A STORY OF SMALL-TOWN APARTHEID

Anelia Schutte grew up in Knysna – a beautiful town on the coast of South Africa, centred around a picturesque lagoon and popular with tourists. But there was another side to Knysna that those tourists never saw. In the hills surrounding the town with its exclusively white population lay the townships and squatter camps where the coloured and black people were forced to live.

Most white children would never go to the other side of the hill, but Anelia did. Her earliest memories are of being the only white girl at a crèche for black children that her mother, Owéna, set up in the 1980s as a social worker serving the black community.

Thirty years on, Anelia, now living in London, yearns to find out more about her mother’s work, and to understand the political unrest that clouded South Africa at the time. She returns to Knysna to find the truth about the town she grew up in, from the stories and memories of the people who were there.

For the People is an exploration of apartheid South Africa through the eyes of Owéna – a white woman who worked tirelessly for the black people of Knysna and found herself swept up in their struggle. They called her Nobantu: ‘for the people’.

For the People

A story of small-town apartheid

Anelia Schutte

HQ

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2014

Copyright © Anelia Varela 2014

Anelia Varela asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

E-book Edition © February 2014 ISBN: 9781472090980

Version: 2019-01-11

Contents

Cover

Blurb

Title Page

Author Bio

Dedication

Author’s note

Prologue 1984

Introduction

Chapter 1 Going home

Chapter 2 Back to my childhood

Chapter 3 1970

Chapter 4 Digging

Chapter 5 1970–1

Chapter 6 Colourful stories

Chapter 7 Xenophobia

Chapter 8 1972

Chapter 9 Jack and Piet

Chapter 10 1972

Chapter 11 1972–8

Chapter 12 Queenie

Chapter 13 The funeral

Chapter 14 1978–82

Chapter 15 1982

Chapter 16 Township tour

Chapter 17 1982

Chapter 18 Mrs Burger

Chapter 19 1983

Chapter 20 Crèche tour

Chapter 21 1983

Chapter 22 1983

Chapter 23 Oupad

Chapter 24 Tembelitsha

Chapter 25 1983

Chapter 26 Theron

Chapter 27 1983

Chapter 28 Memories of apartheid

Chapter 29 1983

Chapter 30 Johnny

Chapter 31 1984

Chapter 32 1986

Chapter 33 Lois Bubb

Chapter 34 1986

Chapter 35 Amy Matungana

Chapter 36 Trouble

Chapter 37 Esther Xokiso

Chapter 38 1986

Chapter 39 David Ngxale

Chapter 40 Lawrence Oliver

Chapter 41 1986

Chapter 42 1986

Chapter 43 Tapped

Chapter 44 1986

Chapter 45 Elizabeth Koti

Chapter 46 1987

Chapter 47 1987–8

Chapter 48 Winile Joyi

Chapter 49 1988

Chapter 50 Goodbyes

Epilogue 1994

Acknowledgements

Copyright

ANELIA SCHUTTE

has lived in Cape Town, Durban, London and New York, but she still calls Knysna home.

She’s been writing ever since she could hold a pencil: essays for school, poetry for fun, and eventually copywriting for a living. Her short story, The Unkindness of Ravens, was published in From Here to Here: stories inspired by London’s Circle Line in 2005. Somewhere in a drawer she also has an unpublished children’s story about a bullied dung beetle.

Now based in New York, Anelia is chief creative officer at The Writer. The rest of the time she runs along rivers and over bridges, makes bobotie and rusks for her American friends and spends hours on the phone to her mother.

For the People is her first book.

For my mother and father,

for everything

Black South Africans: descendants of the many African tribes in South Africa, each with its own culture, language and traditions going back several thousand years. The most prominent of these are the Xhosa and Zulu people.

White South Africans: descendants of the Europeans who settled in South Africa from the mid-seventeenth century, notably the Dutch and the British. White South Africans fall primarily into two groups based on their native language: English or Afrikaans.

Coloured South Africans: a term commonly used in South Africa for people of mixed race with some African ancestry, usually combined with one or more lineages including European, Indonesian, Madagascan and Malay. Mainly Afrikaans-speaking, they’re also known as ‘bruinmense’ (‘brown people’).

Prologue

1984

They call her Nobantu, but that wasn’t always her name.

While it is true that she was given that name in a church, it was far from a traditional christening. The church in question was little more than a shack; no spire, no bell, no stained-glass windows. Just a simple room with walls of corrugated iron. On the outside, those walls were painted red, the earthy terracotta of Klein Karoo dust. And so it was known as the Rooi Kerk – the Red Church – in the township called Flenterlokasie: location in tatters.

There were twenty-two women in the church that day. Twenty-two black faces under colourful headscarves, twenty-two bosoms squeezed into their smartest dresses (mostly hand-me-downs from their white madams). Strapped onto some of their backs were babies whose innocent faces peered out from under tightly knotted shawls, unaware of the hardship they’d been born into.

There were men, too, four of them, dressed respectfully in worn but neat suits.

They were the township committees, those men and women. Representing the townships to the west of Knysna was the Thembalethu committee, Thembalethu meaning ‘our trust’. And from the other side of town came the committee called Vulindlela, meaning ‘open the road’.

And that was how they arranged themselves in the Red Church that day: Thembalethu on the one side, Vulindlela on the other, twenty-two women and four men sitting on plastic chairs in their place of worship.

But they were not there to worship their God, not that day. They were there to honour a white woman.

For two years, that woman had been coming to their homes and changing their lives. She was the one who helped to start a crèche when she realised their children hadn’t held a pencil by the time they went to school. She was the one who took those children to the beach for the first time in their lives. She was the one who taught the local women to sew, when their only skill until then had been cleaning white people’s houses. She was the one who fought for their right to have more than one water tap serving an entire community.

For all of that they were honouring her that day, in a way reserved only for those who earned the respect and the love of the people. They were to give her a Xhosa name: a name they could use to greet her, to welcome her, and to call to her when they needed her.

The two committees had each chosen a name, which they wrote on a scrap of paper and placed on a table at the front of the church.

On the left, ‘Nobantu’: for the people. On the right, ‘Noluthandu’: the one with the love.

And then they began to sing.

They sang songs of joy and songs of hope, and as they sang the twenty-two women and four men formed a line and danced, single file, shuffling towards the tables.

And they reached into their pockets and into their bosoms, and on the name they felt most worthy of the woman, they placed their crumpled notes and sweaty coins – one rand, two rand, five rand, even ten. However much they had to give, they gave.

And they danced and they sang until all twenty-two women and four men had voted with their hearts and their pockets.

The money was counted, counted again. A decision was reached.

The woman was to be known as Nobantu. ‘For the people.’

They gave her the crumpled notes and the sweaty coins, one hundred and three rand in total – more than two months’ income for most of them. And, despite her protests, they insisted that the money, like the name, was hers.

In the four years that followed, the woman continued to fight for the rights of the people through times of unrest and protest, discontent and violence. During the national state of emergency in 1986, she drove through police barricades and past armoured Casspirs, around burning tyres and past angry youths who were ready to launch bottles and stones at the first white driver they saw. But when she approached, they lowered their bottles and dropped their stones to wave her through. She was Nobantu. She was there for the people.

But it was becoming increasingly dangerous.

The youths were being influenced by their more radical peers from surrounding areas, and eventually the hands holding those bottles and stones were no longer familiar.

There were issues closer to home, too. The security police branded the woman an instigator. Why else would she sympathise with those people? And so she was blacklisted, her family’s phone tapped in an attempt by the security police to find the evidence they needed to implicate her in the growing unrest.

Fearing for the safety of her family – not her own – the woman left the people in 1988.

But the people remember.

And even today when the woman walks down the street, she still hears the cry, ‘Nobantu!’ from grown men and women; black men and women who were once children she’d taken to the beach when they’d never seen the sea.

They call her Nobantu.

I call her Mother.

Introduction

I was born into apartheid. From 1978 until Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990, it was the only reality I knew.

My parents had grown up with it too. When the National Party came into power in 1948, both my mother and father were four years old.

The National Party government introduced a system of racial segregation that would become known as apartheid – ‘separateness’ – enforced by a series of acts and laws. Land was separated into homogenous areas for white, coloured and black. Children of different races were forced to go to different schools. It became illegal for white people to marry people of other races – or, under the ‘Immorality Act’, even to have sex with them.

As our country became scorned, sanctioned and boycotted by the rest of the world, it became ever more insular, our press heavily censored by the apartheid government.

I knew very little of this history before 2007, when I started working on this book.

Growing up in a small town in South Africa, I never questioned apartheid. It was just the way it was – a refrain I’ve heard from many white South Africans since.

I was twelve years old when Nelson Mandela was released. Preoccupied with school and boys, I was only vaguely aware of what was going on.

Many white adults were nervous about what might happen at the time. Some of the more right wing stockpiled food and guns in anticipation of what was surely an inevitable civil war as apartheid laws were abolished and black people’s voting rights reinstated.

At sixteen, I was too young to vote in South Africa’s first democratic election, which saw the African National Congress, or ANC – for years treated as a terrorist organisation – become our new government, and Nelson Mandela our new president.

To everyone’s relief, the worst fears were unfounded. Where the apartheid government enforced segregation and oppression, Mandela encouraged forgiveness and reconciliation.

The most unifying gesture of all was his appearance at the 1995 Rugby World Cup, wearing the green and gold of our national team, the Springboks.

In our living room, I cheered with my family and the rest of the country when he lifted that cup with white rugby captain Francois Pienaar.

Everything was going to be OK.

Things changed quickly. National service was abolished so soon after the election that my brother, who’d simply assumed he’d go to the army straight after school, still went despite being one of the first generation of white boys who didn’t have to. He simply didn’t have a plan B.

He was one of very few people in the army that year who weren’t coloured or black.

When I finished high school in 1995, I applied for a scholarship to an advertising school in Cape Town, as the tuition fees were more than my parents could afford. I was told my skin was the wrong colour. I still went, after my parents remortgaged their house to pay for it.

One of the upsides of our new democracy was that the world opened up to us in a way it never had before. As a result, a new wanderlust broke out among young white South Africans. My oldest brother was the first in our family to leave, just two years after Mandela’s release, to go backpacking around Europe. Having had a taste of the world, he came back to South Africa just long enough to get a qualification before returning to Europe, where he settled in the UK and eventually married a British woman.

When my family went to London for the wedding, my mother got her first-ever passport at the age of fifty-three. My father and I already had passports, but only because we’d both been to Namibia – my father on a one-off fishing trip, and me for a week of canoeing the year before.

In London, I was amazed to share the Tube with well-dressed black people who spoke not in African accents but British ones.

Having had a taste of the world beyond South Africa, the travel bug bit me too and in 1999 I left, aged twenty-one and armed with a working holiday visa for the UK.

Those of us who left were criticised by the government for creating a ‘brain drain’ in the country at a time when it was hard at work rebuilding itself. While it’s true that many people left because of the limited job prospects for white people in a country that was hastily redressing its race balance, my own motivations were more personal. I was in an enforced break in my copywriting career after losing my job at an ad agency. And I had fallen for a man in London during the trip for my brother’s wedding. The relationship didn’t last, but I never went back to live in South Africa.

In London, I quickly got out of touch with what was going on back home. I went over to see my parents every eighteen months or so, but with only two weeks there at a time, I became a tourist in my own country.

It was on a writing retreat in Spain that I first started questioning the way things were back home. By then I was a British Citizen through naturalisation, having lived in England long enough to get a British passport. South Africa felt very far away.

But when I interviewed a local farmer in Aracena called Alfonso Perez, I suddenly felt myself drawn back to my homeland. Alfonso told us one story after another of the Spanish Civil War and how it had divided his country, with friends and even family finding themselves on opposite sides of a violent struggle.

I couldn’t help drawing comparisons with South Africa, and faint memories started flickering in my mind. Pieced together from several phone calls to my mother in South Africa, one of those memories became a short story.

I never thought it would become the prologue to a book. My then husband, a Brit and also a writer, put the idea in my head on my return to London. ‘There’s a book here,’ he said. ‘And only you can write it.’

At first I laughed it off: I didn’t have a book in me.

But then the memories started coming back: snippets of stories my parents had told me when I was growing up of my mother’s work in the townships.

I became curious, wanting to know more about those stories and the stories behind them.

At first my mother hated the idea.

‘I was just doing my job,’ she said.

But she was keen to encourage my writing and eventually gave in. Just three months after my time in Spain, I used a Christmas trip to South Africa to start doing some research.

It was a frustrating process. My mother’s memory was sketchy in places, leaving big gaps in the story. Many of the places that might have kept official records from that time were closed for the holiday season. And without a clear contextual framework or timeline, the few interviews I did made little sense to me.

I realised if I was going to do this, I had to do it properly.

A year and a half later, I took three months off work and went back to South Africa armed with a laptop, a Dictaphone and a crash course in interviewing from my boss, an ex-investigative journalist.

This time I wanted to hear not just my mother’s side of the story. I wanted to speak to the people who lived in the townships, and the authorities who’d built them. I wanted to speak to the people who’d worked for the apartheid government then, and the people who work for the ANC government now. I wanted to speak to the rioters who’d stood up for their human rights, and the policemen who’d arrested them.

This is what I found.

Chapter 1

Going home

My mother is in the passenger seat in front of me, my father next to her, driving. I’m in the back of the Volkswagen Jetta with a bright-pink gift bag of treats on my lap.

‘Just a little something to snack on till we get home,’ says my mother.

There’s dried mango and guava, and big, fat raisins still on their stems. My hands reach first for the biltong and drywors, the dried meat and sausage that I crave in London every time I feel homesick.

I’m not really hungry, just tired. It took an eleven-hour flight from London, a six-hour stopover in Johannesburg and a two-hour domestic flight to get to George, the nearest airport to Knysna. But Knysna isn’t our next stop. My mother, as always, has managed to squeeze some work into the day. While she was going to be in George anyway, she thought she’d get a radio interview out of the way for Epilepsy Week, a major event on the Epilepsy South Africa calendar.

My mother has been a social worker at the Knysna branch of Epilepsy South Africa for twenty years now. When she first joined it was called the South African National Epilepsy League, or SANEL. For most people in Knysna it will always be SANEL and the people who live there, most of whom have brain damage from epilepsy, will always be ‘Sanellers’. A big part of my mother’s job is raising awareness of the condition, hence the stop at Eden FM.

My father and I listen to the interview in the car outside the radio station as my mother reassures Eden’s audience that people with epilepsy can live normal lives. She sounds confident as she answers the questions she scripted for the DJ last night, but her answers are very much unscripted.

‘People can tell when you’re just reading it,’ she said before she went in. ‘It sounds insincere.’

My mother’s smiling, alto voice works well on the radio. These days I’m more used to hearing it over faint phone lines to the UK, so it’s strange to hear it resonating through the stereo speakers in the back doors of the car. She sounds younger than sixty-four.

Fifteen minutes later, my mother is back. Just one more stop, she promises. My aunt, who lives in George, recorded the interview and we need to pick up the tape.

When we get to my aunt and uncle’s, I notice an electric gate where there was no gate, electric or otherwise, before. ‘They were burgled,’ my mother says matter-of-factly. ‘While they were in the house, sleeping. And all they’d left open was a small kitchen window.’

Had my aunt and uncle still had Snorretjies, their yappy little lapdog with his titular whiskers, the burglars might have been scared off. In South Africa, dogs are man’s best alarm system and as a result, most white families have at least one.

My parents’ last two dogs, Lulu and Nina, were what my father calls ‘township specials’. Drive through any township and you’ll see Lulus and Ninas everywhere: medium-sized mongrels with short, golden hair and white chests. My father’s theory is that this crossbreed of dog has developed in such dire conditions that it can withstand almost anything. ‘So your vet’s bills are lower,’ he says. ‘And your dog lives much longer than the neighbours’ pedigree Alsatians and Dobermans.’

Putting his theory to the test, my father got Lulu and Nina from the local townships where he took them off the hands of whichever family’s dog had delivered a litter that week.

Lulu and Nina are long dead now, and my parents haven’t bothered to get a new dog. They don’t have the time or the energy to walk a dog any more, they say. I’ve been nagging them to at least consider getting a little dog that wouldn’t need much exercise, but they won’t listen.

Finally we’re on the road to Knysna. I’m on the edge of the back seat, partly to hear my parents over the grumble of the car engine, partly from the usual anticipation I feel when I’m so almost home.

The sixty-kilometre drive from George to Knysna is a scenic journey through the Garden Route, as this coastal stretch of South Africa is known. Against a backdrop of mountains, forests, lakes and sea, the N2 highway winds and climbs, dips and falls.

The Jetta climbs one last hill and there it is, the momentary glimpse of water through an opening in the trees. Down the hill and… I’m home.

As we come round the final bend, the hillsides part to reveal the Knysna Lagoon. It’s not actually a lagoon, it’s an estuary, as my father told us time and time again when we were little. He was a biology teacher then, and he’s always been a stickler for detail.

Situated on the south coast of South Africa in the Western Cape, Knysna is ‘the heart of the Garden Route’ according to the brochures and websites, and ‘South Africa’s Favourite Town’ three years running.

The White Bridge – named as imaginatively as the nearby Red Bridge – carries us over the lagoon. To our left, the Knysna River feeds the lagoon with fresh water from the mountains, while in the distance to our right, two sandstone cliffs known as the Heads let through the sea.

I’m arriving in the run-up to the Oyster Festival, a two-week celebration of food, drink and sport cunningly designed to draw in tourists in July, the middle of the wetter winter months. In summer, there’s no need for such gimmicks. South Africans and foreigners drive here in droves to spend their rands, pounds, dollars and euros on lagoon cruises, seafood platters, quad-biking and abseiling. Or at least, they used to. My mother says they’re coming less and less.

As we drive through the centre of town, she points out all the restaurants and shops that are closing down. Even Jimmy’s Killer Prawns – eat as many prawns as you like – has gone under, but my mother doesn’t mind that one so much. Jimmy had taken over the vet’s old building and my mother always refused to go there as a result. How could she eat there, she argued, when it was where all our dogs were put down?

Thankfully, some things haven’t changed. After thirty-nine years in Knysna, my parents still live on the same street in the same house where I grew up. As we turn into the driveway, I notice that my parents – unlike my aunt and uncle in George or, indeed, most of my parents’ neighbours – still don’t have an electric gate or even a proper fence. I’m glad they feel safe enough not to cage themselves in like canned lions, but at the same time, it makes me uneasy. Crime has turned violent, even in Knysna. People don’t just get burgled any more, they get tied up, knifed, assaulted, raped.

I ask my parents whether it’s a good idea leaving the house so open.

‘Oh, Annie,’ says my mother. ‘What difference does it make?’

She tells me about a friend of hers who lives not far from here who was burgled recently. The friend was assaulted at knifepoint by one burglar while another emptied out her safe. ‘And she had a big gate and a dog,’ my mother says.

They’re after laptops and jewellery these days, she tells me. Gold, especially.

‘That’s why I don’t go around wearing fancy rings and things,’ she says, tugging at the ceramic beads around her neck. ‘Let’s face it, if they break into our house they’d be very disappointed.’ She laughs. I don’t. My hand tightens around the straps of my laptop bag.

My parents have never been materialistic. ‘Money is nice, but it’s not essential,’ is my mother’s motto. So although the house is big – five comfortable bedrooms over three floors and a pool in the back garden – it’s well lived-in, crammed full of trinkets and pictures and mementoes that have no real value beyond the sentimental.

Even the TV would be unlikely to appeal to a would-be burglar, being so old it doesn’t have a remote control. Not that it’s ever stopped my father changing channels or adjusting the volume from his armchair – ever inventive, he uses a metre-long dowel and some precision aiming to adjust the manual buttons and slide controls.

When I walk into the house, I feel the warm familiarity of home.

Greeting me in the kitchen is a rusty old fridge that used to be my grandmother’s. It’s covered in pictures and newspaper cuttings, even more than I remember. Now, alongside a photo of my grandfather in hospital before he died, there are pictures from my and my two brothers’ weddings in Knysna, London and Barcelona. Next to a faded, laminated poster of a pig (‘Those who indulge, bulge’) that’s been there for as long as I can remember, there’s a postcard of Picasso’s Weeping Woman that I sent my mother from Paris. And next to a fridge magnet of an Irish blessing is another carrying a bible verse: ‘Be strong. Be courageous.’

One new addition to the fridge gallery that catches my eye is a newspaper clipping. It’s a photo of a black man in a wheelchair, his arm and leg in plaster casts. He’s being pushed along by another black man on crutches, both his arms and one leg also in plaster.

Everywhere I look in the house, there are memories. In the dining room, the old upright Otto Bach piano on which I learned to play is now covered in candles, many of them gifts from family and friends around the world. My mother insists on burning those candles, all of them, when she and my father have guests over for dinner, and there are multicoloured dribbles and drops of wax all over the piano lid.

The wall opposite is a shrine to times gone by. Antique keys, medals, fob watches and hair curlers are stuck onto the wall with putty that has hardened into a cement-like bond after thirty-odd years. An old cast-iron meat grinder is stuffed full of porcupine quills and attached to a sturdy old cashier’s till. A wiry spectacle frame that has long since lost its lenses brings back memories of school plays.

But it’s a simply framed cheque that takes pride of place at the top of the wall: a cheque for one hundred and three rand, made out to ‘Nobantu’ and dated 15 October 1984.

On a white border around the cheque are two headings, ‘Vulindlela’ and ‘Thembalethu’, in my mother’s handwriting. Under each heading are the committee members’ signatures.

Some of the signatures are spidery, like my grandmother’s handwriting in the years before she died. Some are elegant and considered, others are childlike and laboured. One Thembalethu committee member started signing under the Vulindlela heading, realised her mistake halfway through her first name, scratched it out and started again. But they’re all there. All twenty-two women. All four men.

Elsewhere on the wall, there are more recent acknowledgements of my mother’s work. A Certificate of Merit from the Rotary Club of Knysna thanks her for ‘outstanding and invaluable services rendered in the community’. On another certificate, the Knysna Municipality names her a ‘Woman of Worth’.

But while those newer accolades are squeezed in between the bits of junk on the wall, the cheque to Nobantu from 1984 hangs above them all.

Chapter 2

Back to my childhood

My parents have given me the option of sleeping in the garden flat, which has a separate entrance from the main house. Whenever my brothers and I are here at the same time, there’s a mock-debate over who’ll get to stay in the flat, the most private and only en-suite room at my parents’ house. All three of us know that my oldest brother and his wife will always be first in line and I, as the youngest, will always be last. This time I’m here alone, giving me first dibs on the prize room.

Despite the rare opportunity to have the flat to myself, I choose to stay in the main house. Without my husband or my brothers here, the idea of walking the short distance from the main house to the flat at night makes me nervous. Especially after hearing my parents’ stories of break-ins and assaults in the neighbourhood.

I’ve decided to sleep in my brother’s old room and work in what’s still known as ‘Anelia’s room’, figuring that writing in my childhood bedroom might help to bring back memories. As soon as I open the bright-red door, I know I’ve made the right choice. My high-school blazer still hangs in the wardrobe, adorned with a row of scrolls sewn in gold thread that remind me of prize-giving evenings and Monday morning assemblies at Knysna High. On the wall next to a full-length mirror, there’s a framed, faded newspaper ad for Barclays Offshore Services, my first work to get published as a professional copywriter. Under the ad there’s a black-and-white chest of drawers and around the room a series of black floating shelves, the only remaining evidence of my black-and-white phase in my adolescent years, when most of my wardrobe was monochrome.

When I turned twelve, my birthday present from my parents was a black-and-white makeover of my bedroom, with some splashes of red (‘Because you have to have some colour, Annie’). My father, more proficient at using a sewing machine than my mother, made me a black duvet cover with white polka dots and red curtains. He also made the black shelves and put them up in the ideal positions for my books, electronic keyboard and speakers.

But one of my biggest reasons for wanting to write in this room isn’t what’s inside. It’s the view outside. I pull the curtains back from the ceiling-height windows and there it is, the Knysna Lagoon with the Heads in the distance.

Below me is our back garden and the swimming pool that we got when I was six. It’s still surrounded by concrete patches where my dad has been intending to build decking for years. Between the garden and the Lagoon there are two more rows of houses and the N2 highway that has brought me home.

I spend my second day in Knysna turning my bedroom into an office.

When my mother worked in the squatter camps in the 1980s, she took lots of pictures to support her appeals for funding. She’s managed to dig out the old slides that she used in her presentations, and I’ve had them printed as a visual reminder of what it was like back then.

Above my desk, I create a collage of the pictures: crèche children with dirty black hands holding plastic cups of whatever juice drink they were given that day. Squatter-camp landscapes with eroded dirt tracks that link shacks made from rough wooden planks and corrugated iron. In one picture, a black woman smiles at the camera from under her headscarf, the newly tarred township roads winding round a hill behind her.

On the wall opposite, once covered in posters of the rock band Queen, I stick the handful of newspaper clippings of Knysna in the 1980s that I managed to find on my last trip here. In one of the few articles that shows my camera-shy mother, she’s behind the wheel of a minibus donated by a national newspaper.

Next to the news gallery, I stick up the beginnings of a timeline. Starting in 1937, when the ‘Knysna Health, Social and Child Welfare Society’ was founded, the timeline has space for any significant events in Knysna and the rest of the country on one side, and anything specific to my mother on the other.

There are far too many blanks, though, reminding me how little I know about my own town’s history and indeed, my own family’s.

When my parents and I sit down to dinner, I ask them to tell me their story.

Chapter 3

1970

Owéna Schutte opened the first of many suitcases and unpacked a pair of mud-caked sandals that she wouldn’t be washing anytime soon.

The mud was from the plot of land that she and her husband, Theron, had recently bought. It was a decent-sized patch on the outskirts of Knysna where they were building a house an architect friend had designed for them. In the meantime, they were staying in the local boys’ boarding house with some of Theron’s fellow teachers from the Knysna High School.

Until their house was built, the mud on her sandals was all Owéna had to show for their purchase. Their own piece of Knysna.

Married for nine months, Owéna and Theron had moved to Knysna from Cape Town, where they’d rented a small flat in a suburb near the school where Theron got his first teaching job after university. The flat had been an improvement on the caravan they’d lived in for the first three months of their marriage, but they were thinking of starting a family and the city wasn’t where they wanted to raise their children.

Looking for a quieter life, Theron applied for posts at schools in two very different parts of the country. One was in Upington, a farming community in the arid north-west of South Africa that was known for its exceptionally hot summers and frosty winters. The other was in Knysna, the pretty coastal town known mainly for its timber and furniture industry.

When both applications were successful, Theron, a keen fisherman and woodworker, chose Knysna.

Soon after Theron accepted the position, Owéna received a phone call. Unsurprisingly for a town as small as Knysna, word had got out that the new biology teacher’s wife was a trained social worker. And the Knysna Child and Family Welfare Society was in desperate need of one.

Owéna was torn at first. She did need a job, but her only experience since graduating from Stellenbosch University had been working with the aged in care homes, where she organised social groups and concerts to keep their minds active. It was gentle work and although it was always sad to see one of the old dears pass away, there was the consolation of knowing they had all lived long and usually full lives.

Working with children was a very different job, and one for which Owéna felt extremely under-qualified. Would she be able to cope with seeing a child who’d been abused or neglected? Or taking a child away from his parents to put him in foster care?

Adding to her crisis of confidence was the job title: senior social worker. The society already had two social workers who were far more experienced than Owéna, especially when it came to dealing with children and families. Yet she was offered the senior position – with the higher salary that came with it – only because, she suspected, she was white and they were coloured, or mixed-race.

Owéna didn’t know much about politics. She’d been born in 1944 to a conservative Afrikaans family who, like most Afrikaners, respected the government’s authority and accepted its decisions unquestioningly – even when, from 1948, that government was the National Party with its separatist ideals.

Owéna’s upbringing wasn’t a particularly privileged one, not by white South African standards. Her father was a station-master for the national railways, a job that hardly paid a handsome wage, and her mother was a housewife who’d married in a simple sundress because her family couldn’t afford a wedding gown.

Owéna was just four years old when the National Party came into power and introduced apartheid. So she didn’t find it strange that there was a separate queue at the post office for black and coloured people. It was just the way it had always been. She didn’t even notice the separate counters in butchers’ shops, where the prime cuts were displayed behind glass at the whites-only counter, while black and coloured customers had to take whatever sinewy off-cuts they got. And when Owéna used a public toilet, she never stopped to ask why she could only go through the door euphemistically marked ‘Europeans only’ when she had never been to Europe.

Like most South Africans, Owéna had never travelled anywhere beyond the borders of her country. It was just too expensive, and she had no real desire to see the rest of the world.

Despite her blinkered view on the world around her, Owéna still felt uncomfortable at the idea of going into a new job above two colleagues based purely on the colour of her skin. But, needing to work, she accepted the job.

She spent her first day in Knysna in bed with a migraine.

If Owéna had worried that the coloured social workers would hold a grudge against her, she needn’t have. When she turned up for her first day at the Knysna Child and Family Welfare Society – or ‘Child Welfare’, as the locals called it – her new colleagues couldn’t have been friendlier or more welcoming.

Good humour was necessary in their line of work. Child Welfare dealt with cases ranging from child abuse and neglect to alcoholism and domestic violence. Clients came mainly from Knysna’s sizeable coloured community, with the occasional case from the few black families who lived among the coloured. White families’ welfare, on the other hand, was seen to by a Christian organisation in town.

While Owéna was working a six-day week at Child Welfare, Theron was teaching in the mornings and working on the house in his spare time. He had found a coloured bricklayer and two black labourers to do most of the building work, leaving him to make things like the window frames and staircases where he could put his woodworking skills to good use.

With no workshop or equipment at the building site, Theron did most of the woodwork at the boarding house where he made the window frames by hand, cutting the joints with the minute precision he’d mastered under the microscope in biology class.

The people of Knysna soon got used to the sight of the new teacher and his social worker wife driving through town with their window frames, some three metres long, tied to the roof of their Borgward station wagon.

At the building site, Owéna helped as best she could at the weekends, happily holding this here and hammering that there as instructed by Theron. The house was coming along nicely, and she allowed herself to daydream of the family they would raise there.

Little did she know that a much bigger development was under construction not far from theirs. To the east of Knysna, just on the other side of a hill, new roads were being scraped, water pipes were being laid, and one identical house after the other was being built.

Knysna’s first township was underway.

Chapter 4

Digging

Knysna has been racially segregated for as long as I remember. Growing up in the 1980s, I lived in a white neighbourhood, went to a white school, ate in white restaurants and swam in a white sea. The coloured children had their own homes and schools in Hornlee, a formal township where all the coloured people lived. The black children, on the other hand, stayed in the various squatter camps on the other side of the hill where they were out of sight of most white people.

The squatter camps or shanty towns were informal settlements where people lived in self-built shacks. Townships, on the other hand, were those areas especially built for black or coloured people (never mixed) by the government. Townships, having been planned and built from scratch, had at least some services like water, electricity and sewage. Squatter camps didn’t.

As a child born into apartheid South Africa, I didn’t find any of that strange. It was just the way it was. What I do find strange is that now, fifteen years after the first democratic election and the abolishment of the Group Areas Act, most of Knysna’s coloured people still live in Hornlee. And most black people are still in the squatter camps.

The circumstances up there are considerably better these days, as most of the squatter camps are being upgraded to better-serviced townships, and small brick houses are replacing the shacks. But I still thought there’d be more integration now that the racial divide is no longer law. I don’t know what I was expecting; maybe some black people living on my parents’ street, or a friendly coloured family popping over from next door for tea. But my parents’ neighbours are as white as they’ve always been. The only real difference is that their walls are higher and their fences spikier than before.

My mother says it is starting to happen, the integration. Apparently there are one or two black families living in a block of flats in their neighbourhood. The house prices are the problem, says my mother. Most black people can’t afford to buy property in Knysna. In fact, most white people can’t afford to buy here any more.

I don’t know anything about Knysna’s development, now or then, so I start asking questions. When was Hornlee built? Where did the first black people live? And why are the townships where they are? But my mother doesn’t know all the answers, and nor does my father.

The obvious place to start looking for answers is the Knysna Municipality, the local authority for the Knysna area. If there are any records of how and when the coloured and black townships were developed, they’ll be there.

It doesn’t come as a surprise that the municipality’s archive team know who my parents are. Most people in Knysna do – it’s the result of my father having been a teacher at what used to be the only white school in town, and my mother’s constant fundraising and campaigning efforts for Epilepsy South Africa.

It helps to open doors – in this case the heavy steel door to a walk-in safe containing years’ worth of town council meeting minutes and correspondence meticulously filed, indexed and bound in thick hardback volumes. Frustratingly, they only date back to 1980 – ten years after my parents first moved to Knysna. Anything older, I’m told, has been archived in Cape Town.

Even so, the volumes from 1980 onwards make up thousands of pages.

I’m not allowed to take away any of the records, so for three days I turn up when the municipality offices open and stay there until they close, a packed lunch of breakfast bars, fruit and sandwiches from my mother keeping me going so I don’t even have to break to eat.

On the first day, I’m shown to a desk just outside the safe where I pile up the relevant volumes and start trawling through almost three decades of bureaucracy and red tape.

The archives are astonishingly thorough and detailed, and I have to stop myself squealing when I realise they include several letters from my mother to the town council in the 1980s. My mother hasn’t kept anything like that herself.

On my second day at the municipality, I hear a commotion outside. It’s the unmistakable sound of toyi-toying, the stomping South African protest dance. A crowd is singing and chanting, their feet thudding in unison. Around me, in the safety of the municipal building, people appear from their offices to watch through the windows. I join them, peering through a gap between two vertical blinds.

The crowd outside the building is about two hundred strong. Some people are carrying placards made from bits of corrugated cardboard torn from boxes, with messages scrawled on them in marker pen. It’s not an unfamiliar sight – I remember similar protests from years ago, especially in the run-up to Nelson Mandela’s release. But the messages are different now. ‘We need houses’ says one of the signs. ‘We vote for 15 years. Now is enough.’ ‘The people shall govern.’ One placard says ‘Defy’ on the back. It’s not a bold protest statement. It’s the name of the brand of oven that came in the original cardboard box.

A man I can’t see starts shouting something over a megaphone, but from where I’m standing all I hear is a monotonous bark. Occasionally the crowd responds with whistles and cheers. Someone blows a vuvuzela.

I know from the news on TV that protests like these are going on all around the country. It seems to be an orchestrated attempt by the opposition to fire up the masses in communal criticism of the ANC government.

Although the protest is noisy, it’s peaceful and the people around me soon lose interest and go back to their work. I stay for a little while longer, then I do the same.

Although the municipality’s records prove invaluable for information about Knysna’s squatter camps and townships after 1980, I’m still missing the information about how they came into existence some ten years before.

I decide against driving to Cape Town to search the archives. It’s six hundred kilometres away and, even if I could get into the archives, I would have to request specific information from specific dates. With only a vague sense of chronology and no idea of what information the archives might hold, it seems a fruitless journey to make.

The Knysna library is a dead end for that period, too. When the library was renovated, boxes full of archive copies of the Knysna-Plett Herald, the local newspaper for Knysna and neighbouring Plettenberg Bay, were accidentally thrown away. A call to the newspaper’s office brings the frustrating news that their copies had been destroyed in a basement flood during a particularly bad spell of rain.

Fortunately, Knysna’s Director of Planning and Development, Lauren Waring, knows of one other place I can look: the Land Claims Commission in George. She worked there for years.

Never having heard of the Land Claims Commission, I look it up. Google takes me to the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights. Established in 1994, after the ANC won South Africa’s first democratic election by a landslide, the Commission was part of the newly elected government’s plan to right the wrongs of apartheid. Specifically, its aim was to settle disputes over land where the original owners and occupiers had been forced to leave their homes under the Group Areas Act. Tens of thousands of people came forward to stake their claims on land that had been taken from them and their families. Around five hundred of those claims came from Knysna.

According to Lauren Waring, the records of the forced removals in Knysna were particularly detailed compared with most other places. And copies of all those records, including the ones that have since been archived by the municipality, should still be available in George.

I call ahead, name-dropping Lauren, and am invited to drop by the next day.

When I get to the Commission’s office, all the information I’m after is waiting for me in two lever-arch files. I spend my morning in George reading the files, looking in particular for any information about the forced removal of Knysna’s black people. But there’s disappointingly little documentary evidence that it ever happened. Whenever black people were moved, it seems they were given verbal notice at best, leaving no proof of what actually happened. For the coloured community, on the other hand, there’s a long and detailed paper trail.

I’m soon drawn into the coloured people’s story and am amazed at how ‘official’ it all was. In the files, I find the Land Claims Commission’s report on the Knysna area with all the evidence to support it. There’s a memorandum from a committee formed by the coloured community as far back as 1959, objecting to the conditions in the proposed new coloured group area. From 1970, there are copies of notices given to people who were asked to leave the newly declared white areas. And the report quotes one government proclamation after another as land in Knysna was divided up between white, coloured and black.

Then there are the letters, many of them painfully polite pleas from respectable family men to the local authorities, asking for more time to move to the coloured area so they could get enough money together to build their own homes.

If my idea of forced removals was that they were met with anger and resistance, the reality, it seems – for the coloured people, at least – was far more compliant and resigned.

Chapter 5

1970‒1

When Hornlee was being built on the eastern outskirts of Knysna, Owéna was working on the opposite side of town in an outlying area called Rheenendal. There she looked after the welfare of a small coloured community, mainly labourers on the surrounding farms and timber plantations.

Situated outside the municipal boundaries of Knysna, Rheenendal was never declared white under the Group Areas Act – and so the coloured families in the area could stay in their homes, many of them living on their white employers’ farms.

Owéna’s work saw her visiting families and running activities for pre-school children and the elderly. Occasionally she had to deal with a case of alcohol or child abuse, the two often going hand in hand. But generally the people of Rheenendal were happy, and Owéna found her new job less challenging than she’d feared.

On the other side of town, however, her coloured colleagues knew there were much more challenging times ahead.

In 1970, many of Knysna’s coloured families lived in Salt River, a quiet riverside area where over three hundred coloured families and a handful of black families hired plots of various sizes from the Anglican Church, which owned the land. The people lived in houses that in many cases had been built by their parents or their grandparents before them, and would be passed on to their children when they died.

Some of the houses were built from bricks, others from wood and iron. But all of them were big family homes with ample space for mothers to grow vegetables, fathers to keep cattle and children to play.

The families lived simple lives in Salt River, but it was home. Everything they needed was right there, including a church and a few small schools.

One of those schools was started by a man named Percy Mdala, a teacher so adamant that children should get a decent education that he went from door to door convincing parents of the fact. When it rained and the children complained they couldn’t get to school across the swollen river, Mr Mdala went to the river himself, rolled up his trousers and carried the children over one by one.

Although Knysna itself was mainly white, a scattering of coloured families lived there too, mainly schoolteachers, headmasters and shopkeepers.

Wherever they lived, in August 1970 each coloured family in the Knysna area was given a notice confirming what they had known for a while was coming, but hoped never would.

Headed ‘Notice to Terminate Occupation in a Group Area’, it came from the Department of Community Development, the government department dealing with housing for the coloured people of South Africa.

At the top of the page was the South African crest with its antelope and its Afrikaner ox wagon, under which it was declared in English, Afrikaans and no uncertain terms that the area the recipient lived in had been ‘declared for occupation by members of the White group’. As the coloured people were not members of the ‘White group’, it would become illegal for them to live on the land their home was on from a certain date.

For the people of Salt River, that date was October 1971.

In town, the coloured home-owners were also given notice to move. The government arranged for their homes to be valued and the families received whatever amount the valuators decided on, with no room for negotiation.

By the specified dates, the people had to move to the township. There they would be given new homes as part of a low-cost housing scheme, unless they could afford to buy their own land and build on it at their own expense.

Owéna’s colleagues were some of the fortunate ones who could afford to build large family homes in the higher-lying parts of the township that overlooked the Knysna Lagoon.

But on the other side of the hill, rows upon rows of low-cost houses were being built in a damp basin on uneven ground.

Hornlee, or ‘Bigai’ as it was originally known, had first been proclaimed Knysna’s official coloured area more than ten years before.

Almost immediately, the coloured people voiced their concern.

The area was far too small for the twelve thousand people who would have to move there, they said. The topography would make building extremely difficult. The damp could make the area a breeding ground for tuberculosis, already a serious problem in their community. And it was far away from town, where most of the men and women worked.

They would only accept the new township if it were spread over a wider area, they said.

The authorities took note of the request and when the township was finally built, they allocated some extra land to allow for future expansion. That included a piece of land originally belonging to a man called Thomas Horn, and Bigai became Hornlee.

When the deadline for moving came and went in 1971, several of Knysna’s coloured families were still in their old homes. Most of them couldn’t move even if they wanted to. The low-cost section of the township still wasn’t finished, so that they had to wait for houses to become available.

Those who had been able to buy their own land in the township had other issues. Having paid for their plots, many of them now couldn’t afford to build a house on it.

Families who couldn’t move for the time being had to get special permits to stay in their current homes, as once the areas were officially white, the only coloured people who were legally allowed to be there were live-in housemaids. Those maids had to stay in servants’ quarters, usually a small room with its own bathroom, separate from their employer’s main house.

Under strict apartheid legislation, housemaids’ families were not allowed to stay with them in the servants’ quarters. But not everyone complied with the rules. One white man in Knysna allowed his live-in maid’s husband to stay with her. A neighbour took exception and wrote to the authorities to complain, saying it was ‘like a non-white township’ next door. Despite the white employer’s protests and appeals, his maid’s husband was eventually evicted.

Like many other men in the same position, the husband would have had to put his name down for a house in Bigai. And when those men, along with the rest of the coloured community, finally started moving into their new homes, Owéna’s colleagues had their hands full.

The low-cost houses were a fraction of the size of the homes the families had left behind. On the upside, there was hot running water and electricity. Even the bucket toilets were a step up from the ‘long-drops’ most of them were used to, as the buckets were emptied and the waste removed by the municipality each night.

But the floors of the houses were bare cement and there were no inside doors. The soil quality was poor and the ground was uneven so that water came in under the front doors when it rained. Houses were packed in alongside each other with virtually no land in between.

Next-door neighbours could hear every word of every domestic argument and every sob of every screaming child.

Whereas many families had previously managed to live off their land, eating and selling their own vegetables and keeping livestock for milk, butter and meat, they now had no space for vegetable gardens or cattle. And having to pay rent and rates for services meant people had money problems that they’d never known before.

The houses were so small that many parents had to sleep in the same room as their children. As a result, the children saw and heard things that normally would have happened behind closed doors. Marriages were put under strain, husbands started drinking, and children refused to go to school.

While Owéna’s colleagues dealt with those issues, she looked after her coloured community in Rheenendal where, unaffected by the Group Areas Act, people continued to live their lives as before.

She heard stories from her colleagues about the difficulties in the township, but the reality didn’t sink in. Not until a work trip with her colleagues finally opened her eyes to the other side of apartheid South Africa.

It was a national conference that took Owéna and two of her coloured colleagues to Port Elizabeth, South Africa’s self-styled ‘friendly city’.

As the event ran over two days, they were spending the night in a business hotel; nothing too fancy for the cash-strapped Child Welfare.

Owéna and her colleagues were given adjacent rooms on the third floor. Owéna thought nothing of it, but her colleagues knew this arrangement was the exception rather than the rule. The only reason they were even allowed to stay in the same hotel – never mind on the same floor – was because that particular hotel had a special ‘international licence’ that allowed it to admit people of different races.

That evening, the three social workers went out to find a place to eat. Walking along the beachfront, they spotted a cosy-looking Italian restaurant with sea views.

Owéna walked towards the open front door, but her colleagues didn’t follow. They couldn’t, they said. It was a white restaurant.

Owéna couldn’t believe what she was hearing. With her white upbringing and her white education and her white friends, she had never realised the extent of the discrimination against coloured people. If there were never any brown faces in the restaurants she went to, she’d assumed it was because coloured people chose not to go there.

Looking through the window of that restaurant in Port Elizabeth, she realised for the first time that choice had nothing to do with it.

She carried on walking with her colleagues until eventually they found a restaurant where they could all eat together: a curry house run by Indians, far away from the beach.

Chapter 6

Colourful stories

If there’s anyone who’ll tell me a vivid story of life as a coloured person in South Africa, it’s my mother’s boss, Vivien Paremoer.

I drive to her and my mother’s office at Epilepsy South Africa’s ‘residential care facility’ in Knysna; a home where people with epilepsy and other disabilities are given care around the clock.

The home is at the top of a hill, where it’s flanked by a black township on the one side and the local prison on the other. The residents, like their neighbours in the township and the prison, have a spectacular view of the Knysna Lagoon.

I’ve always felt slightly uncomfortable coming up here, and ashamed because of it. The residents are all adults, but many of them have the mental age of children and the emotional neediness that goes with it. I never know quite how to deal with them.

There’s a big security gate that’s looking worse for wear. I have to lean out of my car window to push an intercom button on a rickety post and announce my arrival to a voice so scratchy I can barely hear it.

The gate slides open.

I find Vivien in her office, where I greet her with a ‘Hallo, Tannie Vivien.’

Like all Afrikaans children, I was taught to call adults Tannie (auntie) and Oom (uncle) out of respect, whether they were related to me or not. Even now that I’m in my thirties, Vivien will always be Tannie to me.

Vivien and my mother first worked together years ago at Child Welfare, where they were both social workers. It was my mother who talked Vivien into taking the job as branch director at Epilepsy South Africa, when what Vivien actually wanted to do was retire.

To say thank-you for seeing me, I give Vivien a packet of rusks from a batch I baked yesterday. A type of South African biscuit, rusks are much like Italian biscotti: long, dry fingers designed for dunking in coffee or tea. I’ve packed them in neat rows in a clear plastic bag that I’ve tied with red wool.

‘Just like your mother,’ says Vivien.

Although she and my mother go back as far as I can remember, I don’t actually know much about Vivien at all. It’s only in the last week that I found out her family has always lived in Knysna, even before Hornlee was built. I’ve also found out that her family was one of those who were removed from their homes because of the Group Areas Act.

That’s the story I’m here for.

I ask Vivien about growing up in Knysna and she soon puts me right. She didn’t spend much of her childhood here, she says. Her parents, both teachers, sent her and her sister away to Cape Town when she was five years old.

It was the 1960s and Vivien’s parents were teaching at one of Knysna’s small farm schools – back then, the only places for the local coloured and black children to go if they wanted any kind of education in Knysna. The classes were big and the children in Sub A and Sub B – now grade one and grade two – were all together in one class with just one teacher.

Vivien’s parents, wanting a better education for their daughters, sent the two girls to stay with their grandmother in Cape Town where they were enrolled in a ‘proper’ primary school. It was still a coloured school – ‘I never went to a school in my life where there were white children too,’ says Vivien – but it was a decent urban school, much bigger and more structured than Knysna’s farm schools. The school was in a suburb of Cape Town, where Vivien’s grandmother rented a big house. Eventually six of Vivien’s uncles and aunts moved in too, but still there was room enough for everyone.

Until they had to move.

Not long after Vivien got there, her grandmother was told that Parow had been proclaimed a white area and she and her family had to move to a coloured township. There, they were given a small, cramped house under the government-subsidized or ‘sub-economic’ housing scheme.

‘That was my first township experience,’ says Vivien.

The next time her father visited his daughters and saw where they were living, he promptly brought them back to Knysna. Vivien was eleven years old.

By then, her parents were living in Salt River.

Vivien remembers having only the most basic facilities in Salt River. Water for washing and cooking came from springs or tanks that collected rainwater in the winter months. Toilets were ‘long drops’ dug in the ground. Light came from lamps and candles, and food was cooked on wood-fired ovens and paraffin stoves. But the house was big and there was ample space to play.

Not that Vivien settled there for very long. Ever concerned about their daughters’ education, her parents sent her and her sister to stay with family friends in town so they could be closer to their school.

I stop her there. Until I read the Land Claims report the other day, I never knew that there were ever coloured people living in Knysna itself. Who were they? Where did they live?

Vivien starts listing the names of the families, ten surnames in total. She can still remember exactly where they lived, too, identifying the houses by the white people who live there now, or the shops they’ve become.

Vivien lived in one of those houses herself, but not for long. After two years her parents sent her away again, this time because there was no proper secondary school for coloured children in Knysna. So once again she found herself in Cape Town, this time living with an aunt who’d been able to afford to build her own house in a coloured township, giving her family more space than in the boxy, pre-built houses provided by the government.

At the time, Vivien’s parents still lived in Salt River and she spent every school holiday there.

She was in her second year of university when Hornlee first became ‘home’.

Vivien’s father had died by the time her mother was told she had to move to the coloured area because her house was now on white land. Like Vivien’s aunt in Cape Town, her mother was able to afford her own piece of land in the township and have a house built on it. But it was still a difficult transition.

‘You choose who you want to associate with,’ says Vivien, speaking generally. ‘So you know you get along with these people, but you don’t fancy those people for whatever reason. They’re the natural choices you make. But the thing about living in the townships then was that you had to live next to people who just didn’t understand you, and you didn’t understand them. You didn’t have the same outlook on life, you shared nothing.’

Schools were another issue, she says. When people all over South Africa were moved to places like Hornlee, there often weren’t schools for their children yet, or there’d be a primary school but no secondary school. As a result, many coloured children stopped going to school altogether.

‘And so you broke down a whole lot of people, not by making it intentionally difficult, but by not caring that it was difficult,’ says Vivien.

I ask her what the worst things were about living in the new township.

‘You were kind of… uprooted,’ she says. ‘But I don’t want to make an effort to say how bad it was. Because I didn’t really experience it as bad. Come to think of it, many things were better. We had water in the house; we didn’t have to pray for rain any more. We had flushing toilets, we had electricity. There were practical things that were better.’

Vivien still lives in Hornlee.

‘On the whole, now that I can live elsewhere – even if I had the money – I don’t think I would,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to have to go and get used to new things. It’s my home.’

I want to hear more about the removal in 1970. Was she there when her mother got the eviction notice in Salt River? Did she help her mother move? Did the local authorities help at all?

No, she wasn’t there, says Vivien. All she knew was that one holiday she was going home to Salt River, and the next she was going home to Hornlee.

‘If you want to know about the removals, you should speak to Ronnie,’ she says. ‘He’s got lots of stories.’

I find Ronnie Davidson in the workshop round the back of the Epilepsy South Africa home.

An ex-principal at a local farm school, Ronnie now supervises the residents where they do woodwork, needlework and gardening. Today they’re hammering together trellises and vegetable crates that they’ll sell for funding for the home.

Ronnie and I go into the workshop manager’s office where we’re relatively undisturbed except for the occasional face peering round the door to ask for toilet paper.

Like Vivien, Ronnie is coloured – although he feels no need to make that distinction any more. His identity is no longer attached to the colour of his skin.

Whereas Vivien’s family moved to Hornlee from Salt River in the west, Ronnie’s moved from Concordia, a forested area high in the hills north of Knysna town.

A keen storyteller, Ronnie is happy to talk about his childhood in Concordia in the 1960s, when his family lived on a piece of land ten, twenty hectares big.

‘Let’s be conservative and say it was ten hectares,’ he says. ‘That’s still twenty rugby fields.’

He tells me his family wasn’t wealthy by any means, but nor were they deprived. His father had a car, and they had electric lights in the house that were powered by a stack of car batteries charged by a wind-powered generator.

‘When those batteries were charged, you had light for two, three days,’ he says.

Water and sanitation were less sophisticated. Like Vivien, Ronnie spent many childhood hours cleaning roofs and gutters whenever it looked like it was going to rain. Another chore that fell to the Davidson children was cleaning the bucket toilet. A common sanitation system where running water wasn’t available, bucket toilets were housed in outbuildings with two doors: a front entrance and a small door at the back through which the bucket was removed to be emptied.

Ronnie laughs at the memory. To ward off the smells, they scattered ash from their wood-fired oven over the buckets. ‘It didn’t stink,’ he says. But when it came to emptying the buckets, it still wasn’t a pleasant chore.

‘On the yard, away from the house, we had to dig holes to empty the contents of the bucket into,’ says Ronnie. ‘Often. And we were a family of eight children.’

But overall, Ronnie says, they had a good life. He and his brothers and sisters grew up playing in forests and ravines where they set traps for birds, climbed trees and ate wild berries.

As idyllic as life was for a young coloured boy in Concordia, there was another reality awaiting Ronnie whenever he went into Knysna town.

Every time he and his brothers and sisters wanted to go to the cinema, or ‘bioscope’ as Ronnie calls it, they had to go to a matinée as there was a nine o’clock curfew. Any black or coloured people on the streets of Knysna after nine were chased out by the police.

They ran out of town, he says, to make it home in time.

When they did go to the bioscope, they had to sit on hard benches on a gallery, while the white people sat downstairs in soft seats.

The post office was even more segregated, with a separate entrance for black and coloured people away from the whites-only door. Once inside, the whites and ‘non-whites’ were separated by a latticed wall that gave them just a glimpse of how the other half lived.

Things didn’t get any better as Ronnie got older. If anything, they got worse. He remembers going away to college and having to change trains in George. At the station he had to change platforms, and there was a bridge over the tracks for just that purpose. ‘Everyone used that bridge, white and brown,’ he says. ‘But in 1970, they built a second bridge next to that bridge. Then we had to walk separately. In 1970, I tell you.’

When people started being removed to Hornlee, only some of the families in Concordia were singled out for the move. It hadn’t been declared a white group area, but some of the houses were in the way of a new bypass road that was being planned.

I’ve heard about this controversial bypass since I was a child. It still hasn’t materialised.

Ronnie remembers the day they realised their family had to move, ‘They drew a cross on our gate,’ he says. ‘A white cross.’

His mother, for one, was relieved to move to the township.

Ronnie’s mother had come to Knysna from Oudtshoorn in the Klein Karoo, a semi-desert region where she’d lived in a stone house in the middle of town long before the forced removals of later years. There she had grown up with proper electricity in the house from an early age. So living in Concordia with a wind charger and car batteries providing light, but not much more, had been a big change for her.

Having electricity in Hornlee was a big thing, says Ronnie. ‘My mother could buy a food mixer.’

But there were challenges as well. For his parents, Ronnie says, the biggest adjustment was financial.

‘There was suddenly a mortgage, and rates and taxes that were never there before. We used to bury our own sewage, burn our own rubbish. Now, all of a sudden, my parents had to pay to get it removed.’

Ronnie himself missed the space of Concordia. ‘I felt like I was stuck in the township with nothing around me,’ he says.

Many years later, when he had a son of his own, he took the boy to Concordia ‘just so he could experience what I had experienced’.

There, like his father before him, the boy climbed trees, played in the forest and ate wild berries.

Even today, says Ronnie, his son still talks about that day he took him to Concordia, and showed him the life he’d left behind.

Chapter 7

Xenophobia

In my second week back in Knysna, my parents take me to lunch at Crab’s Creek, a pub on the edge of the lagoon. While we wait for the pretty black waitress to bring us our drinks, my mother says hello to a coloured lady she recognises at the table behind us. I’m introduced as the daughter who’s been living in London and the coloured lady says her daughter is overseas too.

At another table, three teenage boys are drinking bottles of Castle lager. Two of them are coloured, one is white.

So much has changed since I was their age.

There were only a handful of non-white children at Knysna High when I finished school in 1995. One of them was black, a girl in my class. In a year below me there was a coloured boy, a talented rugby player. The only others, if I remember correctly, were two younger Indian boys. They were some of the first Indian people I’d ever encountered, as most of South Africa’s Indian population was concentrated in the Natal province on the eastern coast of South Africa, where I’d never been.

It was only the year after, when I went to study in Cape Town, that I made my first black, coloured and Indian friends in an advertising college that was still predominantly white.

Back at my parents’ house, our stomachs full of pub lunch, my father and I settle down to watch TV. As my father pokes his dowel at the buttons to skip through the channels, South Africa’s new racial integration flashes before me. Mixed-race pairs of South African DJs, comedians and equestrian stars do the cha-cha on Strictly Come Dancing. In one of the locally produced soap operas, black actors speak Afrikaans one minute and English or Zulu the next. Another soap is entirely in Zulu, with English subtitles.

When I was little, we had one channel on SABC TV that broadcast only in English and Afrikaans. American shows like Buck Rogers and T. J. Hooker were dubbed into Afrikaans, with the English soundtrack broadcast simultaneously on the radio. On two separate channels, there was ‘black’ programming in African languages.

My father finds the news he was looking for and puts down the dowel.

In stark contrast to Strictly Come Dancing and the soaps, I now see the other extreme of the new South Africa: a report on recent forced removals in Johannesburg. In one incident outside a church, police grab black people, including women and children, off the streets, beating them if they don’t comply. I could be watching a scene twenty, thirty years ago. But unlike thirty years ago, those people aren’t being removed because they’re black. They’re being removed because they’re illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe who were sleeping on the street because the homeless shelter in the church was full. And unlike thirty years ago, the policemen who are beating them are also black.

When the news is over, my father goes back to poking at the TV. On one of the channels he flicks through, the same story from Johannesburg is repeated, this time in Xhosa.

I’ve been hearing and reading a lot about xenophobia in South Africa since I’ve been back here. In Knysna, black people complain about Zimbabweans, Somalis and Nigerians coming into the townships, bringing with them drugs and violence while taking jobs, houses and women. White people complain their taxes are being spent on giving those illegal immigrants special treatment. Coloured people complain they’ve been forgotten.

From what I’ve heard, it’s the black people who are most xenophobic. And in Knysna, the tension between locals and immigrants, or ‘newcomers’, has led to clashes in the townships at least once in the past year.

The stories I’ve heard from various people in town are confirmed by reports on national newspapers’ websites. During what was called South Africa’s ‘xenophobic unrest’ in 2008, several Somali-run shops in Knysna’s townships were looted and their owners driven out of the community. Over a hundred foreign nationals from Somalia and other African countries fled the townships and sought refuge at the police station. Teachers at the local schools were told not to send any foreign children back to the townships. For months, the foreigners had to stay in tents on the rugby and hockey fields at Knysna’s sports park until it was safe to return to their homes.

It seems there’s still tension in Knysna now.

One of the main stories in the Knysna-Plett Herald these last few weeks has been about a group of African traders who’ve been removed from their long-established roadside market by the Knysna Municipality. The reason for it wasn’t xenophobia – the municipality was planning to widen that stretch of road and the traders were in the way. But the public response to the money spent moving the traders – to a new site with pre-built market stalls, toilets and twenty-four-hour security – has had definite xenophobic overtones.

It’s not that the traders are ‘newcomers’ – many of them came from Zimbabwe and Nigeria as far back as ten, fifteen years ago. But in many people’s eyes they’re still nothing more than illegal immigrants.

According to one angry letter in the Herald, ‘These illegals are not “previously disadvantaged”. They come to our country of their own free will and are now using us. They are opportunists and should be treated as such.’

This xenophobic attitude seems to be common in the new South Africa, but it’s news to me. It has never made the headlines in the UK and my mother, who’s always quick to phone me when a family friend has died or there’s been some or other scandal in the government, has never mentioned it either.

So when my mother invites me on a diversity training course organised by her work, I go along in the hope that it will shed some light on xenophobia and how South Africans are being advised to deal with it.

The course is held at a home for the aged in Hornlee where we have a large, cold room to ourselves. There are fifteen people taking part, most of them employees at Epilepsy South Africa, plus a handful from other charitable organisations in neighbouring towns.

The course-leader, a man called Ismaiyili from somewhere in North Africa, divides us into groups, deliberately mixing white, black, coloured, English, Afrikaans, Xhosa, young, old, male and female. I’m separated from my mother and end up in a group with a black man, two black women and two coloured women.

From the start, xenophobia features high on the agenda – as high as the first page of the handbook we’re given, where it says that a recent report on migration in South Africa showed that ‘the practice of xenophobia by South Africans is amongst the highest in the world’.

Ismaiyili asks us to discuss, in our groups, whether foreigners should be allowed to set up a business or get a job in South Africa.

Within our group, there’s a barrier to our communication: the older of the coloured women speaks only Afrikaans. And the younger of the black men refuses to speak anything other than English. I end up translating for the coloured woman’s benefit.

When I was growing up, it was mandatory for white children to study both English and Afrikaans at school.

Having established in our group that by ‘foreigners’ we mean Zimbabweans, Nigerians, Somalis and Mozambicans, my three black team-mates insist that those foreigners shouldn’t be allowed to work in South Africa at all.

‘They come here and they take our jobs,’ says one.

‘And they’re cheap labour,’ says another. ‘We can’t compete.’

I try to be impartial and tell them how the same could be said of me going to London and working there.

They don’t seem convinced, but eventually my black team-mates concede that it’s OK for foreigners to start businesses in South Africa, but only if they give South Africans jobs. The coloured people agree.

The rest of the day deals with more general diversity in the workplace. Some of the most surprising moments come when the older black and coloured delegates share their stories of apartheid and how they were treated ‘back in the day’.

The most junior delegates, about ten, twelve years younger than me, are amazed and amused at the stories of a world that seems foreign to them. And yet they fail to see the parallels with their own attitudes towards their Zimbabwean, Nigerian, Somali and Mozambican neighbours.

The next day, I take my research to the library and the Internet, where I scour news reports, articles and readers’ letters on the subject.

Unemployment seems to be one of the main reasons behind the xenophobia. Black South African workers are more aware of their rights than ever, and unions are quick to stage walkouts over pay. The illegal immigrants, on the other hand, work cheaply. And they work hard.

Housing is another issue. For years, the government has been building identical simple brick houses in townships across South Africa as part of its Reconstruction and Development Programme, or RDP. The houses are meant solely for South Africans, but some foreign nationals from neighbouring countries have found their way into them, usually by renting them off cash-strapped South Africans who are willing to go back to living in a shack in their own back yard if it means earning some extra money.

I’ve heard that some RDP homeowners have even ‘sold’ their houses in unofficial transactions for as little as a month’s wages. I wonder whether they realise they’ve blown their one chance to get a house from the government.

The black families who are still waiting for their houses in Knysna’s townships after fifteen years of promises from the ANC government are understandably angry when they see the Zimbabweans and Nigerians moving in.

It’s hard to believe that, less than forty years ago, there were hardly any black people here.

Chapter 8

1972

Owéna hadn’t come across many black people in her life. Growing up in the Western Cape, the non-white people she encountered were mostly coloured. That was because the government had declared the entire region a ‘coloured labour preference area’, meaning that, by law, manual and semi-skilled jobs were to go to coloured people over black.

If a black person wanted to try their luck getting a job in the Western Cape, or indeed anywhere in South Africa, they also had the pass laws to contend with.

The pass laws were part of the apartheid government’s plan to restrict the influx of black people into ‘white’ South Africa from the African homelands. Created by the National Party government in the 1950s, the homelands were ten regions within South Africa’s borders where the different black tribes were meant to live, develop and work among their own. Despite black South Africans outnumbering white by around eight to one, the ten homelands together made up just thirteen per cent of the country’s land.

Encouraged by the government, several of the homelands became self-governing, quasi-independent states in 1959.

In 1970, a law was passed that made all black South Africans citizens of their homelands and no longer of South Africa, removing their right to vote and making white people the new majority.

If any black person wanted to travel outside the borders of their homeland, they had to carry a passbook at all times. And if they wanted to live and work in a South African town or city, they needed one of two things in their passbook: either a so-called ‘section 10’ stamp, or a temporary work permit.

The section 10 stamp gave the bearer of the passbook permission to live somewhere permanently, usually because they were born there. To live and work anywhere else, they needed a work permit that had to be renewed every year. An employer had to apply for that permit on behalf of a worker, so that no black person could move between towns and cities without having a guaranteed job at their destination. The work permit usually covered only the worker, not his wife or children, who had to stay behind. Anyone caught without the necessary paperwork was evicted and sent back to where they came from – a job that fell to the Bantu Affairs Administration Board.

Formed in 1972, Bantu Administration, as most people called it even after its name changed a number of times, was the government department responsible for the ‘development and administration’ of South Africa’s black population. As an enforcer of apartheid, the Administration was despised by the black people and in this context, the word ‘bantu’ – Zulu for ‘people’ – became offensive by association.

The government’s influx control meant Knysna, like the rest of the Western Cape, didn’t have much of a black population in 1972.

The few black people in Knysna – those who had been born and raised in the area and so had the necessary section 10 stamp to stay there – lived among the coloured people in places like Salt River until they were evicted along with their coloured neighbours.

But the black people couldn’t go to Hornlee with its schools and its churches and its community centres and sports fields. Because, under the Group Areas Act, black and coloured couldn’t mix.

With no township of their own to go to, they ended up squatting in shacks in the hills around town, on land that was undeclared for any particular colour.

In a desperate attempt to give their families a better life, many black people attempted to get into Bigai by pretending to be coloured, even changing their surnames to sound less African.

The authorities had various tests and techniques to catch out those imposters. One was to check whether the person could speak Afrikaans, as most coloured people spoke it as their first language. A black man from the Transkei, the official Xhosa homeland, would never have had the opportunity to learn the language, and so would be exposed as ‘acting coloured’ if he failed to answer a question in Afrikaans. Alternatively, a policeman might ask that black man to say ‘Ag-en-tagtig klein sakkies aartappeltjies’, an Afrikaans phrase that simply meant ‘eighty-eight small bags of potatoes’, but had so many guttural sounds and inflections completely alien to the African tongue that few Xhosa people could pronounce it.

Fortunately, many of the Xhosa people native to Knysna spoke fluent Afrikaans, having grown up among the coloured community. And so there were some of them who passed the language test and made it into Hornlee.

Those who didn’t returned to the squatter camps.

Whereas the Western Cape had no black population to speak of, it was a very different story in the neighbouring Eastern Cape.

With no coloured labour preference and a border shared with the poverty-stricken Transkei homeland, the Eastern Cape was a popular destination for migrant Xhosa workers looking to feed their starving families. Once there, they worked in factories and on farms, in gardens and on building sites, anything they could get to be able to send some money back home.

But the black workers far outnumbered the available jobs in the Eastern Cape. Desperate for money, many of them turned their attention to the Western Cape. And when they heard rumours of job opportunities in Knysna’s sawmills and furniture factories, one black man after another took his chances and moved there, work permit or not.

From towns and cities like Umtata and East London, they hitchhiked to Knysna, a long and arduous journey often undertaken on the back of a Toyota or Isuzu bakkie, the pick-ups popular with South Africans and especially farmers.

Those people with work permits were often put up in compounds on their employers’ premises. Those without permits, however, had no choice but to join the squatters in the hills, where they lived in fear of getting caught.

The Bantu Administration van was a familiar and feared sight in the squatter camps. Raids were common, often at three, four in the morning in an effort to catch people while they were sleeping.

But word spread quickly, and the ‘illegals’ were good at hiding.

Chapter 9

Jack and Piet

As a white child in Knysna, I knew nothing of the Bantu Administration or its work. So it comes as news to me that one man who used to work for the Administration is someone I know.

Piet van Eeden’s family went to the same church as mine, and his daughters were just a few years ahead of me at school.

My parents tell me there’s another ex-employee of the Bantu Administration who’s still in Knysna. His identity is even more surprising than Piet’s, not because I know him – I don’t – but because he’s black.

Neither of them is hard to track down. Piet van Eeden now manages a supermarket near my parents’ house, and his black ex-colleague Jack Matjolweni is working at the Department of Labour.

I call Jack at work, introducing myself by my married name. At first he sounds guarded, but when I explain who my parents are, he’s more forthcoming.

‘Aaaah, I know your mother,’ he says. I can hear he’s smiling now. ‘And I know your father very well.’

My father often deals with Jack to sort out benefits for Johnny, our gardener.

Jack says he’ll come to my parents’ house after work.

I’ve heard of Jack. In the last week I’ve had a few conversations with people from the townships and Jack’s name came up often – and never in a favourable light. It’s not surprising. A black man who worked for the apartheid government and raided his own people’s houses to catch women’s husbands and boyfriends and send them away couldn’t have been popular.

One woman I spoke to put it down to the attitude with which Jack did his job. He was young and full of spirit, she said. He was just too keen.

Jack is all smiles when my father opens the door. He’s tall, so tall he has to bend over slightly to get through the door between the kitchen and the dining room. He looks much younger than his fifty years in a leather jacket and khaki chinos that make him resemble a black Indiana Jones.

Jack speaks Afrikaans to my father but switches to English when he speaks to me. It seems more natural that way, as we spoke English on the phone. His English is broken with a strong African accent and he throws in the odd Afrikaans word here and there.

I offer Jack a coffee, tea, maybe a beer. Just hot water, he says. With sugar. I bring him his drink with a bowl of freshly baked rusks.

Jack laughs when he remembers the past. He has a high-pitched giggle that doesn’t go with his face or his size, and I find myself warming to him. It’s not that he’s making light of history by laughing about it, rather that he can hardly believe his own stories of how things used to be.

Jack tells me he was still at school when he started working for the Bantu Administration. He was seventeen.

He was recruited by chance in 1976 while he was waiting in line in a Bantu Administration office. Born in Humansdorp in the Eastern Cape, he needed a stamp in his passbook for permission to go to school in a nearby town. While Jack’s papers were being processed, one of the white Bantu Administration officials came to him and offered him a job. ‘He came to me and said “Hey, I want someone like you,”’ says Jack.

By ‘someone like you’, the man meant a black boy who could speak Xhosa, Afrikaans and English, and was still young enough to be trained and shaped into whatever the Bantu Administration wanted him to be.

Jack says the fact that he was only seventeen and still at school didn’t seem to faze his prospective employer.

‘He said I could go to night school and finish my studies that way.’

Jack accepted the job. It was just too attractive an offer to refuse. Being a Bantu Administration employee meant he no longer needed permits in his passbook. It also made it relatively easy to transfer to Knysna.

As a Bantu Administration inspector, Jack had to check people’s passbooks and make sure they had the necessary permits to be in Knysna. Sometimes he would go from door to door in the squatter camps looking for ‘illegals’, other times he would get a call or an anonymous letter from someone blowing the whistle on a rival for a job or a girl.

‘What, black people would turn each other in?’ I ask him.

‘Ja!’ he says. Yes.

Sometimes the letters and calls were from coloured workers who’d lost out on a job. Other times they came from white employers, maybe bitter about losing a worker to a competitor who was willing to pay more. But most often the letters and calls were from black people: jealous boyfriends in Knysna who wanted to get back at the men who took their women, or concerned wives in the Transkei who hadn’t heard from their husbands for months.

Jack explains that most black workers left their wives and families behind in the homelands when they came to Knysna, promising to send money as often as they could. But a year was a long time for a man to be away from his wife, and many of the workers took girlfriends in Knysna. Jack remembers wives turning up from the Transkei and the Eastern Cape looking for their husbands. He tells me how those wives would cry when they saw their husbands with other women, often with new children.

‘If somebody came to me saying the husband has left and he’s got kids, then I was fighting for that,’ says Jack. ‘I was not worried about girlfriends and boyfriends. But I was always fighting for married people.’

Not all of the illegals in Knysna were married, however, and some of them fell in love with the local girls. Those men found themselves in a different predicament. Even if they married their Knysna girl, they wouldn’t be allowed to stay without a permit. Should they try to find work without a permit, they increased their chances of getting caught. And should they get caught, they’d be sent away, back to where there was no work to support their new family.

‘What about those women?’ I ask.

‘It made no difference,’ he says. ‘The men had to go back.’

And leave the wife and children behind?

‘The law doesn’t look on that,’ says Jack. ‘That time they would say the wife must go to Transkei.’

I am amazed at his apparent loyalty to his then employer, the apartheid government, and his almost blind acceptance of its laws. But he admits that it simply wasn’t his place to say anything.

‘I was an inspector,’ he says. ‘They wouldn’t worry about me.’

It’s an attitude I’ve heard from other black people and white people too, my parents included. That, back then, you didn’t disagree with the government; you just accepted that things were the way they were, you did your job and you kept quiet. Those who didn’t were marked out either as activists or sympathisers, both of which could land you in trouble.

Throughout our conversation, Jack insists that he was helping people – and that the people were grateful for what he was doing. The outsiders were coming and taking the locals’ jobs and women, he says. The locals wanted them out.

I ask him how the people reacted when he caught them.

‘They would fight,’ he says. ‘It was dangerous.’

That’s why he carried a gun.

‘Because it’s dangerous,’ he says again. ‘They can kill you.’

Sometimes, Jack says, he had to run. Other times he would get the police to go back with him. But he never had to use the gun, and no one ever as much as pointed a gun at him. Knives, yes, ‘to try to open the road and run,’ he says. ‘But if they see you’ve got a gun, nobody will bother you.’

He pauses for a long time. He’s not laughing now.

‘It was…’ he stops again.

‘Yoh, it was very hard. Because it’s my job. If I couldn’t do that, then I would be fired.’

He says people threatened to kill him sometimes, saying it wasn’t right, the job he was doing.

‘And I would say to them, “Give me a better job, and I will do that.”’

I’ve heard that Jack’s house was burned down twice but he insists it only happened once, much later, in 1993 when there was widespread unrest following the assassination of the ANC’s Chris Hani. It was the year before South Africa’s first democratic election.

At that time, he says, anyone who lived in the township and worked for the government was a target.

Jack was already working for the Department of Labour then, but admits that there might have been people who’d held a grudge about his work for the Bantu Administration in the past.

After his house was burned down, Jack moved to Hornlee, where he still lives today.

When I ask him what the most difficult part of his old job was, he says it was sending the people back to where they came from.

‘Why was that difficult?’ I ask.

‘Because you’ve got a heart, don’t you?’ says Jack. ‘You’re still a human being.’

I know the shop that Piet van Eeden manages; it’s where my father buys his newspaper. I offer to go and buy it for him so I have an excuse to speak to Oom Piet.

In the same way that Vivien Paremoer has always been Tannie to me, Piet has always been Oom.

I find Oom Piet at his manager’s station near the tills and he recognises me right away. There’s the usual chit-chat of what I’m doing now, where his daughters are in the world, how my brothers are doing and who in the family has had babies. But when I mention the book, his attitude changes. He doesn’t seem happy talking about the past.

‘I’ve talked to a lot of people for a lot of books and articles,’ he says. ‘The last time I did that, I said “never again.”’

I ask him what kinds of books and articles those were.

‘I can’t talk about it now,’ he says, looking pointedly at the cashiers behind the tills. They’re all black.

He seems wary of talking about it at all.

‘It’s behind me,’ he says. ‘That whole system. I’ve left it behind.’

Just when I think he’s blown me off, he carries on: ‘But only because it’s you, and because I know you,’ he says, ‘I’ll talk to you a little.’

He says he’ll come over to my parents’ house the next day.

After his initial apprehension, Oom Piet seems relaxed and happy to talk to me in my parents’ house.

Oom Piet’s take on the role of the Bantu Administration is very different from Jack’s. Whereas Jack focused very much on the social aspect of reuniting wives in the Transkei homeland with their straying husbands, Oom Piet saw the role as a more practical one.

‘We had to make sure the economy kept going by supplying workers, and seeing that it was done on a proper, coordinated basis,’ he says. ‘Otherwise, if you had to just throw open the doors, you can imagine what kind of influx it would have caused.’

And, he says, you couldn’t allow those people to come in without providing the necessary services for them. But, in a catch-22 situation, you couldn’t budget properly for those services when the censuses weren’t giving a true reflection of the size of the population. And the people who were in Knysna illegally avoided getting polled in an effort not to get caught.

‘You do a census,’ he says, ‘and the census says there are a thousand people. But in reality there are two thousand. Now you work according to the numbers and build a school. Then they say the school is too small. It’s always too small.’

He tells me it was impossible to keep everyone happy.

‘Say I let people come in,’ says Oom Piet. ‘Then they’ll probably come to me later and say we now need church premises. Then I say OK, fine, we’ll make a plan. Now you give them premises for a church. And tomorrow they come and say but that’s an Anglican Church. Now we need this church and another church and another church. If you make one concession, you really need to do your homework. And that’s where things got messy.’

There was never enough money, he says. Funds from the provincial government were extremely limited, and because of Knysna’s hilly terrain, any building work and infrastructure cost considerably more than in most other places in the region.

On the positive side, he says he feels like he meant something to the people.

‘You were at once a teacher, a social worker, a magistrate. You solved problems, you served people with knowledge.’

But he realises those people might not have liked everything he did. As well as controlling the influx of black people into the area, the Bantu Administration was responsible for removing squatters from white-owned land – two jobs that couldn’t have made him popular with the black community.

‘It’s like traffic police,’ he says. ‘We all agree there have to be traffic police on the roads. But they have to catch other people, not you. And that’s how it is. As long as the traffic cop catches other people, it’s hunky-dory. And who likes the traffic cop? We’re all friendly when we see him. But when he walks away, we say, “That’s the last job I’d want.”’

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