ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
For The People. Anelia Schutte
Читать онлайн.Название For The People
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781472090980
Автор произведения Anelia Schutte
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство HarperCollins
Things didn’t get any better as Ronnie got older. If anything, they got worse. He remembers going away to college and having to change trains in George. At the station he had to change platforms, and there was a bridge over the tracks for just that purpose. ‘Everyone used that bridge, white and brown,’ he says. ‘But in 1970, they built a second bridge next to that bridge. Then we had to walk separately. In 1970, I tell you.’
When people started being removed to Hornlee, only some of the families in Concordia were singled out for the move. It hadn’t been declared a white group area, but some of the houses were in the way of a new bypass road that was being planned.
I’ve heard about this controversial bypass since I was a child. It still hasn’t materialised.
Ronnie remembers the day they realised their family had to move, ‘They drew a cross on our gate,’ he says. ‘A white cross.’
His mother, for one, was relieved to move to the township.
Ronnie’s mother had come to Knysna from Oudtshoorn in the Klein Karoo, a semi-desert region where she’d lived in a stone house in the middle of town long before the forced removals of later years. There she had grown up with proper electricity in the house from an early age. So living in Concordia with a wind charger and car batteries providing light, but not much more, had been a big change for her.
Having electricity in Hornlee was a big thing, says Ronnie. ‘My mother could buy a food mixer.’
But there were challenges as well. For his parents, Ronnie says, the biggest adjustment was financial.
‘There was suddenly a mortgage, and rates and taxes that were never there before. We used to bury our own sewage, burn our own rubbish. Now, all of a sudden, my parents had to pay to get it removed.’
Ronnie himself missed the space of Concordia. ‘I felt like I was stuck in the township with nothing around me,’ he says.
Many years later, when he had a son of his own, he took the boy to Concordia ‘just so he could experience what I had experienced’.
There, like his father before him, the boy climbed trees, played in the forest and ate wild berries.
Even today, says Ronnie, his son still talks about that day he took him to Concordia, and showed him the life he’d left behind.
In my second week back in Knysna, my parents take me to lunch at Crab’s Creek, a pub on the edge of the lagoon. While we wait for the pretty black waitress to bring us our drinks, my mother says hello to a coloured lady she recognises at the table behind us. I’m introduced as the daughter who’s been living in London and the coloured lady says her daughter is overseas too.
At another table, three teenage boys are drinking bottles of Castle lager. Two of them are coloured, one is white.
So much has changed since I was their age.
There were only a handful of non-white children at Knysna High when I finished school in 1995. One of them was black, a girl in my class. In a year below me there was a coloured boy, a talented rugby player. The only others, if I remember correctly, were two younger Indian boys. They were some of the first Indian people I’d ever encountered, as most of South Africa’s Indian population was concentrated in the Natal province on the eastern coast of South Africa, where I’d never been.
It was only the year after, when I went to study in Cape Town, that I made my first black, coloured and Indian friends in an advertising college that was still predominantly white.
Back at my parents’ house, our stomachs full of pub lunch, my father and I settle down to watch TV. As my father pokes his dowel at the buttons to skip through the channels, South Africa’s new racial integration flashes before me. Mixed-race pairs of South African DJs, comedians and equestrian stars do the cha-cha on Strictly Come Dancing. In one of the locally produced soap operas, black actors speak Afrikaans one minute and English or Zulu the next. Another soap is entirely in Zulu, with English subtitles.
When I was little, we had one channel on SABC TV that broadcast only in English and Afrikaans. American shows like Buck Rogers and T. J. Hooker were dubbed into Afrikaans, with the English soundtrack broadcast simultaneously on the radio. On two separate channels, there was ‘black’ programming in African languages.
My father finds the news he was looking for and puts down the dowel.
In stark contrast to Strictly Come Dancing and the soaps, I now see the other extreme of the new South Africa: a report on recent forced removals in Johannesburg. In one incident outside a church, police grab black people, including women and children, off the streets, beating them if they don’t comply. I could be watching a scene twenty, thirty years ago. But unlike thirty years ago, those people aren’t being removed because they’re black. They’re being removed because they’re illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe who were sleeping on the street because the homeless shelter in the church was full. And unlike thirty years ago, the policemen who are beating them are also black.
When the news is over, my father goes back to poking at the TV. On one of the channels he flicks through, the same story from Johannesburg is repeated, this time in Xhosa.
I’ve been hearing and reading a lot about xenophobia in South Africa since I’ve been back here. In Knysna, black people complain about Zimbabweans, Somalis and Nigerians coming into the townships, bringing with them drugs and violence while taking jobs, houses and women. White people complain their taxes are being spent on giving those illegal immigrants special treatment. Coloured people complain they’ve been forgotten.
From what I’ve heard, it’s the black people who are most xenophobic. And in Knysna, the tension between locals and immigrants, or ‘newcomers’, has led to clashes in the townships at least once in the past year.
The stories I’ve heard from various people in town are confirmed by reports on national newspapers’ websites. During what was called South Africa’s ‘xenophobic unrest’ in 2008, several Somali-run shops in Knysna’s townships were looted and their owners driven out of the community. Over a hundred foreign nationals from Somalia and other African countries fled the townships and sought refuge at the police station. Teachers at the local schools were told not to send any foreign children back to the townships. For months, the foreigners had to stay in tents on the rugby and hockey fields at Knysna’s sports park until it was safe to return to their homes.
It seems there’s still tension in Knysna now.
One of the main stories in the Knysna-Plett Herald these last few weeks has been about a group of African traders who’ve been removed from their long-established roadside market by the Knysna Municipality. The reason for it wasn’t xenophobia – the municipality was planning to widen that stretch of road and the traders were in the way. But the public response to the money spent moving the traders – to a new site with pre-built market stalls, toilets and twenty-four-hour security – has had definite xenophobic overtones.
It’s not that the traders are ‘newcomers’ – many of them came from Zimbabwe and Nigeria as far back as ten, fifteen years ago. But in many people’s eyes they’re still nothing more than illegal immigrants.
According to one angry letter in the Herald, ‘These illegals are not “previously disadvantaged”. They come to our country of their own free will and are now using us. They are opportunists and should be treated as such.’
This xenophobic attitude seems to be common in the new South Africa, but it’s news to me. It has never made the headlines in the UK and my mother, who’s always quick to phone me when a family friend has died or there’s been some or other scandal in the government, has never mentioned it