Читать книгу The Lie of 1652 - Patric Tariq Mellet - Страница 3

What is it that motivates me to write about the loss of land, the loss of belonging and the loss of identity here at the southern tip of Africa? Is it just that I am deeply bothered by the vast expanse of shacks across half of the Cape Flats and Cape Peninsula where every rainy season people are flooded out of the only place that they call home, and every windy season they are burnt out? Could it be that I am disturbed about how many people on the Cape Flats are backyard dwellers where three or more families share tiny sub-economic homes and most are unemployed, with communities besieged by gangs wreaking havoc and death rates usually associated with wars? Or is that a culture of brutality and violence in general, and against women and children in particular, has become so entrenched that society as a whole now hardly blinks an eye when figures such as 47 for deaths and an equal numbers for rapes in just one Cape Town district are reported on most weekends?

Or is it the stark poverty and nothingness that greets me when travelling to rural areas where each smart, predominantly white town has what can only be described as a segregated dormitory ‘slavery town’ next to it? Is it because 25 years after the fall of apartheid there is little evidence of agrarian reform in these same rural districts? Or perhaps my focus results from the fact that I spent much of my life as a freedom fighter with many years in underground resistance and then more in exile, active in the broad liberation movement? Is it that I am afraid of the consequences for our country of what the poet Langston Hughes called ‘a dream deferred’?

All these questions contribute to my consciousness. But my motivation goes back all the way to my own childhood and personal experiences and feelings of homelessness, a lack of belonging, exploitation, and trying to recover an identity that had been erased as a result of social engineering.

As a child, two things stood out for me. The first was that my single mother and I did not have a place called home. Mum, a low-paid laundry worker in District Six, rented rooms in other people’s homes and moved about frequently. In her room she would have a bed, an ablutions bucket, a basin for bathing, a Primus stove for cooking, a table and a chair. It was a Spartan existence.

Much of the time she could not have me with her, so I was fostered by three different families before I was six years old. The trajectory of my life from there was a short stint with my mother, and then into a brutal children’s asylum, next into an industrial trade school, and at the end of my 15th year into a factory to work. There was never any sense of ‘home’. No sense of belonging, except perhaps to District Six where my mother worked and where she took me with her to her workplace during those periods that I lived with her. In the District my mum was known as ‘Cleaners’ and I was ‘Cleaners’ Boy’, and that was about as much a sense of belonging and identity that I had in my upbringing.

My lack of rootedness also arose out of my dysfunctional family life. My mother, who was 40 years old when I was born, had had four other children before me, one of whom had died. Mum had been divorced from her children’s father and then briefly had a relationship with my father. My father, or sire, as he is known to his many children by different mothers, had been born in District Six. He was a shoemaker working in a factory near the garment factory where my mother had been working at that time. They were never married and they acrimoniously parted ways when I was just 18 months old. At the time I was in hospital recovering from third-degree burns over my upper body as a result of a Primus-stove cooking accident at home. Sixty years after my accident, the Primus stove is still a symbol of poverty in South Africa.

Mum’s mainstay was her matriarchal extended family – my grandmother and my mum’s older sister, Doll. It was at this time that apartheid was being ushered in. ‘Race’ classification had a devastating effect on our family that were a mix of people who would be classified as Coloured, Indian and White. (As will be shown in the book, this classification system defied the fact that those classified as ‘Coloured’ have 195 roots of origin, the vast majority of whom were Africans, with Asian and some European admixture.) My grandmothers were ‘Coloured’ and my grandfathers white, my Aunty Doll’s husband was Indian, and my cousins had features ranging from the darkest Asian looks to the fairest of European complexions.

Apartheid with its race classification, group areas, separate amenities, prohibition of mixed marriages, and immorality legislation decimated a family that was as multi-ethnic as ours. As poor people, the adults, all women, also relied heavily on one another economically and for practical and moral support, especially with us kids. Under the new apartheid laws, the assault on family life became too much for my mother’s sister. Aunty Doll and her entire brood of children and grandchildren moved to the United Kingdom to get away from the classification monster and its impact on lives. Only one son stayed on and became a seaman who spent much of his time on the high seas while his wife and children remained in Grassy Park in Cape Town.

My mum was then very much on her own with her fatherless child. In desperation, she placed an advert in a weekly church newspaper asking for a family to take me in as one of their own. That was my third foster home, where I spent two years in a family that had eight children. Mum had a nervous breakdown and was in no position to work, nor to look after herself and take care of me. I was aware enough to know that she felt alone and vulnerable, having lost her family support structure.

It was at this point that as an eight-year-old I briefly came under the influence of a German nun from the Holy Cross Convent in District Six, who did my mother a favour by looking after me sometimes when she could not take me along to her workplace because of company inspectors’ visits.

Sister Mary Martin became my part-time carer for a while. She had a devotion to the Peruvian slave saint Martino de Porres of Lima and I would often see her kneeling at the feet of St Martin’s statue, talking to him. A white woman asking for guidance from a statue of a long-dead black man was a sight to behold for a kid whose family life had been so disrupted by the apartheid system. Through storytelling, Sister Mary Martin introduced me to San Martino de Porres and to the history of slavery and the connection that the people around her in District Six had to the enslaved at the Cape. The stories captivated me and provided me with a key to understanding what the deeper sense of ‘belonging’ was all about. It was my first experience of being able to associate deeply with anything. District Six and Marty, as I called him, became my muses for life.

As I grew up, I came to learn of my own family heritage rooted in the African and Asian enslaved and in local indigenous African peoples. I learnt about white people owning Africans and Asians as slaves – people who were treated worse than animals. People who got no compensation at all, not even the measly five rand per week my mother was earning from Monday to Saturday at the Hanover Street laundry shop. Over time I came to learn that 24 of my own ancestors were Africans and Asians who were enslaved, and to this day I have a soul connection to African and Asian cultures.

I learnt that I was part of a bigger whole – ‘our’. In the mid-1960s when the destruction of District Six and forced removals under the ethnic cleansing brought on by the Group Areas Act of 1950 began, my child’s mind was horrified about this wrenching of people from their homes and from the land under their feet. What had once been wastelands on the Cape Flats became the dumping grounds for those removed from ‘grey areas’ (so-called racially mixed suburbs) across the southern suburbs of Cape Town from Sea Point to Simon’s Town.

Father Vincent O’Gorman, an old non-conformist Irish priest, was my high-school history teacher in standard six. On the first day of class, he dramatically threw the history textbook into the rubbish bin while loudly exclaiming: ‘Propaganda! Rubbish! I will not teach you this rubbish. At the end of the year before you write exams, I will coach you about what the Education Department wants, but until then we will explore history. Official histories are versions. There are always other versions. Don’t even accept mine. I want you to remember this throughout your lives.’ And so it came to be that a young boy had an early awakening to a lifelong path of struggling against racism, apartheid and dispossession on the path to freedom.

Though unable to continue my schooling beyond a trade-school junior certificate, I was an avid reader who sought out books about African, Asian and Latin American struggle heroes and their beliefs. I was particularly drawn to Latin American liberation theologians, some of who were among the most radical leaders of that time. I embarked on a path of self-education and lifelong learning and would eventually attain an MSc degree in my mid-40s through self-funded part-time night study.

Over time I would, by taking the step of commitment to liberation, find myself in a position to learn at the feet of such great leaders as OR Tambo, Dan Thloome, Henry ‘Squire’ Makgothi, Ray Alexander, Ruth Mompati, Sophie de Bruyn, Reg September, Wolfie Kodesh, Archie Sibeko, Joe Slovo and so many more. I was fortunate later to undergo liberation movement training and mentorship under one of South Africa’s foremost academic thinkers, Professor Jack Simons. Jack did much to help me understand and make sense of who I was and what all the ingredients were that made up identity. Joe Slovo and Jabulani Mzala Nxumalo were others who contributed to that learning curve. I was furnished with the basic intellectual tools that assisted me to explore the wonderful world of identity when colour, ‘race’, ethnicity, ideology, primacy and nationalism of any type are removed from the picture.

This is how it came to be that I took my studious interest in Southern African social history to a new level. The themes of subjugation of indigenous peoples, land dispossession and expropriation of labour without compensation, loss of independent livelihoods, loss of African social infrastructure, and the brutalisation of slavery all came into focus. I have travelled the world, visiting and living in over thirty countries, and seen war and peace, affluence and poverty. In none of the societies I observed was the rich–poor divide as great as it is in South Africa. The dialectical relationship between loss and denial of home or land on the one hand, and enslavement or expropriation of unpaid labour on the other, is the theme that runs through every black person’s experience in South Africa. It deeply impacts the soul of people.

In recent years, writers such as Botlhale Tema in Land of My Ancestors (2019) and Tembeka Ngcukaitobi in The Land is Ours (2018) have begun different conversations about land, slavery and the genesis of what we call the ‘land question’ today. The narrative of this book joins in conversation with theirs in exploring what Africans lost through the colonial expropriation of land and, by extension, home, belonging, identity, soul, support systems and social cohesion.

The year 1652 has been presented as the genesis of social history in South Africa, and of human advancement and civilisation of Africans. Our history was relegated to the realm of the natural history framework of Iron Age and Stone Age hominins. African social history as taught by institutions of learning in South Africa was said to have begun with the establishment of a European colony in 1652. This can be referred to as the ‘1652 paradigm’. Despite an abundance of research from a range of academic fields that exposes the fallacy of this paradigm, it is still widely entrenched. The aim of this book is to break out of this constricting approach and look at African social history from long before 1652 and beyond this paradigm, incorporating key parts of history that have been ignored by mainstream studies or have remained restricted to academic debate and discourse that seldom reaches the public arena.

Five themes will be explored in five chapters. The book draws on studies in the fields of history, archaeology, genetics, linguistics, rock art, anthropology, climatology, social history and oral history to contrast some of the latest thinking with colonial and neocolonial interpretations.

The first chapter challenges the colonial myth that presents 17th-century southern Africa as ‘an empty land’ free of Africans, save for a few wandering San and Khoe who conveniently had no interest in or consciousness of land ownership. It also debunks the myth that at about the same time of European exploration of what is now South Africa, a mass invasion of black alien people swooped down from Nigeria, Cameroon and the Great Lakes and tried to wrest the land from the San, Khoe and Europeans. The chapter provides a narrative that contests the colonial ‘empty land’ narrative by looking at the period from 1000 BCE until 1652 CE. By taking a social history approach, it fundamentally challenges the colonial constriction of African people’s progress to a version of natural history. Its focus is on the peopling of southern Africa over 3 000 years and the trajectory of social formation over that time.

The second chapter looks at Khoe and European engagement over 52 years prior to 1652, involving the establishment of a Khoe trader community, and the first ‘hot war’ between the Dutch and the Khoe that led to the expulsion of all Khoe communities from the Cape Peninsula. The loss of the first indigenous direct-trading development by the Khoe at the hands of the Dutch generally does not feature in other historical narratives. This story culminates with Van Riebeeck’s words written by his own hand in his journal: ‘We had to tell them that their land had fallen to us by the sword.’ This debunks the version that all land acquired by Europeans was by means of civilised treaties and fair bargaining.

The third chapter moves from the genesis of land dispossession at the shoreline frontier to look at the four instruments of land dispossession as well as the nineteen wars of dispossession over 227 years that resulted in the formation of the Cape Colony. Along this trajectory, one community of Africans after the other faced a range of atrocities and dispossession of land and livelihoods, and became conquered subjects of colonial rule. Against this background, the chapter raises the issue of ‘crimes against humanity’ as described in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and asks whether politicians’ articulation of restorative justice as a call for ‘expropriation of land without compensation’ should not be formulated differently.

The fourth chapter tackles the often-forgotten question of who added productive value to the land seized by the Europeans from indigenous Africans. This is the story of migrants of colour largely forcibly brought to the Cape as enslaved people from elsewhere in Africa and from Asia. It is made clear that without the skills and labour of enslaved and later also indentured and migrant workers, there would not have been towns and villages, road infrastructure, built environments and land transformed into productive farms. Commanders and governors of the early Cape constantly appealed to the United Dutch East India Company (VOC) for slave labour and skills, as the Europeans were unable to do the required work for ultimate European control of the land and could not meet the increasing demand by passing vessels for produce and services.

The fifth chapter argues that, to understand the loss of land and the historical narrative beyond a 1652 colonial paradigm, we must also deal with the question of alienation from the land and its relationship to loss of identity, namely de-Africanisation as part of an imposed ideological framework. It also looks at the ties that bind us as Africans of diverse ethnicities and cultures, particularly our common cause of facing the adversity of crimes against humanity and transcending that adversity. Divide-and-rule strategies relied on the de-Africanisation of local identities that had evolved over 3 000 years, rationalised local identities, and created two silos of Africans labelled ‘Natives’ and ‘Coloureds’.

In the conclusion, I turn to contemporary times and argue that, in the context of restorative justice, decolonisation should be understood in a much more comprehensive way than is suggested by the narrowly framed ‘land question’.

All histories are versions, and this book, like all works, is a version or interpretation of a lived reality and a path of learning. In making my thoughts and explorations part of public discourse, I am opening this narrative to engagement by others with a wide array of views that may challenge my own – that is the nature of discourse. There are a great many fascinating perspectives in other works, and I encourage all to explore these. My only caution is that, as soon as someone presents their version as being the absolute truth rather than a perspective, healthy distrust should set in.

My sincere wish is for people to explore beyond the imposed borders – physical or mental – no matter whether this comes from the colonial or neocolonial corner or from new gatekeepers of what may be considered to be politically correct or ethnically correct. The citations in this book are not there simply to accredit authors or to back up arguments. They are also intended to assist exploration by providing references to enable readers to consult the sources themselves and formulate their own perspectives.

A need has been expressed for an easy reference work on the subject of the history of African loss of land and sustainable livelihoods, the breakdown of structures of social cohesion and the deconstruction of culture, as well as enslavement and expropriation of labour without compensation. While the book is an attempt to meet this need, it is by far not a comprehensive account of all facets of our past. It is a simple reader covering just five broad areas to encourage people to explore our past and not just accept the stunted version of history they may have been taught at school. There is also a need articulated by many who cry out for belonging and reunion with ancestral roots lost in the sands of time as land and people were removed from each other. For memories to heal, the memory must be restored and shared. Bringing to light the history that has been hidden is the start of a process of restorative memory that is vital to restorative justice.

PATRIC TARIQ MELLET