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from their homes, compared with just one in 666 whites.

      The first proposal for enforcing Group Areas legislation in Simon’s Town appeared in a local paper in 1959. It included provisions for allowing coloured and Indian residents to remain living there, but was replaced, five years later, by a new plan reserving the entire town for white people.

      ‘Representatives from the Roman Catholic, Anglican and Methodist churches, the Mosque Trustees, Ratepayers Association, Chamber of Commerce, the Black Sash local branch, various sporting bodies and clubs, and all the non-white organisations’ came together to oppose the announcement, wrote Barbara Willis, a prominent activist, in a paper she presented at the 1968 Black Sash Durban conference.

      The committee sent submissions to the Group Areas Board, collected signatures for a petition and raised money for legal action ‘to put the case for the united townspeople,’ Willis wrote. At a public hearing in 1965, ‘there was no objection from any section of the community or from any racial group against each other,’ only sworn testimonies from residents who saw no need for segregation. But on 1 September 1967 ‘the guillotine fell’ and the entire municipality was designated a white area.

      Remonstrations to the national minister of planning were unsuccessful. The first removals would take place within a year. In a letter to the Argus soon afterwards, Willis’s husband, Humphrey, a local councillor, proposed erecting a gravestone in the middle of town:

      Simon’s Town is dead—murdered by the Group Areas Act. It will, of course, continue as a collection of buildings in which people work but the spirit of the place is departed … A living entity has been destroyed. What have those who perpetrated its destruction given in its place? Nothing—a blank. Therefore, let the place be renamed ‘Blancville-by-the-sea’. And you can spell it as you like—Blanc, Blank or Blanke. They all mean the same—a town without a soul.

      *

      Shuhood’s mother, Rosa, had already felt the squeeze of forced removals by the time of Simon’s Town’s demise. She had grown up in South End in Port Elizabeth—among the first neighbourhoods razed in the apartheid government’s quest for racial segregation.

      Set in the heart of the city, on a low hill above the harbour, South End was home to ‘English and Afrikaans-speaking Caucasians, Malays, Coloureds, Indians, Chinese, Jews and a mere handful of Africans,’ writes Yusuf Agherdien in South End, Then & Now, a book juxtaposing historical photos of the suburb—brick row-houses, crowded streets—with the vacant fields that replaced it.

      The cleared land is still visible from the air today: a scrubby wasteland, only partially filled in by new buildings, punched out from the urban grid. Rosa lived there once, one of fourteen siblings, with a large extended family within walking distance. She was twenty years old when she met Shuhood’s father, a carpenter for RH Morris Builders renovating the Provincial Hospital down the road. He was lodging with an aunt of hers, had blue eyes and pale skin, and was, she thought, the most handsome man she had ever seen. Marriage followed quickly—his family drove up for the wedding—and when his contract ended they decided to move back to Simon’s Town, taking a small cottage two doors away from his parents.

      ‘The stoep looked right over the sea. It was so beautiful and blue. And the mountains—it was amazing,’ Rosa said.

      From their doorway it was a three-minute walk to the Simon’s Town harbour, where local fishers sold their catch, including perlemoen.6 There was no vehicle access to their home and they parked their car, a Ford Zephyr with orange seats, on Jubilee Square, trekking up the steps with their groceries. At first Rosa was homesick, but the community she’d moved to was very similar to her own. There were old families—Manuels, Bakers, Slaamies, Fakiers, Appelbys, Jenkinses—connected to each other through marriage, binding over generations into a kinship network that soon welcomed her in.

      Their lives revolved around the mosque, built in 1926, that today mostly stands empty, tucked behind the Main Road coffee shops and clothing boutiques. Up the hill lay a kramat, or shrine, for two Indonesian imams, exiled to South Africa in the eighteenth century. At the Seaforth Cemetery—beside sections for war victims, Boer prisoners of war, Russians and Italians—was a Muslim burial ground. (The kramat is still there, incongruously wedged among expensive houses, but the burial ground has been destroyed by vandalism.) During Ramadan, children filled the streets before sunset, delivering gifts of food between families preparing to break the fast. When Eid came, the muezzin’s prayers rung out until dawn.

      The mosque’s imam, Mohammed Baker, was widely respected as an Islamic scholar, and had published the first Afrikaans translation of the Qur’an in 1956. Three years later, he addressed the Group Areas Board when their intentions for his hometown became clear.

      ‘My father and his father and his father’s father were born and bred in Simon’s Town,’ he told them. ‘We have been there for 200 years. I will lose my birthright—my ancestors were the first people to settle in the area. If I move to Bonteheuwel, I will become nothing, merely a number. They have no hospitals, no police station, no church, no school. A man can be subjected to such disintegration that he will lose his spirit.’

      Rosa’s family began losing their homes in South End in 1965, a year after she had moved away. ‘Group Areas started in PE and spread down here,’ she said. ‘It was traumatic. We lived right near the beachfront, but they said we were too black and we had to leave. They pushed us right out to Galvandale, which is now the so-called coloured area. And they started with Cape Town a few years later.’

      Among the first and most visible targets for the apartheid town planners was District Six, the flattened residential neighbourhood that still scars the city’s slopes. From the late 1960s more than 60 000 of its coloured residents were ejected to new housing projects on the Cape Flats, joined by thousands more families from other ‘black spots’ identified by the apartheid government: Salt River, Observatory, Mowbray, Claremont, Wynberg, Tokai, Bergvliet, Plumstead, Constantia, Bishopscourt, Simon’s Town.

      ‘You had to get accustomed to the neighbours,’ said Rosa, who in 1972 relocated to Grassy Park with her husband and two children. ‘Group Areas threw the people out and they just had to come.’

      ‘When you meet a coloured person in Cape Town,’ Shuhood told me once, ‘you don’t ask, “Where are you from?” You ask: “Where are your mense from?” Your people. We speak about the old places, not about Hanover Park and that.’

      Most of the evicted Simon’s Town residents moved to Ocean View in Kommetjie, another freshly poured housing project that would soon devolve into a ghetto. At first the hillside settlement was called Slangkop, or ‘Snake Head,’ a name that so distressed the new arrivals that they began referring to it as Upper Fish Hoek. Before long, officials renamed it—bringing to mind, one imagines, both the lost view of False Bay and its more distant Atlantic replacement.

      The government’s plans for Ocean View included schools, an old-age home, playgrounds, a cinema, a shopping centre, a community hall and several churches, but none had been completed when evictions began. Many never would be.

      ‘Street lights are not yet functioning because they have run out of cable and the only telephone is in the Housing Supervisor’s office which is closed at night,’ wrote Barbara Willis in 1968, several months after some 70 families had already moved across from Simon’s Town. ‘There are no halls, no library and no police station, and there is already some hooliganism there, and also a shebeen or two.’

      The local MP had tried to get a police station built or, failing that, a smaller satellite post, but was refused on both counts.

      When given notice under Group Areas, families had three months to vacate their homes and accept whatever new housing the government offered them. Alternatively, they could state, in writing, that they would find new accommodation for themselves. But Cape Town was already beset by a severe housing backlog—there were 12 000 names on the waiting list for rental housing in 1967—so most people did not consider this an option.

      The first families to move to Ocean View had been categorised ‘sub-economic’ by the government, earning less than R60 per month, and had their

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