Residents of De Buldt in the Karoo now have the resources to rebuild their homes, writes Tara Turkington
At the end of a long dirt road in the barren Karoo lies a place where residents defied apartheid, and got away with it. Although now almost a ruin, a major award has given it a brighter future.
The little Northern Cape town of Carnarvon is a quirk in South African history: it’s a place where the Group Areas Act never came into existence, thanks to the fearless campaigning of people in an area of the town called De Buldt (“The Ridge”), who were so proud of their past they refused to bow to apartheid’s cornerstone.
When the danger turned from forced removal in the 1970s to demolition by neglect born of poverty and uncertainty in the 1980s and 1990s, De Buldt’s residents again rallied to save their 150-year-old homes. They applied for and won this year’s R100 000 Sanlam Restoration Award, the country’s premier historical conservation prize.
The houses of De Buldt are a far cry from the colonial buildings most often identified for conservation in South Africa. The area is a dilapidated collection of 29 flat-topped Karoo-style houses.
Its residents are a group of elderly women – mostly widows – and one or two widowers. Their homes are without electricity or water- borne sewerage, but are rich in a history that began with dispossession.
In 1839, the British government awarded a group of Xhosas land on the colonial frontier on condition they chase away the San, who had been attacking white settlers in the area.
The Rhenish Missionary Society established a station – a small church and school – there in 1847. The homes of De Buldt are those first erected around the mission in the mid- 1800s.
The fact that the De Buldt homes have survived, despite their proximity to the “white” town of Carnarvon, is due to a series of serendipitous circumstances and brave stands, starting early this century when Andreas Boezak, a magistrate’s clerk and ancestor of the prominent activist family, registered all births in the community as “coloured”, despite the strong Xhosa component.
Louise Boesak, an African National Congress MPL from Carnarvon, who is Allan Boesak’s aunt, says despite the fact that some of De Buldt’s residents still speak isiXhosa and are very dark-skinned, “we don’t have a black township”.
Because of this non-classification, the community was not carved up and sent to various homelands during apartheid. It even survived the Group Areas Act. But only just.
In 1975, says Boesak, the Carnarvon municipality tried to declare a “European” area which would have seen De Buldt razed and forced removals. The idea met fierce opposition from the residents, and the municipality let the matter lie for two years.
But, recalls Boesak, in January 1977, she returned from holiday to learn from “one of the ooms” from De Buldt that some families had already been evicted.
That evening Boesak and the residents decided that everyone would stick together and would refuse to leave, no matter what.
The next day, Freddie Brown, who lived at Number 29, was served an eviction notice on the grounds he was not the legal owner of the house. He argued that, despite the fact that all of De Buldt was held under a single, communal title deed, the municipality recognised he was the owner of his home because it sent accounts to him.
The matter eventually went to the supreme court and, against all odds, Brown won. It was a test case which frightened the municipality out of serving further eviction notices.
“When we won that, we’d won the others,” says Boesak. “It was quite a success story. I remember the mayor of Carnarvon at the time, Daan van Tonder, saying we were the only town in the country that got away with it [not abiding by the Group Areas Act]. I was much younger then and the strength I got from these people was wonderful. They stood by me.”
But uncertainty lingered. Dominee Leuvennink of Carnarvon’s United Reformed Church explains: “The municipality retained the [communal] ownership of the ground, with the intention of eventually demolishing the old houses and developing a new, larger residential area.
“Erven were already laid out for this, and the street planning done.” The designated site was in a suburb called Bonteheuwel, a few kilometres from De Buldt and, cruelly, with a direct view of it.
Some families “said they couldn’t fight the whites” and left for Bonteheuwel. “They [the municipality] kept on, and kept on,” says Boesak, “but we fought and fought.
“One family was offered eight rooms in Bonteheuwel, instead of their four in De Buldt. But to have your own property, your own history … we kept falling back on the history.”
For 15 years the people of De Buldt staved off forced removals until eventually, in 1992, they received individual title deeds. But the years of doubt and poverty had taken their toll, and their homes were facing demolition through neglect.
That same year, the National Monuments Council followed up on an architectural survey completed by the University of Natal, which pointed out that the vernacular architecture of De Buldt was particularly conservation-worthy, and declared it a conservation area.
Later it provisionally declared the whole area a national monument, and in 1997 gave a grant of R45 000 towards the restoration of the homes.
With this grant, the aged community faced a new challenge. Realising the money would stretch if they didn’t pay for labour, they invested in materials, including corrugated iron for their roofs and bricks. Then they learnt how to mix cement and do plaster work themselves.
As the materials would not be enough for all the houses, the De Buldt Residents’ Committee behind the restoration drive decided to start on number one, with the belief that if they could get as many residents as possible to work on the first house, they would shame the other owners into helping on the second house, and so the restoration would snowball.
As they finished work on number one, they entered the Sanlam Award, although they believed they had little chance of winning.
The chair of the award committee, restoration architect Gawie Fagan, says the competition was tough.
“We look at the benefit to the community, and where there is hardship. This particular community was extremely keen – that was in their favour. They really are empowering themselves, to use contemporary jargon.”
Dirk Sacco, son of one of the residents and chair of the residents’ committee, couldn’t contain his excitement at the news they had won the award: “For more than 20 years we’ve wandered in the desert, and now we’ve come out of it.” He and two other members of the committee, Mary Erasmus and Johanna Brown, went to Cape Town to receive the award. When they told the others about the money, says Brown, “the tears ran”.
Two days after receiving the R100 000 grant, the committee received another prize, this time the annual Northern Cape Heritage Award, made by the provincial Department of Arts and Culture on Heritage Day.
Although only a symbolic medal, it served to again formally and finally recognise the long battle the residents of De Buldt have fought to protect their heritage.
“Every building in De Buldt has a valuable history,” says Sacco. “The restoration of De Buldt has an enormous impact on the whole community because this place is our inheritance.”