to walk before stopping to share a meal at a local Soweto spot. Then people started telling Mazwai that they would happily pay for the experience so #FunkItI’mWalking became ticketed events. The walks became experiences, taking in some of the famous sights of Soweto, from Vilakazi Street to Winnie Mandela’s home and “Confrontation Corner”, the site where the blood of slain protesting students forever marks the 1976 Soweto Uprisings.

She teams up with different restaurants and bars, tour guides and a local Soweto choir, the Karabo Ya Morena choir. Choir master Lebo Seritsane says walking, singing and performing with #FunkItI’mWalking is a win-win. For Mazwai it boosts the number of walkers, making up necessary critical mass. For Seritsane, it’s a paid gig and exposure.

“Walking means we get people from outside of Soweto to get to know us and it also means that we can raise transport money for our performances outside of Gauteng. Our members walk because we enjoy this,” says Seritsane.

Choral music is part of a synergy Mazwai insists on. She adds: “Find your alignment and you find your community. Choral music is beautiful and it’s a great South African export.”

Ultimately for Mazwai, perceptions change with experiences of value and enjoyment. She says: “Having worked in community I know that we need to enable safety for there to be a thriving economy.”

This month Mazwai pushed the #FunkItI’mWalking concept to a new target audience of tour groups — for bigger numbers and new partnerships — launching her latest brainchild called Soweto Nightout Tours. Mazwai says: “Soweto already draws daytime tourists. But Soweto after dark is something special. It’s like the dust of the mine dumps settles; it feels like even the geography shifts at night and it’s beautiful to be on the streets then.”

Further south in the country, women have also been reclaiming the night and the streets of the Mother City with the Cape Town chapter of the global movement called Women Walk at Midnight. Amrita Pande, an Observatory local and sociology lecturer from the University of Cape Town stepped up and out in August 2022.

She says: “I love being out at night but being out at night requires so much planning or it requires activity you do in a group. In almost all the cities that I've spent a long time in in the global south I have not been able to access the night as I've wanted. It’s because these societies are extremely violent or violent for women in general.”

Pande has lived in South Africa for 15 years. She up grew in Delhi, India and lived in a Tripoli in Lebanon for three years.

“I also lived for a while in Amherst, Massachusetts and there I could walk in the night without looking over my back, without my heart in my mouth or carrying pepper spray. Even though this community is a cocoon, I realised that women walking at night could be done,” she says.

The first Cape Town Women Walk at Midnight event took place in August 2022. There were 28 women, Pande remembers, who gathered in Observatory. At the 9pm starting time the suburb went into load-shedding, adding to the initial anxiety.

But they walked into the darkness and now Pande says they can group 80 women at each walk. Women volunteer to create routes and to co-host a walk in their neighbourhoods. This ensures that over the months the walks cover more communities across a city of many entrenched divisions.

A manifesto for the Women Walk at Midnight movement, which started in India in 2016, sets out guiding principles. These include no safety mechanisms apart from the safety of the collective; walking at the pace of the slowest walker; not being especially visible with lights or headlamps, and no dogs. Pande says it’s intentional to keep the focus on how women would typically walk in their cities.

“We create routes that aren't just for able-bodied women and we'll be working more on this in the coming months. At the end of the day it’s about finding ways to access the night with pleasure, with joy and not with fear,” Pande says.

For the community of Kensington, Johannesburg a monthly full moon walk has been a deliberate act of taking this pleasure and joy. It’s a pushback against negativity and cynicism in a city tired of high crime, maintenance neglect and the damning consequences of slack bylaw enforcement.

In February this year some in the community gathered to think through solutions. One initiative started with an alternative WhatsApp group. The group is intentionally not for reporting the usual worries of crime, water and electricity outages or for people looking for a deal or punting a hustle. Called SafeStreets, it set itself four pillars: share innovative, fun ways to be visible and present on our streets; build community solidarity; good vibes; and mutual respect. And with this the Kensington full moon walk became the first actionable idea put to the community.

The first WhatsApp notice read: “Bring the neighbours, the kids and dogs. Dress up with things of bright — with headlamps, Christmas lights and all the neon in your wardrobe — we walk our streets, we’ll say our hellos and howl to the moon.”

The idea of being on the streets after dark would be a leap of faith. Would strangers dare to come out from behind their high walls? Could they trust that arriving and being present would mean more than asking for assurances for their safety? Would they recognise the power in their physical first steps landing on the pavements?

They did — a village raised an idea on a full moon night. With flashing décor lights and to the tunes of a “Full Moon” playlist of songs about the night, about walking and odes to the moon, the community, with dogs, kids and prams in tow set off.

The monthly walks of the Saturday closest to the full moon are less than 3.5km long and mostly take in the highest point in the neighbourhood — the Scottish War Horse Memorial. The site offers a 360° view of the city, but many locals had never climbed the steps to the top of the hill, even in the daytime.

But perceptions can shift, minds can change and maybe we can see differently — by the light of a silvery moon.

*Ufrieda Ho is a Kensington local and part of the SafeStreets initiative. This article was originally published in Sunday Times Lifestyle.