'Seaforth residents were removed 15 years before District Six'

Rodney Adams, 72, stands where his wood and iron house once stood. Left, a much younger Adams poses in front of the house, which now forms part of a school. Picture: Tracey Adams

Rodney Adams, 72, stands where his wood and iron house once stood. Left, a much younger Adams poses in front of the house, which now forms part of a school. Picture: Tracey Adams

Published Feb 23, 2017

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Cape Town – For 61 years, a Heathfield artisan has been wrestling with the pain of coming home from primary school and finding that his Seaforth, Simon’s Town home had been bulldozed and his family forcefully removed.

Rodney Adams, 72, said he was born and raised in the wood and iron house in Harrington Road, Seaforth Township – a place where freed slaves had been given homes in the 1800s.

“One afternoon in 1956, I was 12 years old and after school I did gardening at a teacher’s home, to earn pocket money. At 6 o’clock I returned to my home and was greeted by a terrible sight."

“The area where my home and about eight other houses had been standing was completely flattened, demolished by bulldozers. I just stood there, when my aunt, who had been sitting waiting for the truck to fetch the rest of my family’s possessions, told me where my family had been taken. I turned around and ran to the area of Waterfall where they were,” he said.

Adams’ parents knew they had to move but they had been reassured by the town mayor that a suitable home would be found for their family of nine.

Instead they were moved to a condemned house for three weeks and then to another condemned house in Waterfall, until 1971 when most of the coloured townspeople were moved to Ocean View, he said.

Adams’ Seaforth neighbourhood was demolished to expand the “white” Simons Town primary and high schools’ complex.

Today, his cousin Jean Human, 57, is the principal at the school where her grandmother’s house had stood, on the hill where a playground is.

Waterfall, the area where Adams’ family was moved to, is now part of the SA Navy’s property. “I ask myself, how did this happen? Was it correct? Was it legal? Why was it allowed to happen? What recourse do I have for all the emotional trauma caused to my family by the apartheid government? Do I have grounds for a claim?” he mused.

As a bricklayer and skills trainer by trade, Adams followed in the footsteps of his maternal grandfather stonemason and whose work still can be seen in the picturesque town.

On Wednesday, on a visit to the town, Adams and Human spoke of the integrated community that Simon’s Town had once been and the ties that still bind through shared history and longing.

Adams went back many times to build homes for white people in the area and many of his clients could not believe that he had been born there or that he played in pine forests where the school sports field is or that Boulders was “our beach where we used to swim”.

“People don’t know about Seaforth where people were removed at least 15 years before the demolition of District Six."

“This has been such a heavy weight on my chest all these years,” said Adams quietly.

Adams’s land claim, lodged in 2014, has been put on hold until 2018.

Cape Argus

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