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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
The Knysna library is a dead end for that period, too. When the library was renovated, boxes full of archive copies of the Knysna-Plett Herald, the local newspaper for Knysna and neighbouring Plettenberg Bay, were accidentally thrown away. A call to the newspaper’s office brings the frustrating news that their copies had been destroyed in a basement flood during a particularly bad spell of rain.
Fortunately, Knysna’s Director of Planning and Development, Lauren Waring, knows of one other place I can look: the Land Claims Commission in George. She worked there for years.
Never having heard of the Land Claims Commission, I look it up. Google takes me to the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights. Established in 1994, after the ANC won South Africa’s first democratic election by a landslide, the Commission was part of the newly elected government’s plan to right the wrongs of apartheid. Specifically, its aim was to settle disputes over land where the original owners and occupiers had been forced to leave their homes under the Group Areas Act. Tens of thousands of people came forward to stake their claims on land that had been taken from them and their families. Around five hundred of those claims came from Knysna.
According to Lauren Waring, the records of the forced removals in Knysna were particularly detailed compared with most other places. And copies of all those records, including the ones that have since been archived by the municipality, should still be available in George.
I call ahead, name-dropping Lauren, and am invited to drop by the next day.
When I get to the Commission’s office, all the information I’m after is waiting for me in two lever-arch files. I spend my morning in George reading the files, looking in particular for any information about the forced removal of Knysna’s black people. But there’s disappointingly little documentary evidence that it ever happened. Whenever black people were moved, it seems they were given verbal notice at best, leaving no proof of what actually happened. For the coloured community, on the other hand, there’s a long and detailed paper trail.
I’m soon drawn into the coloured people’s story and am amazed at how ‘official’ it all was. In the files, I find the Land Claims Commission’s report on the Knysna area with all the evidence to support it. There’s a memorandum from a committee formed by the coloured community as far back as 1959, objecting to the conditions in the proposed new coloured group area. From 1970, there are copies of notices given to people who were asked to leave the newly declared white areas. And the report quotes one government proclamation after another as land in Knysna was divided up between white, coloured and black.
Then there are the letters, many of them painfully polite pleas from respectable family men to the local authorities, asking for more time to move to the coloured area so they could get enough money together to build their own homes.
If my idea of forced removals was that they were met with anger and resistance, the reality, it seems – for the coloured people, at least – was far more compliant and resigned.
When Hornlee was being built on the eastern outskirts of Knysna, Owéna was working on the opposite side of town in an outlying area called Rheenendal. There she looked after the welfare of a small coloured community, mainly labourers on the surrounding farms and timber plantations.
Situated outside the municipal boundaries of Knysna, Rheenendal was never declared white under the Group Areas Act – and so the coloured families in the area could stay in their homes, many of them living on their white employers’ farms.
Owéna’s work saw her visiting families and running activities for pre-school children and the elderly. Occasionally she had to deal with a case of alcohol or child abuse, the two often going hand in hand. But generally the people of Rheenendal were happy, and Owéna found her new job less challenging than she’d feared.
On the other side of town, however, her coloured colleagues knew there were much more challenging times ahead.
In 1970, many of Knysna’s coloured families lived in Salt River, a quiet riverside area where over three hundred coloured families and a handful of black families hired plots of various sizes from the Anglican Church, which owned the land. The people lived in houses that in many cases had been built by their parents or their grandparents before them, and would be passed on to their children when they died.
Some of the houses were built from bricks, others from wood and iron. But all of them were big family homes with ample space for mothers to grow vegetables, fathers to keep cattle and children to play.
The families lived simple lives in Salt River, but it was home. Everything they needed was right there, including a church and a few small schools.
One of those schools was started by a man named Percy Mdala, a teacher so adamant that children should get a decent education that he went from door to door convincing parents of the fact. When it rained and the children complained they couldn’t get to school across the swollen river, Mr Mdala went to the river himself, rolled up his trousers and carried the children over one by one.
Although Knysna itself was mainly white, a scattering of coloured families lived there too, mainly schoolteachers, headmasters and shopkeepers.
Wherever they lived, in August 1970 each coloured family in the Knysna area was given a notice confirming what they had known for a while was coming, but hoped never would.
Headed ‘Notice to Terminate Occupation in a Group Area’, it came from the Department of Community Development, the government department dealing with housing for the coloured people of South Africa.
At the top of the page was the South African crest with its antelope and its Afrikaner ox wagon, under which it was declared in English, Afrikaans and no uncertain terms that the area the recipient lived in had been ‘declared for occupation by members of the White group’. As the coloured people were not members of the ‘White group’, it would become illegal for them to live on the land their home was on from a certain date.
For the people of Salt River, that date was October 1971.
In town, the coloured home-owners were also given notice to move. The government arranged for their homes to be valued and the families received whatever amount the valuators decided on, with no room for negotiation.
By the specified dates, the people had to move to the township. There they would be given new homes as part of a low-cost housing scheme, unless they could afford to buy their own land and build on it at their own expense.
Owéna’s colleagues were some of the fortunate ones who could afford to build large family homes in the higher-lying parts of the township that overlooked the Knysna Lagoon.
But on the other side of the hill, rows upon rows of low-cost houses were being built in a damp basin on uneven ground.
Hornlee, or ‘Bigai’ as it was originally known, had first been proclaimed Knysna’s official coloured area more than ten years before.
Almost immediately, the coloured people voiced their concern.
The area was far too small for the twelve thousand people who would have to move there, they said. The topography would make building extremely difficult. The damp could make the area a breeding ground for tuberculosis, already a serious problem in their community. And it was far away from town, where most of the men and women worked.
They would only accept the new township if it were spread over a wider area, they said.
The authorities took note of the request and when the township was finally built, they allocated some extra land to allow for future expansion. That included a piece of land originally belonging to a man called Thomas Horn, and Bigai became Hornlee.
When