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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.