Nostalgia is felt most sharply at times such as now when we mark the 50th commemoration of forced removals from District Six ,writes Michael Weeder.
Nostalgia, the longing for that which we can visit only in the grand palaces of memory, is felt most sharply at times such as now when we mark the 50th commemoration of forced removals from District Six.
During the time between the cessation of British colonial rule, its evil progeny, slavery, and the advent of legislated apartheid rule, black Capetonians had settled into vibrant and fairly stable communities. Their lives, graced by the sylvan orchards and vineyards of Constantia and the birdsong of Newlands Forest, were privileged with breathtaking vistas of Table Bay at day break, a heaven of orange-hued sunrises over the distant Hottentots Holland Mountains and full, yellow moons in the indigo-dark around Karbonkelberg.
All this was viewed from the doorways of their cottages on the slopes of Signal Hill or Devil’s Peak or Camps Bay. On summer days they walked along cobbled lanes from their homes on Loader Street and Red Hill, or the heights of Hangberg, rowing off in their fishing-boats from Klein Sint Helena Baai or Long Beach in Simon’s Town or Hout Bay.
The legacy of the Group Areas Act has had unimaginable consequences. An emerging black middle class had been evicted from property they owned or inherited long before formal apartheid was implemented.
People who were born and raised in communities with neighbourly quirks, irritations and sustenance were jettisoned to bleak, wind-swept government-built townships to rebuild their lives among strangers. Families fell apart. High school education was disrupted as many were not able to travel into the city to attend their old schools such as Harold Cressy and Trafalgar High.
There were those who never recovered from the statutory violence of “The Group”. They slumped into the amnesia engendered by the social death of slavery and became immersed in a nihilistic culture born of chaos.
Peter Clark, the Simon’s Town- born writer and artist, resolved the tension of restitutive return by engaging the humanity of the beneficiary of his loss:
Flat 19, Block 5, Waterfall Road, Simonstown.
No, he said, when asked would he like to move back to where he had lived in Simonstown.
He sat. Quiet. Smiling from heart to eye; from a memory of narrow lanes.
The sound of courting laughter on Jubilee Square.
Of sea-shells on the graves of the old ones freed from slave-shackled ships, somewhere beyond the shores of another Africa that had blessed him with a beauty, dark and pensive like moonlight on the path to Miller Beach.
The wild-flowered hills of a distant spring.
No, Ocean View is home now.
But I would like to know of the people who live there now there on Waterfall Road:
I would like to know if they are happy.
The past will always be a better place when the present fails to rebuild the ruins of our history on foundations of love and justice.
* The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
**The Very Rev Michael Weeder is the current Dean of St George's Cathedral
Weekend Argus