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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
Despite the rare opportunity to have the flat to myself, I choose to stay in the main house. Without my husband or my brothers here, the idea of walking the short distance from the main house to the flat at night makes me nervous. Especially after hearing my parents’ stories of break-ins and assaults in the neighbourhood.
I’ve decided to sleep in my brother’s old room and work in what’s still known as ‘Anelia’s room’, figuring that writing in my childhood bedroom might help to bring back memories. As soon as I open the bright-red door, I know I’ve made the right choice. My high-school blazer still hangs in the wardrobe, adorned with a row of scrolls sewn in gold thread that remind me of prize-giving evenings and Monday morning assemblies at Knysna High. On the wall next to a full-length mirror, there’s a framed, faded newspaper ad for Barclays Offshore Services, my first work to get published as a professional copywriter. Under the ad there’s a black-and-white chest of drawers and around the room a series of black floating shelves, the only remaining evidence of my black-and-white phase in my adolescent years, when most of my wardrobe was monochrome.
When I turned twelve, my birthday present from my parents was a black-and-white makeover of my bedroom, with some splashes of red (‘Because you have to have some colour, Annie’). My father, more proficient at using a sewing machine than my mother, made me a black duvet cover with white polka dots and red curtains. He also made the black shelves and put them up in the ideal positions for my books, electronic keyboard and speakers.
But one of my biggest reasons for wanting to write in this room isn’t what’s inside. It’s the view outside. I pull the curtains back from the ceiling-height windows and there it is, the Knysna Lagoon with the Heads in the distance.
Below me is our back garden and the swimming pool that we got when I was six. It’s still surrounded by concrete patches where my dad has been intending to build decking for years. Between the garden and the Lagoon there are two more rows of houses and the N2 highway that has brought me home.
I spend my second day in Knysna turning my bedroom into an office.
When my mother worked in the squatter camps in the 1980s, she took lots of pictures to support her appeals for funding. She’s managed to dig out the old slides that she used in her presentations, and I’ve had them printed as a visual reminder of what it was like back then.
Above my desk, I create a collage of the pictures: crèche children with dirty black hands holding plastic cups of whatever juice drink they were given that day. Squatter-camp landscapes with eroded dirt tracks that link shacks made from rough wooden planks and corrugated iron. In one picture, a black woman smiles at the camera from under her headscarf, the newly tarred township roads winding round a hill behind her.
On the wall opposite, once covered in posters of the rock band Queen, I stick the handful of newspaper clippings of Knysna in the 1980s that I managed to find on my last trip here. In one of the few articles that shows my camera-shy mother, she’s behind the wheel of a minibus donated by a national newspaper.
Next to the news gallery, I stick up the beginnings of a timeline. Starting in 1937, when the ‘Knysna Health, Social and Child Welfare Society’ was founded, the timeline has space for any significant events in Knysna and the rest of the country on one side, and anything specific to my mother on the other.
There are far too many blanks, though, reminding me how little I know about my own town’s history and indeed, my own family’s.
When my parents and I sit down to dinner, I ask them to tell me their story.
Owéna Schutte opened the first of many suitcases and unpacked a pair of mud-caked sandals that she wouldn’t be washing anytime soon.
The mud was from the plot of land that she and her husband, Theron, had recently bought. It was a decent-sized patch on the outskirts of Knysna where they were building a house an architect friend had designed for them. In the meantime, they were staying in the local boys’ boarding house with some of Theron’s fellow teachers from the Knysna High School.
Until their house was built, the mud on her sandals was all Owéna had to show for their purchase. Their own piece of Knysna.
Married for nine months, Owéna and Theron had moved to Knysna from Cape Town, where they’d rented a small flat in a suburb near the school where Theron got his first teaching job after university. The flat had been an improvement on the caravan they’d lived in for the first three months of their marriage, but they were thinking of starting a family and the city wasn’t where they wanted to raise their children.
Looking for a quieter life, Theron applied for posts at schools in two very different parts of the country. One was in Upington, a farming community in the arid north-west of South Africa that was known for its exceptionally hot summers and frosty winters. The other was in Knysna, the pretty coastal town known mainly for its timber and furniture industry.
When both applications were successful, Theron, a keen fisherman and woodworker, chose Knysna.
Soon after Theron accepted the position, Owéna received a phone call. Unsurprisingly for a town as small as Knysna, word had got out that the new biology teacher’s wife was a trained social worker. And the Knysna Child and Family Welfare Society was in desperate need of one.
Owéna was torn at first. She did need a job, but her only experience since graduating from Stellenbosch University had been working with the aged in care homes, where she organised social groups and concerts to keep their minds active. It was gentle work and although it was always sad to see one of the old dears pass away, there was the consolation of knowing they had all lived long and usually full lives.
Working with children was a very different job, and one for which Owéna felt extremely under-qualified. Would she be able to cope with seeing a child who’d been abused or neglected? Or taking a child away from his parents to put him in foster care?
Adding to her crisis of confidence was the job title: senior social worker. The society already had two social workers who were far more experienced than Owéna, especially when it came to dealing with children and families. Yet she was offered the senior position – with the higher salary that came with it – only because, she suspected, she was white and they were coloured, or mixed-race.
Owéna didn’t know much about politics. She’d been born in 1944 to a conservative Afrikaans family who, like most Afrikaners, respected the government’s authority and accepted its decisions unquestioningly – even when, from 1948, that government was the National Party with its separatist ideals.
Owéna’s upbringing wasn’t a particularly privileged one, not by white South African standards. Her father was a station-master for the national railways, a job that hardly paid a handsome wage, and her mother was a housewife who’d married in a simple sundress because her family couldn’t afford a wedding gown.
Owéna was just four years old when the National Party came into power and introduced apartheid. So she didn’t find it strange that there was a separate queue at the post office for black and coloured people. It was just the way it had always been. She didn’t even notice the separate counters in butchers’ shops, where the prime cuts were displayed behind glass at the whites-only counter, while black and coloured customers had to take whatever sinewy off-cuts they got. And when Owéna used a public toilet, she never stopped to ask why she could only go through the door euphemistically marked ‘Europeans only’ when she had never been to Europe.
Like most South Africans, Owéna had never travelled anywhere beyond the borders of her country. It was just too expensive, and she had no real desire to see the rest of the world.
Despite her blinkered view on the world around her, Owéna still felt uncomfortable at the idea