On New Year’s Eve, many countries celebrate with fireworks, while in South Africa a different kind of tradition has persisted since the end of apartheid.
To ring in the new year, people throw their furniture out the window and into the streets below. This tradition is monitored by police forces to make sure nobody gets hurt.
As the clock approached midnight on New Year’s Eve, chaos prevailed on the streets of Hillbrow. Glass bottles were flung at pedestrians from the neighborhood’s high-rise buildings.
Some residents set off fireworks from apartment windows. Random fistfights erupted. But there was no flying furniture. As two police vehicles passed each other shortly after the New Year began, officers gave each other thumbs up.
“It’s a mission accomplished,” said Major Gen. Theko Pharasi. The Hillbrow tradition of throwing out old furniture to start the New Year is hallowed for some and hazardous for all.
It is now colliding with a drive to gentrify Johannesburg’s crime-ridden core, prompting a police crackdown along with angst among some Hillbrow residents.
“You just want to start off fresh for the New Year,” said Bethel Osuagwu, a five-year Hillbrow resident. The 36-year-old technician said he once put aside used items, such as a rusty stove, an old TV set, or worn-out clothes to throw off his balcony on Dec. 31.
But rising rents make furniture-tossing unaffordable as well as illegal, and police now patrol in armored vehicles. The Hillbrow tradition ranked fourth in a poll of the strangest New Year’s Eve customs, according to a new survey by social-networking site Badoo.com that got 7,200 responses.
First place went to the practice of gathering in a graveyard in Chile to be with dead relatives; second, the Romanian ritual of trying to hear animals talk; third, the Irish custom of banging bread on the wall to frighten away evil spirits.
In other years, pedestrians in Hillbrow have been injured by flying junk. Several years ago, a small refrigerator struck someone on the head and body, according to Nana Radebe, spokeswoman for the Johannesburg Emergency Management Services.
She said there are no official statistics on how many people have been hurt. The tradition began in the 1990s, after the end of South Africa’s white minority apartheid rule.
Many whites migrated to Johannesburg’s wealthier northern suburbs, where houses and compounds are surrounded by electric fences and patrolled by private security officers.
Meanwhile, blacks, who had been restricted from moving freely around South Africa, flooded into the cities in search of jobs. Once a fashionable neighborhood, Hillbrow became one of the roughest parts of Johannesburg.
Squatters hijacked high-rise apartment buildings and began living in the city’s decaying center without paying rent.
