For many South Africans, Heritage Day has become just another opportunity to have a braai and drink a few beers. While I’m not averse to the sizzle of a lamb chop and a good potato salad, I’ve always felt that the nation’s heritage must surely amount to something more substantial than braai and beer.
And so it was that, this year, my Heritage Day at the end of September turned out to be a far more meaningful, thought-provoking experience.
Having seen an advert for a tour of a flower farm in Constantia – an advert which mentioned that the tour would include the history of the farm and the family who run it (i.e. the heritage of the area) – I decided to attend. The tour highlighted a significant element of the history of Cape Town – and this means that it brought to our attention a part of our heritage that we should all know, as uncomfortable as the heritage may be.
The farm is run as a family business by people who were classified under the apartheid regime as ‘Coloured’. This is a family with a long history at the Cape: the current generation knows that their origins go back to the time of slavery at the Cape, and they know that their ascendant was given a piece of land and a house in what is today Constantia when slaves were emancipated in the 1830s. That property was passed on to generation after generation, and more recent generations became expert flower farmers.
An idyllic lifestyle in a particularly beautiful part of our city – which included the ability for people to earn a good living – abruptly came to an end in the 1960s when the land and dwellings were expropriated by the State under the Group Areas Act. The land was subsequently sold to private ‘White’ landowners, while the original residents were relocated to accommodation not of their choice in areas
they would never have selected to live in.
The current farming family, the children of a person forced out of the area in the 1960s, could only return to a piece of land in more recent years, but they hold only a lease over the land and are unlikely ever to own it.
As one of the sons told us the story of what had happened, it struck me that there are so many similarities with the Jewish experience. We, too, had our rights as citizens taken away by a totalitarian state; we, too, lost property to other citizens deemed as being racially superior to us; we, too, have since been engaged in efforts to elicit apologies and secure the acknowledgement that what was done to our forebears is wrong. It’s also clear – just as is the case with today’s generation of Germans – that the guilt of the 2nd and 3rd generation of perpetrators is guiding some of them to make good for the sins of the fathers.
I think that a very meaningful gesture would be for us to embark on a project here that is like the Stolpersteine initiative in Germany and other European countries. (A Stolperstein is a concrete cube with a brass plate that lists the name and relevant dates of victims of Nazi extermination or persecution, which is placed outside the former residence of such a victim.)
An initiative of this sort would surely be a gesture geared to acknowledge a very uncomfortable part of our heritage and to bridge the divide we see in our society.
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