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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
Those who had been able to buy their own land in the township had other issues. Having paid for their plots, many of them now couldn’t afford to build a house on it.
Families who couldn’t move for the time being had to get special permits to stay in their current homes, as once the areas were officially white, the only coloured people who were legally allowed to be there were live-in housemaids. Those maids had to stay in servants’ quarters, usually a small room with its own bathroom, separate from their employer’s main house.
Under strict apartheid legislation, housemaids’ families were not allowed to stay with them in the servants’ quarters. But not everyone complied with the rules. One white man in Knysna allowed his live-in maid’s husband to stay with her. A neighbour took exception and wrote to the authorities to complain, saying it was ‘like a non-white township’ next door. Despite the white employer’s protests and appeals, his maid’s husband was eventually evicted.
Like many other men in the same position, the husband would have had to put his name down for a house in Bigai. And when those men, along with the rest of the coloured community, finally started moving into their new homes, Owéna’s colleagues had their hands full.
The low-cost houses were a fraction of the size of the homes the families had left behind. On the upside, there was hot running water and electricity. Even the bucket toilets were a step up from the ‘long-drops’ most of them were used to, as the buckets were emptied and the waste removed by the municipality each night.
But the floors of the houses were bare cement and there were no inside doors. The soil quality was poor and the ground was uneven so that water came in under the front doors when it rained. Houses were packed in alongside each other with virtually no land in between.
Next-door neighbours could hear every word of every domestic argument and every sob of every screaming child.
Whereas many families had previously managed to live off their land, eating and selling their own vegetables and keeping livestock for milk, butter and meat, they now had no space for vegetable gardens or cattle. And having to pay rent and rates for services meant people had money problems that they’d never known before.
The houses were so small that many parents had to sleep in the same room as their children. As a result, the children saw and heard things that normally would have happened behind closed doors. Marriages were put under strain, husbands started drinking, and children refused to go to school.
While Owéna’s colleagues dealt with those issues, she looked after her coloured community in Rheenendal where, unaffected by the Group Areas Act, people continued to live their lives as before.
She heard stories from her colleagues about the difficulties in the township, but the reality didn’t sink in. Not until a work trip with her colleagues finally opened her eyes to the other side of apartheid South Africa.
It was a national conference that took Owéna and two of her coloured colleagues to Port Elizabeth, South Africa’s self-styled ‘friendly city’.
As the event ran over two days, they were spending the night in a business hotel; nothing too fancy for the cash-strapped Child Welfare.
Owéna and her colleagues were given adjacent rooms on the third floor. Owéna thought nothing of it, but her colleagues knew this arrangement was the exception rather than the rule. The only reason they were even allowed to stay in the same hotel – never mind on the same floor – was because that particular hotel had a special ‘international licence’ that allowed it to admit people of different races.
That evening, the three social workers went out to find a place to eat. Walking along the beachfront, they spotted a cosy-looking Italian restaurant with sea views.
Owéna walked towards the open front door, but her colleagues didn’t follow. They couldn’t, they said. It was a white restaurant.
Owéna couldn’t believe what she was hearing. With her white upbringing and her white education and her white friends, she had never realised the extent of the discrimination against coloured people. If there were never any brown faces in the restaurants she went to, she’d assumed it was because coloured people chose not to go there.
Looking through the window of that restaurant in Port Elizabeth, she realised for the first time that choice had nothing to do with it.
She carried on walking with her colleagues until eventually they found a restaurant where they could all eat together: a curry house run by Indians, far away from the beach.
If there’s anyone who’ll tell me a vivid story of life as a coloured person in South Africa, it’s my mother’s boss, Vivien Paremoer.
I drive to her and my mother’s office at Epilepsy South Africa’s ‘residential care facility’ in Knysna; a home where people with epilepsy and other disabilities are given care around the clock.
The home is at the top of a hill, where it’s flanked by a black township on the one side and the local prison on the other. The residents, like their neighbours in the township and the prison, have a spectacular view of the Knysna Lagoon.
I’ve always felt slightly uncomfortable coming up here, and ashamed because of it. The residents are all adults, but many of them have the mental age of children and the emotional neediness that goes with it. I never know quite how to deal with them.
There’s a big security gate that’s looking worse for wear. I have to lean out of my car window to push an intercom button on a rickety post and announce my arrival to a voice so scratchy I can barely hear it.
The gate slides open.
I find Vivien in her office, where I greet her with a ‘Hallo, Tannie Vivien.’
Like all Afrikaans children, I was taught to call adults Tannie (auntie) and Oom (uncle) out of respect, whether they were related to me or not. Even now that I’m in my thirties, Vivien will always be Tannie to me.
Vivien and my mother first worked together years ago at Child Welfare, where they were both social workers. It was my mother who talked Vivien into taking the job as branch director at Epilepsy South Africa, when what Vivien actually wanted to do was retire.
To say thank-you for seeing me, I give Vivien a packet of rusks from a batch I baked yesterday. A type of South African biscuit, rusks are much like Italian biscotti: long, dry fingers designed for dunking in coffee or tea. I’ve packed them in neat rows in a clear plastic bag that I’ve tied with red wool.
‘Just like your mother,’ says Vivien.
Although she and my mother go back as far as I can remember, I don’t actually know much about Vivien at all. It’s only in the last week that I found out her family has always lived in Knysna, even before Hornlee was built. I’ve also found out that her family was one of those who were removed from their homes because of the Group Areas Act.
That’s the story I’m here for.
I ask Vivien about growing up in Knysna and she soon puts me right. She didn’t spend much of her childhood here, she says. Her parents, both teachers, sent her and her sister away to Cape Town when she was five years old.
It was the 1960s and Vivien’s parents were teaching at one of Knysna’s small farm schools – back then, the only places for the local coloured and black children to go if they wanted any kind of education in Knysna. The classes were big and the children in Sub A and Sub B – now grade one and grade two – were all together in one class with just one teacher.
Vivien’s parents, wanting a better education for their daughters, sent the two