ALBIE SACHS AND OTHERS IN CAPE TOWN: Our first day in Cape Town was really productive and full. I’d been in touch for a while with the office of Albie Sachs, the long-time ANC leader who was the target of a car bomb in Maputo in the 1980s, and who now sits on South Africa’s Constitutional Court. On Tuesday, I finally got to speak to Albie himself, and he said there might be a chance we could meet yesterday (Wed.), at his beach-side place in/near Cape Town– provided I could get there early in the morning. Plus he could only give me 30 minutes…
Well, we got there– Leila and I– to the bus-stop in Clifton that he had designated. I called him from the cell. He said we should wait right there while he came up to fetch us. The housing on that cliffside above Clifton’s beaches is a confusing rabbit-warren, laced through with tiny well-concreted paths and steps. I don’t know how anyone moves furniture or building materials in or out! After we’d waited a few minutes, he emerged from one of the paths and led us down to his place.
When you meet Albie Sachs he holds out his left hand to greet you. The stump of his right arm hangs inside a shirt sleeve from his shoulder. That–and some other injuries– is what the car-bomb did to him. He has a crinkly though tired-looking smile. He took us down to his place, and we sat there, with him framed against stunning views of the Atlantic Ocean as I fired off my questions and he gave reflective, well-argued answers. He gave us considerably more than 30 mins. At the end, I asked if we could take photos. He was terrifically gracious and helpful about this, leading us out into a tiny courtyard to use the boldly painted mural out there as a ‘backdrop’ for the pictures.
As we left, I asked him if he could have ever imagined, back in the 1970s, say, that he would be occupying his present position and that the ANC would have won so much of what it wanted. He recalled that he had joined the movement back in the 1950s, and that the ANC at that time had been espousing a nonracial order in South Africa and had seemed to be making some progress… But then came the Sharpeville massacre of 1961 and the decades of harsh repression that followed it– years when he himself had had to go into exile and when many of his comrades were killed.
“But we always knew we would win,” he said with a quiet smile. “And then, at the beginning of the 1990s, our movement more or less picked up where we had left off in 1961. So yes, we lost three decades there. But we always knew we would win.”
… Leila and I walked back up to the road, still mulling over our incredible good fortune in having been able to meet such an inspiring and historic figure.
The taxi driver who had taken us there was still waiting. He then drove us along a seafront route to the District Six Museum near the center of town.
District Six was a near-in neighborhood of the city that until the late 1960s was a racially mixed neighborhood. In fact, our driver himself, Isgaak, had grown up there. He’s a Muslim of Malaysian origin, as many D6 residents were– but there were also numerous residents who under apartheid’s bizarre system of racial ordering were classified as ‘whites’, ‘blacks’, or ‘coloreds’.
One day in the late 1960s, the government issued an order that D6 was to be abolished, and all its residents dispersed to mono-racial residential districts– many of them very far from the city. The actual destruction of the district took place a few years later. Nearly every structure inside it was bulldozed. A small portion of the area was used to build a technical college, and the rest remained as a grassy inner-city wasteland. Former residents now had to commute many miles from their new homes to the jobs in the city center. More importantly, their historic and multicultural community had been disbanded.
In the early 1990s– after those three “wasted decades”– a Methodist church near D6 donated its premises to a group of former D6 residents who wanted to create the D6 Museum. It is a most amazing place that has become a focus for guarding the history of D6 as well as of the enormity of the forces that broke it up. It has also, evidently, served as a new community center for many of the former D6 residents, who are happy to gather in the museum to work there, to plan for new exhibits, or simply to get together and reminisce. (Some of that was going on in the coffee shop there as I sat there going over my notes.)
The main floor of the former church is now covered with a detailed street map of what D6 formerly was, with even the names of individual families marked in. Hanging from high up in the vaulted ceiling are huge cloth “scrolls” with embroidered on them representations of different aspects of the community’s former life. One such scroll simply has embroidered on to it messages that had previously been written on it in marker by former residents and some of the museum’s earlier visitors.
The museum uses many artefacts from the old district that have found their way here. Such as, many of the original street-name signs, now slightly rusted and chipped. Many of them have been incorporated into a tall virtual “tower” at one end of the church’s former worship space. Around the edge of the worship space, and along the galeries that run up above it are numerous small exhibits representing the lives of individuals and families, and the activities of community groups and well-loved community institutions.
Of course, I could not help thinking how wonderful it would be if Palestinians and Jews inside Israel could create such museums to mark the existence of some of the Palestinian towns, neighborhoods, and other communities that were wiped off the face of the earth– and their residents scattered– in 1948. Walid Khalidi and others have done something to preserve memories of those communities through the publication of books or other documenation. But a museum is so much more “living” as a way to preserve, reinterpret, and present such histories.
When we were there, there were constant groups of visitors coming in. Including at least one school group– youngsters in their early teens, mainly “black” but with many Indian-looking kids– girls and boys in neat uniforms who rushed around filling out worksheets and animatedly discussing the exhibits with each other.
I tagged onto the end of a tour group that was being shown round by museum “fixture” Noor Ibrahim, a former D6 resident who had contributed a lot–icluding many photos– to the collection with which the museum had started out. Most of the participants in the tour seemed to be white toursists.
What struck me most about Mr. Ibrahim’s presentation was the gentle but devastatingly “amazed” way in which he referred to the idiocies and brutalities of apartehid’s practicioners. His tome was often one of amazement and mockery…. “Yes, they divided people up into all these different groups. And everyone had to have identity cards which marked which of these groups they eblonged to… Can you believe this, ladies and gentlemen? And then look, here are pictures of the cards everyone had to have, with their racial group clearly marked on it… But only the blacks had to carry their passes all the time, 24 hours a day. And the black passes were called ‘dom-pass’– can you believe that? That means ‘a pass for a dumb person’. Can you believe they called them that?”
One of the most devastating things Mr. Ibrahim showed us was a large panel which swiveled around a vertical pole going down its middle. On one side was a large black and white picture of Richmond Street in D6, as it had appeared at the end of the 1960s. Mr. Ibrahim then slowly swivelled it arund to show a full-color picture of the exact same view, from the same spot, today. Where shops and houses had stood in the earlier photo, now only grass bew in the wind. All traces of the homes were gone.
Just before I left the tour-group, Mr. Ibrahim was telling them about the plans the government has been making to re-gather all D6s former residents and their descednants back into a rebuilt version of the community. “I am very excited!” he said “Very, very excited at the thought of coming back.”
Earlier, our driver, Isgaak, had said that his family, too, had discussed the prospect of him moving back to the rebuilt D6. “But my kids persuaded me not to go ahead with it,” he said. “They said that I would just be living in the past if I went back there. They said that they had grown up in our new neighborhood and have little interest in moving back. So I guess we won’t be going.”
… Well, that was District Six. Leila and I then spent a little more time looking around downtown Cape Town before we went for a late-lunch meeting with Mxolisi (‘Ace’) Mgxashe. Ace had been a reporter on the ‘Cape Argus’ before, in 1995, he took up a job in the research department of the TRC. A longtime supporter of the Pan-Africanist Congress, one of his first jobs was to investigate and draft the part of the TRC report that would deal with excesses committed by the PAC during the struggle years…
We had an interesting discussion, which I don’t have time to recap here. Afterwards, Ace took us walking through the huge ‘Golden Acres’ development around the city’s central train station and up to the rooftop central depot for the citys extensive system of minivan (combi) taxis. He found us the right combi to get in for Mowbray, the suburb that was our next destination. The combi had its full complement of 14 or 15 passengers, and it soon set off.
As we approached Mowbray, we asked the “conductor” who sits by the passenger door handling the 3-rand fares and drumming up business from the street if we could get off near the Maternity Hospital. There was some discussion among the passengers over the best place to do this, but one young woman took us in hand and told us with some detail how to get there. Where we were going was the Quaker Peace Center which is not far from the hospital. We arrived there only a little late for our meeting with its director, Jeremy Routledge.
No time to write much about that meeting, either. But afterwards, Jeremy did invite us to go to his home for dinner. We accepted. o as the meeting ended we climbed into his very small car; he stopped at a supermarket to pick up a few groceries; and in short order we were at his home.
Jeremy’s wife Nozizwe is a longtime ANC activist, now not only a parliamentarian but also South Africa’s Deputy Minister of Defense. (And a Quaker, too.) She has been in Pertoria most of this week– where they also have a flat. So I haven’t met her yet, and most likely won’t get to on this trip. But because of her position she alsdo gets allocated a government house in Cape Town, for her family to stay in, and for her to use when the parliament is in session here and all the government ministers have to be in Cape Town, not Pretoria. So that was the house we drove to. It was a large Cape Dutch-style house set in a lovely lawned garden guarded by a high wall and SAPS guards at the gate.
That evening we helped Jeremy cook dinner (well, Leila helped a lot more than I did); and then we ate it with Jeremy and his two sons in the dining-room of the house that was formerly home to apartheid-era Defense Minister P.W. Botha, among other famous and infamous former residents…