Forced removals destroyed communities

Roots covered in dust

Forced removals destroyed individuals and communities, and account for the physical and emotional distance between South Africans today, writes Cornelius Thomas

Dis geskrywe en dis gesign, en dis 'n must / hie sal djy disappear in a cloud of dust. -- poet and playwright Adam Small

THE bitter taste of removals lingers long, and it extends backwards as well as forwards. The other day the Daily Dispatch reported that, after 20 years, those who had been evicted from the East Bank in East London have neither been compensated for their losses nor had land allocated to them.

Their eviction and dispersal was, wrote researcher Leslie Bank, "a slow and painful process (from 1962) that eventually (in 1980) resulted in the relocation of 67000 people".

East Bankers were not alone in their pain.

The East Bank removal was part of the apartheid state's grand scheme of social engineering. The DF Malan government passed the Group Areas Act, No 41 of 1950, which deigned to settle each population group in its own area.

Allan Boesak said in 1983 (when speaking to teachers in West End, Port Elizabeth), that this policy attempted a washing-powder solution to South Africa's "racial" problems: it would get rid of all the black spots, the coloureds would come out more colourful, and the whites would be whiter.

The government thus embarked on a policy of ridding white South Africa of black spots and stains (coloureds).

Forced removals took place all over South Africa, from Cato Manor in Durban to Goodwood in Cape Town. While no one removal can be said to have been more traumatic than another, a few examples will suffice to illustrate what happened to a significant number of South Africans.

IN 1933, Johannesburg town council declared the city a white area. Propped up by the national Slum Act (1934), the council started in 1935 to evict black people from the crowded "yards" of Doornfontein, destroying the shacks so that the blacks who had lived there could not return.

They crowded into Sophiatown, which had developed on a farm bought by Herman Tobiansky in 1897.

He intended it as a freehold suburb for whites and later coloureds but the town council opened a sewerage pit nearby and also developed Western Native Township adjacent to it. Many whites were deterred from buying property there.

Tobiansky also sold to blacks. In 1912, the town council reported: "In Sophiatown ... we have a mixed population of black and white owners."

The town grew steadily, with blacks moving in and whites moving out to Vrededorp, Brixton and Mayfair in a pattern of ''ghetto-isation'' and ''suburbanisation''.

By the early 1950s, blacks owned two-thirds of properties in Sophiatown. They used their yards to accommodate other blacks in make-shift shanties and lean-to shacks.

Sophiatown was well known for its tsotsis and Florscheim-shoed gangsters. It was here that Henry "Mr Drum" Nxumalo was killed in what is today still an unsolved homicide. Then there was the American machismo that earned the town the name Chicago of South Africa.

But the township boasted a concentration of people and black culture that gave it a ''jiveliness''.

In the 1950s, Sophiatown experienced a flowering of music and literature. Marabi music (a combo of spiritual, rag, vastrap, and rural harmonies) of the Doornfontein yards faded in the 1940s, but not before it had inspired the dancers, literati, musicians, journalists and street folk of this town into African jazz and jive, novels, critical essays, and creative dance styles.

The town also served as the staging platform for Jonas Gwanga, Hugh Masekela and Kippie Moeketsie (the sound was mbaqanga) and Todd Matshikiza, Nathan Mdledle and Miriam Makeba (the musical was King Kong). And then there were the writers: Eskia Mphahlele, Bloke Modisane, Can Themba and Nat Nakasa.

Notwithstanding the realities of freehold, talent and social cohesion, the apartheid planners decided that Sophiatown should go. In 1954, the Native Resettlement Act launched the process of black-spot removals -- in this case to relocate them to the South Western Townships.

The property owners protested, but to no avail. While they braced themselves for the officially announced day of removal -- February 12, 1955 -- government trucks roared into the town at 5.30am on February 10. The drivers were backed by a police force of 2000 policemen toting rifles and machine-guns.

With the people loading their own belongings at gunpoint, it took less than three hours to move the first 110 families to Meadowlands (now part of Soweto). Over the next three years, other families followed while bulldozers razed the buildings around them. Before long the place looked like a bombscape.

These people had not only been swindled out of their property but had also been robbed of community spirit and their own place for the flowering of their talent.

The late veteran anti-apartheid Anglican clergyman, Father Trevor Huddleston, said that South Africa had lost "not only a place but an ideal".

A white suburb was developed on the location. The government called it Triomf (Triumph).

Afew years later, the Minister of Community Development, referring to a colourful collage clinging to the slopes of Cape Town's Devil's Peak, asked: "Why should coloured people live here? They don't appreciate the view. The area should be given to whites who appreciate the view."

Soon Parliament repealed the 1957 version of the Group Areas Act and replaced it with No. 36 of 1966. It was signed and it was a must, District Six had to disappear in a cloud of dust.

Known as District 12 until 1867 when it got the name District Six (Kanaladorp), it housed from the outset a spectrum of people from ebony black to ivory white.

"You are now entering Fairyland," the graffiti greeted every visitor to the District.

Over time the District became a recognisably working-class belt stretching several kilometres from the Castle near the centre of Cape Town to the suburb of Observatory, although many coloureds, Cape Malays, Jews and Indians of the professional and business classes remained there.

There were brothels and shebeens too, and gentleman skollies who never robbed women and children. When they robbed men, they often gave them change for busfare.

District Six enjoyed its perch. Like Sophiatown, it spawned its own birth of talent and excellence. Writers like Alex La Guma and Richard Rive, politicians Cissy Gool, Benny Kies and IB Tabata, musicians like Abdullah Ibrahim, the Eoan group, dancers and ballerinas flourished.

Alas, starting in 1966, the bulldozers came and razed District Six. Year after year, they rumbled while memories and dreams expired in billows of dust.

There was a stubbornness about District Six, though. In 1976, businesses along Hanover Street, the Champs Elysee of the good ol' Cape, still traded. The Avalon bioscope still called patrons from the Cape Flats. Many churches, the Silvertree Créche and houses on Horstley Street remained. By 1979, though, the District had become South Africa's Hiroshima.

Some 8566 families had been evicted and spilled onto the Cape Flats by then, with 1910 families still to go. A year later in 1980 only the bergies, hobos and flower children remained.

Abdullah Ibrahim captured the passion and pain of the District Six-Cape Flats saga. He left South Africa for self-exile in 1962. When he returned in 1969, he saw first-hand the razing of District Six and the dreariness to which its people had been consigned. With the assistance of Kippie Moeketsie, he produced the jazz epic, Manenberg.

No jazz club -- from Kippie's International Jazz in Johannesburg to CD's Jazz Fusion Café in East London -- can afford not to play it. It is, after all, South Africa's second anthem.

The evicted were dispersed onto the wind-swept and easily deluged Cape Flats. In a mockery of their powerlessness, the city called one township Hanover Park, another Manenberg.

A coloured municipal worker was tasked to dump the District Six street name plates at the local "tip". He took the plates home and stored them in the basement. Years later he gave them to the District Six Museum on Buitenkant Street.

The erstwhile responsible prime ministers and ministers should visit the museum. It has been rumoured that those name plates can talk.

What Adullah saw in the late 60s drove him back into exile. He rejoined Hugh Masekela, Hotep Galeta, Miriam Makeba and Jonas Gwanga to put the plight of black South Africans on the world agenda.

Their voices were drowned by the self-congratulations of Minister Marais Steyn who, speaking in the Senate in 1979, said the removals policy was "one of the greatest successes of the Nationalist Party".

THE uncounted thousands of Sophiatown and the 55000 of District Six were not the only people to be forcibly removed. In the winter of 1968, the city fathers and a flood conspired to spirit 8000 coloured people out of Port Elizabeth's South End. The suburb was razed.

North End, East London, was different.

In September 1965 the Minister of Community Development announced that his department was "not satisfied with the North End situation". He considered it a slum and a festering sore where racial intermingling took place.

Soon North End was earmarked for white residency, light industries and an Indian market.

One August afternoon in 1966, while the big boys were playing street soccer, and the younger Antonio Johnnys and Chris Bridges were playing cops and robbers in Danes Lane, eviction notices were served on the first 77 families.

Between 1967 and 1971, a few score of coloured and Indian families were evicted and resettled in Parkside and Braelyn respectively.

Ronnie (not his real name) in a 1980 Daily Dispatch interview said: "They didn't want to see the beautiful society we had here continue, because it was a flaw in their apartheid system."

As the people were evicted over the next few years, some as far as Mdantsane, demolition squads moved in and turned playgrounds into wastelands. Between 1975 and 1984, North End assumed the aspect of an industrial and warehousing district.

On a bright September day in 1991, the 70-year-old stately house of Kemal Casojee was demolished. As he walked about the neighbourhood, light industrial structures vied with rubble and knee-high weeds, and the sounds of soccer and tennis-playing children had long since died.

By the end of 1979, some 555742 South Africans in all had been forcibly removed, with 132042 still to go.

The removals from North End were not the largest in South African history, but this saga dragged on the longest.

Ironically, while other towns were obliterated, North End showed a remarkable physical staying power. Religious establishments like the Immaculate Conception Catholic church remained. Then there is North End Stadium, scene of many Easter soccer tournaments. Through institutions like these, former North Enders maintained a connectedness with their former place of abode.

Moreover, the North End cultural committee is presently preparing a North End millennium play as well as a book on this nonracial hub that once bustled cheek-by-jowl with the East London city centre.

MENTION must be made of other removals also. In Lakeview, Port Elizabeth, coloureds like Jack Frolick, family and friends, were moved out of their fine council houses so that whites could move in. The evicted had to make do with sub-economic houses. Many coloureds were evicted from their double-storey houses in central Port Elizabeth and from fine cottages in Mowbray, Cape Town.

In Kuils River near Cape Town, the municipality forced out Ashley Mac, family and friends, to make way for white families. Incidentally, Mac was Macsweeny before, but because the surname sounded too "European", he was forced to change it.

In Sidwell, Port Elizabeth, Stanley Erasmus lived in a huge and splendid house with his wife Gwen and their kids -- Garth, Beverly and Linston. In 1966, they had to move out so whites could move in.

The late Stanley's son, Garth, related that the white family -- "a poor white family" -- for whom their home was earmarked, was so impatient that they moved into one of the outbuildings.

Over the next few months they breathed on Stanley, waiting like vultures for the Erasmus family to move out.

Garth, now a self-employed artist in Cape Town, couldn't recall his parents' feelings. He remembered, though, how the neighbourhood swelled with strange white people, how his friends had all moved out to coloured areas, and how he could not wait to get away. "It was unbearable," he said in a recent telephone conversation.

Uncounted thousands of people of colour were removed in this manner. Their history has been shrouded in the bulldozer dust at Sophiatown and District Six.

They still wait patiently for recognition of their stories.

ADaily Dispatch reader observed the other day that nobody has been called to account for the depression that drove people like Nat Nakasa, Ingrid Jonker and Ossie Oosthuizen over the precipice of despair.

This observation is even truer for the gross human rights violation of forced removals.

These removals served an ideology that refused to admit the reality that there is only one race, the human race. It set South Africa back half a century in terms of the nonracial goodwill and competition, understanding and tolerance that such pockets produced.

Today South Africa's children have to find each other in tentative and suspicious outreaches, in ignorance and fear, and in schools far from their various separated communities.