Cape Town – It all began with a photograph in a museum of an imposing Victorian home, so arresting that Joline Young’s entranced gaze caught the eye of a stranger. Their encounter 17 years ago was brief, but it changed her life.
Wittebome-born Young, who now has a history Masters with distinction from UCT, looks back at that instant in 1998 with an acute awareness of the difficulties and rewards of the journey she has travelled since.
Her research material is the basis of walking tours she offers in Simon’s Town, introducing visitors to the seaside settlement’s deeper, complex, often painful and, here and there, exalting past – a subject she is chronicling in a book.
And it is, perhaps, no surprise that the building in that museum photograph – variously named Villa Marina, Villa Zain, Amlay House, and, today, Villa Zain again – is a prominent and poignant feature of Joline Young’s walking tour.
Back in 1998, Young, who at that stage had only a matric to her name, was one of the moms who had volunteered to join a school tour to Simon’s Town and keep an eye on the youngsters, her son Kyle among them.
“We’d all walked up from the station to the Simon’s Town Museum, and while the children were being shown around, I happened to notice a wall of old photographs. For a moment, I thought I was looking at pictures of District Six. There was one picture in particular that caught my attention. I couldn’t take my eyes off it – and there I was, fixated on the picture, when the curator came in. She noticed me and came over. I said, ‘This house is talking to me.’ And to my surprise, she said: ‘Well, you should go and visit the lady who lives there… she’s just moved back.’”
The woman in question was Zainab Davidson – for whom Villa Marina was renamed Villa Zain after her father Dawood Amlay bought it in 1935 when Zainab was just two months old.
Amlay was a Simon’s Town businessman; he owned a local butchery and various other shops, and, for many years was the only member of the town council who was not white. In the end, though, his standing in the community, and his years of service, meant little in the face of apartheid law.
When Young met Davidson in 1998 the past opened before her as a new future, a future of remembering.
Villa Zain was central to it – for it became part home and part museum; Davidson and her husband Sedick have devoted the ground floor of their home to the story, partly obscured by apartheid’s decades, of the now scattered Muslim community of Simon’s Town.
In an article Young wrote for the Cape Argus in 1998, Zainab Davidson described how her father “used to sit on the stoep and swear: ‘I will not budge... either they’ll have to push me out or carry me out in a wheelbarrow.’”
Young wrote: “The Nationalists won the contest but tragically by default when old man Amlay died a broken man, uncertain what the future held for his wife and their nine children. Mrs Davidson’s brother, Agmat, had the same dogged determination as her father and he refused to move.
“By 1975, he was the only ‘affected’ resident still in Simon’s Town. One morning, however, a navy truck pulled up and loaded him up, along with whatever possessions there was space for, and carted him off to a tiny council house in Ocean View, which was to be his new home.”
The old house was ironically renamed Amlay House and was a naval property. In the second half of the 1990s, however, the family returned to it. It was very different. Mrs Davidson recalled having had a “wonderful childhood” in a home right on the beach. “There were beautiful rock pools and, before he went to work in the morning, my father would take us down to the beach for a dip. Then we’d rush home, have a quick bath and walk to school.”
By the 1990s, the house had been cut off from the beach, and was in a poor state – but returning to it was nevertheless profoundly meaningful to the Davidsons. (A restitution claim lodged in 1998 remains unresolved, so the Davidsons are still renting the property from the Department of Public Works.)
Young’s newspaper article was part of the genesis of her transformation, a process in which two Cape Town scholars, historians Robert Shell (who died earlier this year) and Nigel Worden, played a decisive role.
The struggles of trying to make ends meet and look after her family meant it was six years before Young was able to seriously contemplate embarking on the research and study she had dreamed of since first meeting Zainab Davidson.
Meeting Shell – for whom she did some typing after a chance encounter at the national archives – was the key. He encouraged her to enrol at UCT where, in time, she began her Masters under the supervision of Worden.
She speaks highly of both: her research was “deeply inspired by Robert’s very valuable work, who took a keen interest in, and was very excited about my own research. Robert was also a wonderful mentor to so many students, and I am honoured to have been one of them”. She acknowledges Worden as “an excellent supervisor and incredible mentor”.
Young’s Masters thesis on Simon’s Town’s slave history – and her walking tour today – digs deep into the grimly exploitative nature of modern southern Africa’s beginnings as a colonial outpost shaped by the values and social patterns of the time.
“I feel as though I have walked through history, ‘meeting’ people in the archives I felt I could not let go. I felt they were saying to me, ‘You need to tell our story.’”
Young found herself reproducing a story of which she is herself a product. “I have the whole world in me,” she laughs; her 87-year-old mother Barbara has slave ancestry, and her father was Indian. “So I am part south-east Asian, Madagascan and west European.”
If it’s an enriching amalgam, her years of dwelling on a national story which is also a personal one left her at times feeling very angry.
“I needed that, to feel that anger, and then make peace with it, because I think we are all a part of the story.
“Someone asked me once whether we should cut out certain histories, bad histories, and I said, no, we are all a product of this history, and it’s how we engage with it that matters.”
Young hopes her book, which will encompass everything from forced removals all the way back to the early presence of San and Khoi communities, will help to create a “bridge of understanding”.
“We need to reach out to each other, across the pain, and find healing. The Walking History Tours are a modest attempt to facilitate some of that healing. It is only through educating ourselves about our past that we can map out our future as a more unified nation.”
Michael Morris, Weekend Argus