Durban - Bulldog Road has long gone, as well as the Railway Barracks which housed Indian workers near the present Durban station.
Still vibrantly alive, though, is the community spirit which apartheid’s Group Areas Act could not kill when residents were forced to move to Chatsworth about 55 years ago.
Annual reunions, organised by those who remember the barracks, attract hundreds of people.
“It’s to honour to our parents who struggled and suffered so much for us when we could never imagine owning a car or visiting Cape Town and Johannesburg,” said Tony Naidoo, who was born there.
He continued to live there after joining the railways when he finished school early to help support 11 younger siblings.
His father had also worked there, qualifying for a family home at the barracks for as long as he was in service.
The barracks, with an entrance in Somtseu Road, sprung up not long after the first indentured Indian labourers arrived in Natal in 1860.
“Indian labourers were not only placed as workers in the sugar cane plantations, but also on the railways,” James Seekola noted in a brochure prepared for the first Railway Barracks reunion in 2014.
Naidoo recalled that salaries were meagre and families were large, but getting around never added to the financial burdens.
“We went everywhere on foot,” he said. “It was very central. We would walk to the beach, to Kingsmead to watch football, to the market. We also played lots of sport.”
Residents of Railway Barracks had to adapt to a new life in treeless Chatsworth after being forcibly removed from their homes in line with apartheid’s Group Areas Act.
After the families who had occupied the 544 rooms were moved to treeless Unit Three and Unit Five, now Westcliff and Croftdene respectively, breadwinners became dependent on buses to get to work.
“They would have to leave at 4am. Most government workers started work at 6am and they were not allowed to be late.
“Children stopped seeing their dads. Old people took a real hit. They had never travelled by bus. There was a lot of pressure on them. Many passed on.”
Naidoo said people had battled to find where their friends had been moved to.
Nearby was a similar housing unit, Magazine Barracks, for municipal workers.
The residents shared a temple, a mosque, a church and the Depot Road School, founded in 1895, with those from the Railway Barracks.
Some people from both set-ups even married – Naidoo being a product of such a union.
Tiny Kistan, who was 10 years old during the removal and who later became a librarian in Chatsworth, remembered a town crier announcing community news such as deaths, births and weddings.
The X on this aerial photograph shows where the Railway Barracks once was.
“We were given weekly rations of tinned fish, vegetables, oil, sugar and salt. Once a month we got meat, wood and coal.”
Kistan also recalled walking with his friends, harvesting Dutch apples that grew on the streets.
Naidoo rose through the ranks at the railways, from being an office sweeper to an assistant berth manager at the harbour as political reforms created more opportunities.
After retirement, he returned to Transnet as a pension consultant.
He said it was an emotional experience going back to the site of the barracks.
“Sometimes I had meetings at the Durban station. Once I sat there and just cried. My colleagues around me wondered whether I had just heard some bad news.
“I said: ‘That’s the place where I was born and bred.’ ”
Anybody interested in the next reunion, in December, can contact Kesh at 083 307 2100, Tiny Kistan at 082 376 3322 or Tony Naidoo at 031 401 6631.