For The People
Thankfully, some things haven’t changed. After thirty-nine years in Knysna, my parents still live on the same street in the same house where I grew up. As we turn into the driveway, I notice that my parents – unlike my aunt and uncle in George or, indeed, most of my parents’ neighbours – still don’t have an electric gate or even a proper fence. I’m glad they feel safe enough not to cage themselves in like canned lions, but at the same time, it makes me uneasy. Crime has turned violent, even in Knysna. People don’t just get burgled any more, they get tied up, knifed, assaulted, raped.
I ask my parents whether it’s a good idea leaving the house so open.
‘Oh, Annie,’ says my mother. ‘What difference does it make?’
She tells me about a friend of hers who lives not far from here who was burgled recently. The friend was assaulted at knifepoint by one burglar while another emptied out her safe. ‘And she had a big gate and a dog,’ my mother says.
They’re after laptops and jewellery these days, she tells me. Gold, especially.
‘That’s why I don’t go around wearing fancy rings and things,’ she says, tugging at the ceramic beads around her neck. ‘Let’s face it, if they break into our house they’d be very disappointed.’ She laughs. I don’t. My hand tightens around the straps of my laptop bag.
My parents have never been materialistic. ‘Money is nice, but it’s not essential,’ is my mother’s motto. So although the house is big – five comfortable bedrooms over three floors and a pool in the back garden – it’s well lived-in, crammed full of trinkets and pictures and mementoes that have no real value beyond the sentimental.
Even the TV would be unlikely to appeal to a would-be burglar, being so old it doesn’t have a remote control. Not that it’s ever stopped my father changing channels or adjusting the volume from his armchair – ever inventive, he uses a metre-long dowel and some precision aiming to adjust the manual buttons and slide controls.
When I walk into the house, I feel the warm familiarity of home.
Greeting me in the kitchen is a rusty old fridge that used to be my grandmother’s. It’s covered in pictures and newspaper cuttings, even more than I remember. Now, alongside a photo of my grandfather in hospital before he died, there are pictures from my and my two brothers’ weddings in Knysna, London and Barcelona. Next to a faded, laminated poster of a pig (‘Those who indulge, bulge’) that’s been there for as long as I can remember, there’s a postcard of Picasso’s Weeping Woman that I sent my mother from Paris. And next to a fridge magnet of an Irish blessing is another carrying a bible verse: ‘Be strong. Be courageous.’
One new addition to the fridge gallery that catches my eye is a newspaper clipping. It’s a photo of a black man in a wheelchair, his arm and leg in plaster casts. He’s being pushed along by another black man on crutches, both his arms and one leg also in plaster.
Everywhere I look in the house, there are memories. In the dining room, the old upright Otto Bach piano on which I learned to play is now covered in candles, many of them gifts from family and friends around the world. My mother insists on burning those candles, all of them, when she and my father have guests over for dinner, and there are multicoloured dribbles and drops of wax all over the piano lid.
The wall opposite is a shrine to times gone by. Antique keys, medals, fob watches and hair curlers are stuck onto the wall with putty that has hardened into a cement-like bond after thirty-odd years. An old cast-iron meat grinder is stuffed full of porcupine quills and attached to a sturdy old cashier’s till. A wiry spectacle frame that has long since lost its lenses brings back memories of school plays.
But it’s a simply framed cheque that takes pride of place at the top of the wall: a cheque for one hundred and three rand, made out to ‘Nobantu’ and dated 15 October 1984.
On a white border around the cheque are two headings, ‘Vulindlela’ and ‘Thembalethu’, in my mother’s handwriting. Under each heading are the committee members’ signatures.
Some of the signatures are spidery, like my grandmother’s handwriting in the years before she died. Some are elegant and considered, others are childlike and laboured. One Thembalethu committee member started signing under the Vulindlela heading, realised her mistake halfway through her first name, scratched it out and started again. But they’re all there. All twenty-two women. All four men.
Elsewhere on the wall, there are more recent acknowledgements of my mother’s work. A Certificate of Merit from the Rotary Club of Knysna thanks her for ‘outstanding and invaluable services rendered in the community’. On another certificate, the Knysna Municipality names her a ‘Woman of Worth’.
But while those newer accolades are squeezed in between the bits of junk on the wall, the cheque to Nobantu from 1984 hangs above them all.
Chapter 2
Back to my childhood
My parents have given me the option of sleeping in the garden flat, which has a separate entrance from the main house. Whenever my brothers and I are here at the same time, there’s a mock-debate over who’ll get to stay in the flat, the most private and only en-suite room at my parents’ house. All three of us know that my oldest brother and his wife will always be first in line and I, as the youngest, will always be last. This time I’m here alone, giving me first dibs on the prize room.
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.
Chapter 3
1970
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 of going into a new job above two colleagues based purely on the colour of her skin. But, needing to work, she accepted the job.
She spent her first day in Knysna in bed with a migraine.
If Owéna had worried that the coloured social workers would hold a grudge against her, she needn’t have. When she turned up for her first day at the Knysna Child and Family Welfare Society – or ‘Child Welfare’, as the locals called it – her new colleagues couldn’t have been friendlier or more welcoming.
Good humour was necessary in their line of work. Child Welfare dealt with cases ranging from child abuse and neglect to alcoholism and domestic violence. Clients came mainly from Knysna’s sizeable coloured community, with the occasional case from the few black families who lived among the coloured. White families’ welfare, on the other hand, was seen to by a Christian organisation in town.
While Owéna was working a six-day week at Child Welfare, Theron was teaching in the mornings and working on the house in his spare time. He had found a coloured bricklayer and two black labourers to do most of the building work, leaving him to make things like the window frames and staircases where he could put his woodworking skills to good use.
With no workshop or equipment at the building site, Theron did most of the woodwork at the boarding house where he made the window frames by hand, cutting the joints with the minute precision he’d mastered under the microscope in biology class.
The people of Knysna soon got used to the sight of the new teacher and his social worker wife driving through town with their window frames, some three metres long, tied to the roof of their Borgward station wagon.
At the building site, Owéna helped as best she could at the weekends, happily holding this here and hammering that there as instructed by Theron. The house was coming along nicely, and she allowed herself to daydream of the family they would raise there.
Little did she know that a much bigger development was under construction not far from theirs. To the east of Knysna, just on the other side of a hill, new roads were being scraped, water pipes were being laid, and one identical house after the other was being built.
Knysna’s first township was underway.
Chapter 4
Digging
Knysna has been racially segregated for as long as I remember. Growing up in the 1980s, I lived in a white neighbourhood, went to a white school, ate in white restaurants and swam in a white sea. The coloured children had their own homes and schools in Hornlee, a formal township where all the coloured people lived. The black children, on the other hand, stayed in the various squatter camps on the other side of the hill where they were out of sight of most white people.
The squatter camps or shanty towns were informal settlements where people lived in self-built shacks. Townships, on the other hand, were those areas especially built for black or coloured people (never mixed) by the government. Townships, having been planned and built from scratch, had at least some services like water, electricity and sewage. Squatter camps didn’t.
As a child born into apartheid South Africa, I didn’t find any of that strange. It was just the way it was. What I do find strange is that now, fifteen years after the first democratic election and the abolishment of the Group Areas Act, most of Knysna’s coloured people still live in Hornlee. And most black people are still in the squatter camps.
The circumstances up there are considerably better these days, as most of the squatter camps are being upgraded to better-serviced townships, and small brick houses are replacing the shacks. But I still thought there’d be more integration now that the racial divide is no longer law. I don’t know what I was expecting; maybe some black people living on my parents’ street, or a friendly coloured family popping over from next door for tea. But my parents’ neighbours are as white as they’ve always been. The only real difference is that their walls are higher and their fences spikier than before.
My mother says it is starting to happen, the integration. Apparently there are one or two black families living in a block of flats in their neighbourhood. The house prices are the problem, says my mother. Most black people can’t afford to buy property in Knysna. In fact, most white people can’t afford to buy here any more.
I don’t know anything about Knysna’s development, now or then, so I start asking questions. When was Hornlee built? Where did the first black people live? And why are the townships where they are? But my mother doesn’t know all the answers, and nor does my father.
The obvious place to start looking for answers is the Knysna Municipality, the local authority for the Knysna area. If there are any records of how and when the coloured and black townships were developed, they’ll be there.
It doesn’t come as a surprise that the municipality’s archive team know who my parents are. Most people in Knysna do – it’s the result of my father having been a teacher at what used to be the only white school in town, and my mother’s constant fundraising and campaigning efforts for Epilepsy South Africa.
It helps to open doors – in this case the heavy steel door to a walk-in safe containing years’ worth of town council meeting minutes and correspondence meticulously filed, indexed and bound in thick hardback volumes. Frustratingly, they only date back to 1980 – ten years after my parents first moved to Knysna. Anything older, I’m told, has been archived in Cape Town.
Even so, the volumes from 1980 onwards make up thousands of pages.
I’m not allowed to take away any of the records, so for three days I turn up when the municipality offices open and stay there until they close, a packed lunch of breakfast bars, fruit and sandwiches from my mother keeping me going so I don’t even have to break to eat.
On the first day, I’m shown to a desk just outside the safe where I pile up the relevant volumes and start trawling through almost three decades of bureaucracy and red tape.
The archives are astonishingly thorough and detailed, and I have to stop myself squealing when I realise they include several letters from my mother to the town council in the 1980s. My mother hasn’t kept anything like that herself.
On my second day at the municipality, I hear a commotion outside. It’s the unmistakable sound of toyi-toying, the stomping South African protest dance. A crowd is singing and chanting, their feet thudding in unison. Around me, in the safety of the municipal building, people appear from their offices to watch through the windows. I join them, peering through a gap between two vertical blinds.
The crowd outside the building is about two hundred strong. Some people are carrying placards made from bits of corrugated cardboard torn from boxes, with messages scrawled on them in marker pen. It’s not an unfamiliar sight – I remember similar protests from years ago, especially in the run-up to Nelson Mandela’s release. But the messages are different now. ‘We need houses’ says one of the signs. ‘We vote for 15 years. Now is enough.’ ‘The people shall govern.’ One placard says ‘Defy’ on the back. It’s not a bold protest statement. It’s the name of the brand of oven that came in the original cardboard box.
A man I can’t see starts shouting something over a megaphone, but from where I’m standing all I hear is a monotonous bark. Occasionally the crowd responds with whistles and cheers. Someone blows a vuvuzela.
I know from the news on TV that protests like these are going on all around the country. It seems to be an orchestrated attempt by the opposition to fire up the masses in communal criticism of the ANC government.
Although the protest is noisy, it’s peaceful and the people around me soon lose interest and go back to their work. I stay for a little while longer, then I do the same.
Although the municipality’s records prove invaluable for information about Knysna’s squatter camps and townships after 1980, I’m still missing the information about how they came into existence some ten years before.
I decide against driving to Cape Town to search the archives. It’s six hundred kilometres away and, even if I could get into the archives, I would have to request specific information from specific dates. With only a vague sense of chronology and no idea of what information the archives might hold, it seems a fruitless journey to make.
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.