Cape Town - Tasked with researching their community’s origins and its heritage stories for a play, Sheila Davids and Edwina Abrahams turned to Google.
They were looking for information about Ravensmead. But they didn’t get very far..
“So we decided the best way to find information was to interview our senior citizens,” says Davids, herself born and raised in Ravensmead.
The 43-year-old not only found out about the place she has always called home, but gained an understanding for how the previous generation feels about forced removals, still a sore subject that is hinted at but never delved into.
They originally started the research in 2008 because of the brief from a pastor at the Fountain Christian Centre – “the old Miami Bioscope,” both blurt out when I admit being unfamiliar with the church – who suggested a play could illustrate to their youth where their parents came from.
“That is the main aim of this production, to teach our children where they come from, give them a sense of belonging, a sense of heritage so they can be proud of what they have. They have their own identity, their own heritage,” says Abrahams, 42, also from Ravensmead.
The two became friends through this project. Davids ended up working as director, drawing on training she received at Artscape on directing and scriptwriting to supplement her teaching career. Abrahams, who worked as set designer, also co-wrote and produced Toe Ravensmead nog Tiervlei Was (When Ravensmead Was Still Tiervlei).
The Tiervlei Cultural Arts Development Organisation, with Abrahams as its arts administrator, was started in 2006 and presenting the play as part of this year’s Artscape Heritage Festival potentially takes the organisation from arts workshop provider to community theatre group.
Their play centres on a fictional Baadjies family, who are relocated to Ravensmead but remain friends with another family they used to know back when they lived in Parow Valley.
It covers 25 years and draws on the experiences of various families they interviewed for their research. Starting in the 1950s when the Group Areas Act was first enacted, delving into the time when people were moved from places such as Die Akkers, Skilpadvlei and Parow Valley, up to the point in 1974 when Tiervlei was cut up and Ravensmead was created.
Tackling the story of what happened meant painstaking research into archived material at museums, as well as multiple university theses on lost communities and old newspaper articles. It also meant sourcing old faded pictures, deeds and notices of forced removals, as well as teasing out personal accounts from people.
“This one guy told us, ‘Don’t ever mention the words District Six to me because District Six removals started in 1966. We were in the 50s, the first and we didn’t retaliate, we just accepted. They (District Six) go on and they were all ‘Make the people aware’. But it started in the 50s,” says Davids.
The research started with their own parents who referred them to friends. “We allowed them to share and from there we started drawing up questions,” Davids explains about the process.
“And that’s how we found out about forced removals,” she continues. “They never recovered. The pain and the anger, the emotional side… it’s still raw.”
“Actually, they’re more angry at themselves for not retaliating, for not doing something about it,” says Abrahams. “When it happened for them, it was such a shock. And before they could recover, it was all over.
“The one gentleman told us about his friend who went to work the one morning and he came back in the evening and his house was flattened and he didn’t know where his wife and seven kids were. It took him two days to find them.
“The wife afterwards told him that she ran and fetched the kids from school because the bulldozers were there and they were just throwing their furniture into trucks and she didn’t know… her concern was just to get the kids together.”
“We just knew it was Tiervlei and that it changed to Ravensmead, but we didn’t know the history,” says Davids.
She has vague childhood memories of her grandfather’s anger about the second set of removals “when they painted the yellow numbers for instance, which would say where you’re moving to”.
The first set of removals was when people were moved around Parow in the 1950s to make way for what would become the national road; the second set was moving people in the 1960s from houses in Parow Valley to land in then Tiervlei; and the third wave was when suburbs such as Parow Valley, Ravensmead and Uitsig were established in 1974.
What was started six years ago has evolved into an hour-long, three-act drama featuring nine characters, and they suggest bringing along the tissues. It’s more about the emotional baggage than the nitty-gritty of what exactly happened at what specific time, “and the fact that they never recovered”, says Davids.
“The bitterness is there… and a lot of them, they actually died of a broken heart,” says Abrahams.
“That’s why for our people… it’s 20 years of democracy but they still don’t believe anything is going to change.”
Theresa Smith, Cape Argus
l The Artscape Heritage Festival runs from Thursday September 18 to September 30. See www.artscape.co.za.