We’re two months out from Melville’s 130th. A hundred and thirty years old, and it still carries on like it opened last week. Welcome to Melville Untold. Ten minutes with us and you'll have a plan for tomorrow night, somewhere to take your kids, and a fun way to sweat it off in the morning!

In this week's newsletter:

by Aubrey Moloto, Caroline Koma

The ancient archaeological experience of the Batswana/Basotho smelter on the Koppies is about to leave our urban oasis.

On Heritage Day, 24 September, the University of Johannesburg's augmented-reality reconstruction of the Melville Koppies Iron Age smelter goes on display at Museum Africa in Newtown. It’s an AR-narrated rebuild that happens live on your phone screen.

But wait, there's more. Right next to it will be a Melville stand with the sole purpose of catching the Newtown foot traffic and sending it back to our Mellies.

We have told the smelter's origin story before, in Issues 66 and 69, so check it out to catch up. What's new is the fact that it's not just sitting on the ridge waiting to be seen; it's going to fetch people.

Call it one more channel pointing at the precinct, alongside the Art Mile and everything else pulling in the same direction. Every one of them answers the same question, the one every 7th Street trader keeps asking: how do we get more people up this hill?

We asked Izak Potgieter, of the UJ Metaverse Research Unit and project lead, how it came about.

"One of the members of the Melville Koppies Management Committee and Friends of the Melville Koppies was actually someone who was involved in the original installation of the pre-colonial Johannesburg exhibit at Museum Africa, which was installed in the 1980s, 1990s," he told us. He was talking about the legendary Wendy Carstens.

Because she had put so much into that earlier work, "it seemed natural to kind of trace her steps and revisit the exhibit on the smelter at Museum Africa. It was a nice little circle kind of moment which emerged."

Izak is frank about the institution itself.

"Museum Africa, I think, is an underappreciated asset for the city of Johannesburg. It's our world museum. If you go to London or Chicago, you know, you have the British Museum, you have the Chicago Museum of Art. Jo'burg has a version of that, and it's called Museum Africa."

The exhibits are extensive. The energy is there. The budget is not. "Cultural institutions are chronically underfunded in the city. So, kudos to them."

What visitors will actually get: "We are adding the AR experience of the smelter. We are adding a video by Snaps On Seventh to contextualise some of the research which was uncovered or presented. We're also adding signage unique to the smelter, which was developed during a consultation process and the research done on the Melville Koppies Smelter as a phase one."

Yes, that video is ours. We will take it.

And it may not stop there. "The hope is, and this is not contractually set in stone yet, but there seems to be energy and appetite for it from all sides. The hope is that this can be a spark for eventually redesigning the entire exhibit on pre-colonial Johannesburg."

He laughed at the scale of that. Museum Africa is "enormous. You cannot believe the size of Museum Africa. It used to be Joburg's largest market and warehouse for fresh produce."

The museum currently carries signage along the lines of "Jo'burg before people". Izak's response to that framing was short.

"What kind of message is that? That there weren't people here before Jo'burg was established as a mining town? That the heritage before 1886 doesn't count as belonging to what is now Jo'burg? That is incorrect."

Writing pre-colonial Joburg back in is the point. "Why are we so arbitrarily excluding this as part of the story of Johannesburg?"

Which is where the AR earns itself. Izak brought up the Odeon Cinema in Fordsburg, once the largest in Africa, demolished under apartheid.

"Those words are difficult to visualise. What does that mean? Largest cinema in Africa? But if you have some visual, in this case we're using augmented reality, through your phone you can see the size of the cinema. It's like, oh my goodness, this is what this place used to look like."

Same for the smelter. "We can give you long paragraphs about, first trees were cut down, and this was done, and okay, you kind of get it. It's like you have to do work now. But when it's presented through animations, music, visualisation, storytelling, most importantly, everyone recalls and retains information much better, whether you're five years old or 95."

A plaque, as he put it, "is great to have, but it is old-fashioned, and most people don't read them."

Jenny Grice, who has recently taken over from Wendy as the new Koppies Committee chair, has watched people meet the real thing.

Asked what a first-timer should feel standing at the actual smelter: "Everyone should feel that they are standing at a place that not only reveals the early farmers that lived and worked at this spot but also that San and Bushmen had hunted and lived here. And even before them, thousands and thousands of years ago, early hominids."

Is the AR pulling numbers? She is honest that it is hard to measure. Most visitors self-guide and never say. What she does see is people scanning the QR code for the video, usually on the long hikes, when they stop at the lecture hut.

As for the Newtown crowd, she wants them up here for one reason: to understand that large communities were living right across Joburg hundreds of years ago, and that Melville's was one of many.

Izak measures success differently. There is an anonymous analytics system counting AR sessions, languages and rough origin. Useful, but not the number he cares about.

What he cares about is whether this helps Johannesburg tell a better story about itself. He points to Pat Wallace, the first Black technician appointed to the university's archaeological research unit. Wallace worked the smelter excavation, then went missing from most accounts of it. A 2003 slide deck turned his name up again. Getting him back into the telling is the real yardstick.

"If we can get people to understand that Johannesburg has this deeper history, it allows a lot more people to feel like they belong here and that their story is written and it continues to be written in Johannesburg."

Join us, the Friends Of Melville Koppies, the University of Johannesburg Metaverse Research Unit, and Snaps On Seventh at Museum Africa on Heritage Day, 24 September 2026, for the official launch of this Augmented Reality Ancient Batswana/Basotho Iron Smelter experience. Come, witness Melville history live.

Enjoyed this week’s digest? Consider buying us a coffee – It keeps the newsletter going.

The regulars: karaoke five nights a week; quiz nights Wednesday and Saturday; Wednesday jazz and Thursday open mic at SIX; Monday comedy; chess at Jo'anna; Friday biryani; the Saturday run crew from Green Fork; the JAM weekend market at 27 Boxes, Saturdays 10:00 to 16:00, free; Koppies Sundays.

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For more updates as the week goes on, visit our Instagram page @snapson7th or our Melville Pulse event calendar

Over sixty artists and creators open their doors across Melville tonight. That’s the good news and a problem at the same time. Three streets, twenty-odd venues, five hours. Walk it blind and you will have a lovely evening and still miss lot of it.

That’s what the Snaps On Seventh, R450 VIP guided tour is for, and this month it is worth as much as any.

August is Ladies First, our Women's Month edition, and the programme belongs to women.

Lerato Motau works in fibre from Vilakazi Street in Soweto, stitching in the bright mashangane colours of her Shangaan ancestry. "Embroidery and particularly the act of stitching are important in my work, where each stitch is a symbolic journey," she says. Her work has shown in Beijing, London, Toronto and Helsinki, and sells through Saatchi Art. Tonight it’s here.

Naledi Modupi rebuilds women's faces into semi-abstract portraits, all colour and jewellery-shapes, because "faces can tell a person's story and experiences". OkayAfrica ran a spotlight on her. What she wants is for women to "see themselves the way I see them, bold, beautiful, and exceptional".

Maitemogelo Mphela takes the Giving Room with a collaborative piece on belonging and memory, and she is inviting women to leave a trace of themselves inside the work. Our poster artist of the month Robyn Zanine will be showcasing a taste of her current solo exhibition at Vic Yards.

And many more incredibly talented ladies like: Zoe Shope, Celeste Landsberg, Lebogang Mathebula and Nikki Skye Allen in Room 110. Ten more female artists at 54 on 4th under "Shaping Significance" at the Kruis Church. Twelve more at Botaki ba Afrika. Come and celebrate the women in Jozi’s art scene.

The Resource Gallery opens "We Are", an all-women group show running 6 to 25 August, 16:00 to 20:00, free. The line-up is Vhuhwavho Nemaungani, Avela Swana, Maitemogelo Diphetogo Mphela and Kesaobaka Jackson.

"Becoming: Stories We Carry" opens the same night, put together by Liyaphila Tawushile of The Art Vanguard SA.

"Unbroken: A GBV Art Series" runs 16:00 to 21:00 on the 1st floor at 27 Boxes. Women's Month with the difficult part left in rather than decorated over.

The Sinenkani collective is at ERF350, and Protea Phoenix's Realms of Ra takes its turn on 7th Street sharing a building with KevDon.

Gloria Renollet, TEDx speaker and travelling poet, runs a group dialogue session for womb-owners. All genders welcome.

A guided walk with us, Snaps On Seventh. Access to every exhibition and the activations worth your time. Complimentary drinks and snacks at participating venues. A dedicated shuttle on standby for the long stretches. And free entry to the After Hours rooftop, ten artists, a jazz band, dancers and DJs – a paid event.

Add it all up, and the guide is almost mahala.

If you would rather do it yourself, R150 gets you unlimited shuttle rides and access to select activities along the route. The free ticket is completely pay-as-you-go. You have access to all exhibitions and the MAM discounts at certain businesses across the precinct. Getting your steps in and supporting all the things that speak to you costs nothing at all.

The shuttle runs door to door, marshals in green hi-vis vests are on the street all evening, and on the tour, you’re walking in a group with someone who knows every venue owner and curator by name. Nobody ends up alone, unless you want to.

One last thing on the tour, because we can’t believe how incredibly underrated it is. It’s not dinner and a movie. You are moving, drinks are flowing, and the conversation even more so. Everything starts happening the moment you walk into a room.

Come on your own, and you won’t even feel it. There’s a group, a guide, and the Jozi art crowd is always there: gallerists, collectors, makers, the tastemakers. Conversations start themselves when everyone is on the same vibe.

Space is limited. One guide, one group, and it leaves at 17:00 sharp from the 27 Boxes parkade stairs on 4th Avenue.

Book the tour.

We have to rerun this one ‘cause it got cut short in our haste to publish. So sorry Charney, here goes.

There's a colony of feral cats living on Wits-owned land just outside the university, and one long-term Melville/Westdene resident has decided that she must look after them. Nobody is paying her to do it. She just keeps, showing, up.

Charney Van Aardt Giovanelli is 28. Ask her who she is, and the cats aren’t the first thing that immediately jump to mind; it’s her family. "I'm a mother firstly, always," she says. That's Ethan, who also named the small business she runs a handmade keychain and earring label called Fluffy n Plushy. She works part-time at Richmond Vet. About four months ago, she added house-sitting and pet-sitting on top of everything else. Almost every rand of it ends up backing the colony.

"My husband carries the household," she says, "and I carry this."

The cats are older than the flattened structure they live on. That land used to hold an informal settlement, and the colony lived in it, getting by on scraps and rodents. "Their main source of nutrition was from the rats, basically," she says. Rats, and leftovers, and whatever else turned up. Charney and a few others were already feeding and sterilising there before the settlement was cleared, about three years ago. When the people left, the food left with them, and a manageable arrangement quickly turned into an obligation.

They still earn their keep, mind you. The sign at the colony says as much, because a working cat population keeps the rats down, and that reputation is why she gets called out to other properties in the area to trap, sterilise and release. She looks after more than one colony now, but this is the main one. "These are my babies."

The obvious question is why they aren't simply picked up and rehomed somewhere kinder, and the answer is that cats don't work like that. Colonies are territorial, and they don't mix. Drop a cat from one into the space of another, and you get a fight, which is where most injuries come from in the first place. So the colonies are kept far enough apart to keep the peace. Bloods and Crips. The Middle East.

Rehoming is off the table too. "They can't be separated because they formed bonds," she says. "It's like taking a brother away from his family." Every cat there has been sterilised, so nothing is breeding, and still it never resolves. As the old ones die, new ones drift in to fill the gap. "It will never end. There will always be cats here."

I asked her, half joking, what the long game was. She didn't blink. "Until either Wits destroys the place, or I die." And she meant it.

Wits has a cat club that's been running for more than 25 years on campus. Years back they approached her about this outside colony, the deal being simple: they'd buy the food, she'd give the time. For a while they helped with the medical costs too. That has changed. Sterilisations are still covered, she says, but the food and the vet bills now land on her, and the turnaround on claims is long enough that the people involved front the money out of their own pockets and wait. "We pay with our credit cards, and we keep paying, and we keep paying."

She's fair about how she puts it. The club is a handful of people, most of them well past 60, looking after more than 50 cats between them, all of it out of their own money. The students who might carry it rotate out every few years and can't sink R600 into a bag of food anyway. So the help has thinned, and the claims process is particular in a way that stings when you're the one covering the shortfall. Put food on an account and, the way she tells it, the medical on that same account can come back unpaid. When one of her cats gets hurt and needs the vet, whether the bill gets covered is "a 50/50."

The raw numbers are blunt. Twenty kilograms of food a month runs about R1,200. Her vet account has never sat below R3,000. One cat alone has been to the vet three times in the last six months, on her own tab. "Every month I pay, and I pay, and I pay," she says, "but it doesn't go down." She buys the food at cost and gets discounted treatment through the good people at Richmond Vet, where Dr Charmaine has been a God-send to her. She feeds Montego, because it's better for them, even though better at cost price still costs more than the cheap stuff at retail.

And because the raw pet food story was fresh in my head, I asked whether she'd ever go raw for them. She almost laughed. "I can't afford it." Buying raw for a feral colony, on this budget, would be like buying sushi for a soup kitchen. She feeds them as well as the maths allows, and the maths is unforgiving. But healthy food is important.

There used to be twelve cats. On the weekend before we spoke, there were seven. The morning we met her, she counted five. "Where are they?"

Traffic, illness, poison, theft. Some weeks she comes back for a feed and finds one limping, or gone. It wears on a person. A few weeks ago she got close to walking away from the whole thing. "I got to the point where I wanted to give up," she says. The support that used to be there has fallen off; she's the only one of the group with young children at home, and, in her words, the one who never signed up for it financially, and now it all lands on her. She says it without any venom, which somehow makes it heavier.

Her priority list, in order.

The bigger ask is harder, and it's really pointed at Wits, its staff, and its ten thousand-odd students. Not a hero. A second person. Someone steady enough that a 28-year-old mother of a young family could take a week's holiday without lying awake wondering who's feeding the cats. Even short of that, she'd settle for awareness. Out of thousands-and-thousands of students, there have to be a few who love animals, and if the club can't hold them now, it can at least plant something, so that the ones who care carry it with them into the jobs and the means they'll have later. Her obstacles are familiar; they're the same two every volunteer effort runs into: consistency and money.

She came to us through Gail at Bounty Hunters, which is the only reason any of this reached the newsletter at all. "Gail and I are like this," she says, fingers crossed together. Two women, both running on goodwill and their own bank cards. If you already know about the one, you need to know about the other.

If you'd like to play your part, donate using the following details:

Bank details: Richmond Animal Hospital
Bank Acc: ABSA Bank
Branch code: 632005
Acc no: 4065324962

POP to be sent to [email protected]
Please reference with Giovanelli

We can all be heroes to the furry little fellas.

Winter is not finished with us, so neither is the Pet Winter Swag Contest. Jackets, jumpers, jockeys, the full outfit, whatever your animal feels good in.

So far, the entire field is Coco Chanel of the Tilsley family. One entry. We know what lives behind these gates, and it is not one dog in a jersey.

Send us a photo, and drop a blankie at Raw Pet Food Deli, or Ziggy’s Pet Pamporium right in our hood. Reply straight to this email with your votes and entries.

Shout out to Raw Pet Food Deli for making this year’s competition possible!

The petitions worked. Bambanani reopens Thursday 6 August, the same night the Art Mile lights up 4th Avenue. Hours are Monday to Friday 10:00 to 18:00, and Saturday to Sunday 09:00 to 18:00.

A quick recap, if 2026 also felt like 2 years for you. Bambanani closed in May.  The petitions went around, The Scala became the conduit for a neighbourhood that was not ready to let a kids' space go, and now, here we are.

Honestly, Melville is meaningfully better off with Bambanani open. We do not have many things for children here. Johannesburg Child Welfare runs activities and the Play Café, and that matters, but Bambanani is the one that gives parents an actual break. Somewhere the small humans vanish into a jungle gym while the adults finish a sentence, or a meal, or a thought.

Between the Scala coming back, Bambanani reopening and the new shuffle at the bottom of 7th, it’s a good time to be a Melvillian again.

We have just been through a proper team overhaul in the last 2 months. New people, sharper skills, same job: telling Melville's stories with more heart and integrity.

Since the resurgence and even more so, the Melville Art Mile, there have been more things to do and a lot less time for Snaps On Seventh. If Street photography and Instagram were phase one, the newsletter and content creation two; then ladies and gentlemen, I’m proud and honestly a little nervous to announce that we’re officially in Phase 3.

Tours, Events, Marketing and Media strategies. It took some time for me to realise it, catch my breath and do the work needed to cope, execute and thrive in this new chapter. We’re finally here, and these are the people who I trust will help us get to floor 4.

Aubrey "Snaps" Moloto, yours truly. Founder and creative lead. Vision, street photography roots, and the drive to raise Melville's profile “without messing with its rich character”.

Lethabo Maloma, project manager. Knows where everything is and where everyone should be. Task delegation, client outreach, researching prospects while wrangling VIP lists, usually before the first coffee lands. Schedules, documents, budgets: she keeps the chaos in shape so the rest of us look half-organised.

Caroline Koma, the Pulse keeper. Helps draft the weekly newsletter and tracks every event, special and book launch in Melville, so the Gig Guide stays current, and the Pulse calendar stays functional.

Kgosigadi More, social media and content. An extremely talented musician and sound engineer who has spent the last few years running social media for small businesses and private clients. She now leads the Snaps On Seventh social and content departments, with a main focus on the Melville Art Mile pages.

We are looking for a strong picture and video editor. If you also do graphics, motion or are new to new tech, even better, but the editing is the job. We are putting together an internship so young creatives get real experience on live Melville work with an opportunity to get paid while doing it.

We would especially like to hear from Melville residents. We would rather build this place with the people who live in it.

Send a short note, attach your CV and showreel to [email protected], DM @snapson7th or simply reply to this email.

Thrift Therapy is open at 79 4th Avenue, founded by Jessie and Cassie, inside Studio 79. Fresh drops land Mondays and Saturdays.

It puts a fifth thrift and charity shop on one avenue, alongside Bounty Hunters next door, U-Turn where 7th meets 4th, and Junkie and Fundi Leather at the 59 4th Avenue centre. That is less a street than a route.

Heather Mason at 2Summers, who has been documenting this suburb longer than most and is one of our favourite reads, put them in a winter thrifting piece on 24 July and said Thrift Therapy was the shop that made her happiest that weekend.

Melville was proclaimed on 5 October 1896, ten years after Johannesburg itself, named for the surveyor Edward Melvill. That makes 5 October 2026 the 130th, and it makes today exactly two months out.

We have done the history before, in Issues 8, 44, 66 and many more. This is not that. This is us asking you to get involved.

Five hundred years plus smelting on the hill. A hundred and thirty years a suburb. Now an AR rebuild of an Iron Age forge heading to Museuem Africa. This place keeps finding new ways to help us remember, and the next round of memories should have you in them.

So: one memory, one artefact, one photo, one person who made Melville feel like home. Send it to the My Melville Memories portal.

Nothing is too small. The stool somebody keeps by the door for a neighbour on crutches counts every bit as much as thirty years behind a counter.

The Melville 130 committee is also calling for visual artists, musicians, choirs, DJs, spoken word, dancers, poets, journalists, oral historians, heritage specialists, makers, schools, NGOs and volunteers. Public art, live performance, storytelling, heritage exhibitions, community projects. Join the Melville 130 committee here.

A five-hundred-year-oldsmelter, the countdown to 130, Bambanani reopening on the same night the Art Mile hands the whole strip to women. What more do you want from your favourite good news bearers…except actually publishing on time for once?

If the read made your week better, keep us going: buy us a coffee. We now have a lot more mouths to feed.

Reply with your tips, your complaints, and your Melville memories for the 130th. Know somebody who loves Melville? Forward this to them.

See you on the mile.

‘til next Week, Melville. Stay proud, stay present, stay plotting.

再见 ✌️