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Untold truths and unjust realities: Cape Town’s forced removals

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Impossible Return: Cape Town's forced removals by Siona O'Connell
Impossible Return: Cape Town's forced removals by Siona O'Connell

Anger, hurt, loss, rejection … these feelings are familiar to the families who, in the early 1970s, were forced from their homes in Harfield Village in Cape Town’s southern suburbs. 

Manosa Nthunya looks at Siona O’Connell’s book which brings these stories to light and examines the lost ways of life, the sense of home and belonging.

Impossible Return: Cape Town’s Forced Removals by Siona O’Connell

Published by Kwela

Price: R275

. . . . 

One of the best ways South Africa has told the story of its history and present is through the medium of photography.

The country has a strong tradition of using photographs to speak about and depict the injustices of the past, as well as the contemporary.

Some notable photographers who come to mind are Ernest Cole, David Goldblatt, Sam Nzima and Peter Magubane.

These photographers played a pivotal role in depicting South Africa’s history under apartheid and their work continues to inspire not only because of what it represents, but also because of the aesthetic precision that it contains.

It is from these photographers – and many others – that photography today continues to be a compelling medium.

In many ways Siona O’Connell’s collection in Impossible Return: Cape Town’s Forced Removals continues in this tradition.

It is a highly impressive and original book that captures a part of South Africa’s history that some would rather forget. Impossible Return was first made into an exhibition before it was turned into this book collection.

Here, O’Connell looks at the continuing effects of the Group Areas Act of 1950 on the residents of Harfield Village in Cape Town’s southern suburbs.

O’Connell was able to revisit this history through the work of the late artist David James Brown who was responsible for taking the photos of the residents of Harfield Village (while it was still known as Lower Claremont) in the early 1970s.

It is these photographs that the book interrogates to ask questions about the present.

What’s quite interesting is that it’s not only the photographs of the past that speak to us, as O’Connell decided, cleverly, to enlist the work of the anti-apartheid activist photographer, Zubeida Vallie, to capture the images of the people whose lives she explores in the present.

What we end up with is a book that traverses time as it has subjects that speak directly to the impact of history on their present lives.

In the introduction O’Connell writes that this project was of interest to her because the “images struck a chord with my family’s history and removal from District Six”.

This is a history, as many South African’s know, that the country is still grappling with and what this means, consequently, is that it is a history that continues to haunt.

“I think I would have been a happier person. I tend to build walls and lock myself away – and I think I wouldn’t have been like that had I stayed here. I would have had a community around me, friends around me.”

O’Connell writes that Brown’s photographs, “which portray ordinary people living in extraordinary times, are key in understanding South Africa today, particularly as the questions of land restitution and justice continue to dominate the sociopolitical landscape”.

The book engages various subjects who shed light on their lives and on the continuing impact that the Group Areas Act has had on them.

A theme that dominates all the narratives is that the past, as the great US novelist William Faulkner said, “is never dead”.

Many of the people who O’Connell speaks to still retain strong memories of their time in Harfield Village and they continue, even in the democratic dispensation, to be acutely aware of how their experiences and memories are still rendered invisible.

O’Connell therefore writes that these “these two sets of photographs serve as a reminder that the business of freedom is an unfinished one in South Africa; that how we think about the legacies of a racialised and oppressive past will script the way we choose to be in a post-apartheid country” and further that “these haunting, compelling and resolute images address a convenient privilege of amnesia: Through their lenses, we hear a call and its persistent echo we cannot afford to forget”.

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Impossible Return

What, then, cannot be forgotten and what kind of narratives does the book contain?

The first story is that of Shannon Edwards who, interestingly, still lives in Harfield Village.

When O’Connell showed Shannon the picture that had been taken by Brown of her and her mother, Shannon was unable to recognise herself.

She was only drawn to the picture, she says, “by recognising evidence of her earliest home, in particular, the scene in the bedroom” where the picture was taken.

She tells O’Connell that before the evictions “I loved living here as a child. Everybody knew everybody. You could walk down the street at any time of the night or day and you would be safe.”

It would, however, not be long before her family was told to vacate the area and move to Mitchells Plain.

Shannon says that this move had a profound impact on her life: “I had a big personality change. I went from outgoing extrovert to an introvert. I stayed in the house, I wouldn’t even sit on the front lawn.”

It is for this reason that when she was able to, she moved back to Harfield Village but things, she says, were never the same; “the familiarity was there, but the spirit was gone”.

She therefore feels that the Group Areas Act robbed her of what her life could have become.

She says: “I think I would have been a happier person. I tend to build walls and lock myself away – and I think I wouldn’t have been like that had I stayed here. I would have had a community around me, friends around me.”

O’Connell’s book does not, however, only focus on individuals. It also follows families in an attempt to understand the consequences of the act on the family structure.

One of these families is the Daries family which mostly features the stories of Hilda, Gaven, Joyce and Debbie.

The photograph that we see is of the Daries children looking innocent and sitting comfortably in a living room.

Interestingly their mother, Hilda, says that she does not remember when this photograph was taken, saying: “I was always so protective over my children. Whenever I saw some strange person with a camera, I used to call them in. I thought it was their father who took the picture.”

The eldest daughter, Joyce, corrects her, telling her that: “I remember you said that the guy came there to take the pictures. You didn’t want to be in the pictures but you let us sit on the couch.”

What is “compelling and perhaps unique” about the story of the Daries family is that when they received their eviction notice, it so happened that “Hilda Daries’ employer, a white man, bought the family a house in Wynberg” and what this meant, as many of the family members acknowledge, was that their prospects were much better as they had a bigger house unlike what many people had to endure.

An interesting and memorable character in this family is Gaven.

When O’Connell speaks to Gaven about the forced removals she writes that he “seemed to remember very little about Harfield Village, and what was offered came across as brief anecdotes. Despite my questions, I struggled to get to grips with this man and his recollections of Harfield, let alone the emotions stirred up by the eviction.”

Ironically, when Gaven is asked where he considers “home” he says that it’s in Wynberg but his wife, Vanessa, “believes he has no attachment to Wynberg.

According to her, he only speaks about his time in Harfield Village.”

This “misunderstanding” once again occurs when O’Connell asks Joyce if she “would consider putting in a land claim, if opened” and she responds by saying: “It won’t fix the emotional problems. My brother doesn’t believe in the land claims process. I don’t know why he feels that way.”

But, surprisingly, when this question is put to Gaven, he has quite a tough response saying that: “It’s stolen goods. It’s one of the things that were stolen from us as kids. The house was stolen. It was taken from somebody and sold to someone else.”

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Impossible Return

Sharifa Booley’s story, perhaps more than any other, is one that pays homage to the photographer, David Brown (another way of reading this book is as a tribute to him).

Sharifa remembers: “He came back to take pictures of us all. He often came to visit here. My sister-in-law was very open-hearted. She always had koeksisters and samoosas and she would say ‘come, David, come sit with us’.” And that is why she has retained fond memories of him. The picture that Brown took of Sharifa, as O’Connell says, is of a “thoroughly modern woman, poised on the edge of promise”.

The reason for this, says Sharifa, is that with Brown “you had to have a certain stare. You can’t just sit and look. You must sit straight up! And look faraway.”

No wonder her picture is so striking.

Recalling the evictions, Sharifa remembers that when her family was told to move to Hanover Park they made their own plans and she would eventually move to Athlone as “the family was now broken up”.

Thinking about this past she says that “sometimes you block things out of your mind. Sometimes it’s best not to remember.”

It is therefore apt that in concluding this impressive book, O’Connell writes that: “The silences surrounding Harfield’s traumatic past remind me that this is unfinished business and there is more work that has to be done. Remembering on its own cannot offer redemption or freedom.”

Nthunya is a PhD candidate in literature at Wits University. He studied literature, history and philosophy at Rhodes University




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