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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.