The Group Areas Act and Port Elizabeth's Heritage
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The Group Areas Act and Port Elizabeth’s heritage: A Study of Memorial Recollection in the South End Museum by Palesa Kadi 15 November 2007 A mini thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Magister Artium in Public and Visual History, University of the Western Cape Supervisor: Prof. Leslie Witz ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis is a dedication to my parents, Tsepo and Maria Kadi. To my two brothers, Teboho and Kabelo may you see the value of our parents sacrifice through my achievements and learn from that. To my supervisor and professional mentor, Prof Leslie Witz, I have seen darker days in writing this thesis and all you did was to give me space to realize my potential. The baby steps I have taken in the History department since 1997 have come to fruition and may many others realize that history is still relevant in the developing South Africa. And hence I say I salute you my Captain! Writing this mini thesis has been a very emotional path for me as I had to deal with my own internal fights of procrastination. This was a very lonely exercise and yet I pulled through. Since 2004, my professional growth has been inspired by this particular research. My position as Head: Arts Culture and Heritage for the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality came as an ‘add on’ as the original ideas for this research were conceived whilst working for Public Policy Partnership at the University of the Western Cape. I am able to say that through the assistance of Prof Witz, this research was tailored to give insight to the complexity of the heritage landscape of former Port Elizabeth. With this research I have advised Council and argued in the Municipality from an informed position. I would also like to thank Fiona Clayton for streamlining my referencing; your intervention has brought me sanity. I salute my captains who made a great impact in my academic growth, Associate Prof Teresa Barnes, Dr Bheki Mngomezulu, Associate Prof Ciraj Rassool, Dr Premesh Lalu, Prof Uma Mesthrie, Associate Prof Patricia Hayes, Prof Martin Legasick and of course Prof Gary Minkley. I am qualified to say that the 12 years of primary and high school history educations were not necessarily meaningful expenditure for the state and my parent’s money. The only intellectual emancipation came through UWC, my alma-mater! I can now educate many others about distortions and fabrications in history and help them rewrite their own histories. 1 Contents Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………….. Declaration……………………………………………………………………… Introduction ……………………………………………………………………… 1 - 16 Chapter One: South End Community Museum and Heritage Trail………………17 - 48 Chapter Two: The Heritage Landscape Prior 1994………………………………49 - 72 Chapter Three: Contesting Heritage in the ‘new’ Port Elizabeth ………………..73 - 101 Chapter Four: South End; The Books and the Museum………………………….102 - 119 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………120 – 123 Appendices ………………………………………………………………………124 - 126 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………… 127 - 133 2 . DECLARATION I declare that, ‘Group Areas Act and Port Elizabeth’s heritage: A Study of Memorial Recollection in the South End Museum’ is my own work, that it has not been submitted for any degree or examination in any other university, and that all sources I have used or quoted have been indicate and acknowledged as complete references. Palesa Kadi 15th of November 2007 Signed ……………………… 3 Introduction The second half of the 1990s was marked by a significant reworking of memory and history in South Africa. Whilst the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was involved in its hearings on amnesty applications and gross human rights violations, new museums were emerging and older ones began reshaping their displays. Minkley and Rassool view this period of producing history, particularly as it pertained to the TRC, as “raising issues of relationships between individual testimony, evidence and historical memory”.1 This mini-thesis interrogates the changing representations of history, culture, identity and heritage in one South African city, Port Elizabeth, which in 2005 was re-named the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipal area. This discussion examines, at times, the historical era prior to South Africa’s democracy and the period after the first democratic elections of 27th April 1994. In both periods key issues and themes pertaining to the heritage sector in Port Elizabeth emerged. These themes are the development of community museums in post-apartheid South Africa, the making of memory in museums and the 1820 Settler heritage in Port Elizabeth. 1 Minkley, G. & Rassool, C. (1998) ‘Orality, Memory and Social History in South Africa’. In Nuttall,S.& Coetzee,C (eds) Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa, Cape Town: Oxford University Press, p.75. 4 Community Museums The history of museum representations in a community museum’s activity is a significant element in the current relations between the museums and communities. Kreamer explains that, “History is not just something that happened. It is a living part of people’s sense of who they are and how they relate to other elements of civil society.”2 In 2001, the establishment of the South End Museum located in South End, which was known as a former ‘multicultural’ area in Port Elizabeth, constitutes a key point of departure for this research. This was followed by the establishment of the South End Heritage Trail in 2004. This research is aligned with work that has been done on the District Six Museum in Cape Town and Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum in Somerset West near Cape Town. In relation to the above, the Project on Public Pasts (POPP) report for 2002, focused on community museums as its foundation area of research and used this to inform discussions upon the township tourism and cultural sites. This report explains that these “museums ( Lwandle Migrant Labour, South End and District Six) have been established as community spaces in post apartheid South Africa, where histories, forgotten and repressed during the days of colonialism and apartheid would be 3 remembered, recovered, collected and exhibited.” 2 Kreamer, C.M. (1992) “Defining Communities Through Exhibiting and Collecting” in Karp,I. Kreamer C.M. & Lavine S. D. (1992) Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture . Washington and London, Smithsonian Institution Press..p367. 3 University of the Western Cape, History Department’s Project on Public Pasts http:/www.uwc.ac.za/arts/history/popp/report2002 accessed 14 May 2007. 17h45. 5 South End Museum is in many respects similar to the District Six Museum and follows similar display techniques, such as the use of a floor map, newspaper cuttings on the walls and enlarged photographs. They are also comparable in that both museums speak to a community that is not spatially located at the site of the museum, but that was forcibly removed under the Group Areas Act and other legislation. Both of them are communities of memory. South End was an area in Port Elizabeth, next to the harbour, from which there were large scale removals in the 1960s. The same can also be said about District Six. The museum and the heritage trail have been created to invoke memories of South End and to constitute a community of memory. This community of memory, like that in the District Six Museum is created in the sense that, “the people and the place never grew up”.4 The Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum, one of the few township museums in South Africa, tends to be slightly dissimilar in character and in location to both the District Six and South End Museums. Lwandle township was an isolated place and treated as a transient entity under apartheid. There is very little known or written about this place. Lwandle surfaced as an area of isolated black single men’s hostel residences, providing cheap labour in the Helderberg Basin for factories like AECI, Gants Canning Company and the local municipality. The lack of cheap labour in the area compelled the Stellenbosch Divisional Council to ignore “the Coloured labour preference policy which barred Africans from a wide range of jobs in the Western Cape if Coloureds were available.”5 The area was not meant to lodge families but only African single males. Migrant labourers, were accommodated in compounds. 4 University of the Western Cape, History Department’s Project on Public Pasts http:/www.uwc.ac.za/arts/history/popp/report2002 accessed 14 May 2007. 18h30 5 Omond,O. 1985. The Apartheid Hand Book: A Guide to South African Everyday Racial Policies, Ontario:Penguin. p96. 6 6 Buthelezi explains that, “the hostels were fenced with a single entrance and exit.” Buthelezi refers to the migrant labour systems as an arrangement that “affected the 7 lives of their (migrant labourers) families tremendously.” Unlike the memory typified by ‘infantalization’8 in both the cases of South End and District Six in remembering Lwandle there is an emphasis on recreational activities as “there were contests of music and a variety of traditional dance.”9 Buthelezi explains this activity as a moment of erasure. “All the hardships endured in daily lives”10 tend to be forgotten, he maintains. The Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum seeks to tell the story of experiences of ‘Black’ migrant workers through three vehicles. Buthelezi, explains that, “ the first element, is the exhibition which portrays Lwandle’s people as victims of apartheid especially impacting on the Group Areas Act and Separate Development Policy which is linked to pass laws. Secondly, the museum conducts a tour termed to be a “township informative walk”11. This walk focuses on juxtaposing the scars of apartheid and the new developments. Finally, the museum incorporates Hostel 33, which forms key part of the walk and meant to depict living conditions of the migrant life.”12 Thus, although the cultural aspects are still emphasized there is still an attempt to show the harshness of the system and implementation of apartheid in a local community.