For The People

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.”’

Chapter 10

1972

Owéna and Theron saw the shacks appearing on the hills around Knysna; small structures made from corrugated iron, sheet metal and bits of timber. Doors were hardboard or rough planks. Some shacks had glass windows, found or bought. Others just had planks of plywood nailed over window frames.

The land on which those people squatted was usually unused and undeclared for any particular racial group – often because it was so uneven, remote or inaccessible that white people didn’t want it.

In one case, however, twenty-two black families settled in a wooded area called Hunters Home that, unbeknownst to them, was private property belonging to white people. And suddenly Knysna took notice.

During a particularly bitter winter in 1972, those twenty-two families were told to vacate their homes. The municipality allocated an empty piece of land at Concordia for them to move to, and made trucks available to transport their furniture and building materials to the new site, some ten kilometres away. Should the families fail to move, their homes would be bulldozed – a measure entirely within the law.

When word of the situation reached Child Welfare, Owéna was appalled – even more so when she saw where the families, including several small children, would be moved to: an undeveloped area with no water, electricity or sanitation, where they would be entirely without shelter until they rebuilt their homes.

But there was nothing she or her colleagues could do to stop it. The people were squatting illegally. And the black community were outside Child Welfare’s remit.

They could do little more than provide food for the families, giving them bread, peanut butter, fruit and milk powder with the help of the Red Cross and Kupugani, a not-for-profit organisation that supplied food enriched with extra vitamins and minerals. The local Rotary Club contributed too, giving firewood to help the families through the winter.

When that still wasn’t enough, Child Welfare put out an appeal to the public. Help us help these people, they said. Please give what you can.

The people of Knysna didn’t take much persuading. Most of them were shocked when they realised the conditions in which their black neighbours were expected to live, and more than one of them felt guilty for not having realised it before.

One by one, the boxes and bags turned up outside the Child Welfare offices. Jackets and jumpers that children had outgrown. School shoes whose feet had gone to university. Tins of meatballs, corned beef and sweetcorn, some from the back of a pantry, some bought especially. From people’s own gardens came fresh carrots and potatoes. From their businesses and their backyards came planks, nails, windows and roofing. If anyone couldn’t drop off a donation in person, Owéna went to their house to collect it. Back at home, she persuaded Theron to give up some of his shirts and cardigans.

The food, clothes and building materials donated by the people of Knysna found good homes in the squatter camps. But a bigger problem was the lack of running water and electricity – and there was nothing the local authorities or charities could do about it.

By law, if the Knysna Municipality wanted to deliver any services to the black community, it had to establish an official black township. But the municipality couldn’t just build such a township. That was the remit of the East Cape Administration Board, the provincial government under whose jurisdiction the black community fell.

Knysna’s town council had raised the need for a black township as early as the 1950s, even going so far as identifying a piece of land for the purpose. But without the necessary approval from the government, it could go no further. And with such a tiny black community compared to the Eastern Cape, Knysna wasn’t very high on the government’s list of priorities.

As Knysna’s squatter camps grew and the living conditions deteriorated, Owéna’s boss at Child Welfare, a heavy-browed spinster called Dorothy Broster – Miss Broster to everyone she worked with – desperately wanted to get involved to help the people. But, like the municipality officials, she found her hands tied with red tape.

At the time, the South African government had three different departments dealing with the welfare of the three main race groups: for whites there was the Department of Social Welfare; for coloured people, Coloured Affairs; and for black people, the Bantu Administration.

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