Deep under the Eastern Cape’s Kat River dam are 1 000 silent witnesses to one of apartheid’s greatest lies. Peter Dickson reports
Across the length and breadth of South Africa, from District Six to Dimbaza, nothing could stop prime minister BJ Vorster’s bulldozers in 1967. Not even in dusty little Seymour, off the beaten track near Queenstown in the Eastern Cape, where apartheid’s planners had built a major supply dam on the Kat River.
But they had got their numbers wrong and the 1 500 graves that made up the Seymour cemetery – 300 “European” and 1 200 “non- European” – disappeared under the water when the dam reached its high flood level.
Seymour mayor Mike Kota says the remains of the “Europeans” were exhumed and reburied. The authorities, however, left the black graves.
The Department of Water Affairs and Forestry contests this, providing Kota with statistics on 222 bodies traced and reburied across the colour line on one side of the dam. It is a figure curiously close to the 240 white graves the department identified as having had headstones.
The department, which strangely built a memorial to the remains of graves left undisturbed, also pointed out the flood risk was advertised at the time in the provincial press and on government radio and that it had done its best to identify the graves and trace relatives.
But Seymour’s black community, knowing full well that more than 1 000 of its ancestors had been interred in the cemetery, has never believed the department.
The pain of the lie is made more acute by the realisation that the dam had drowned tradition and culture. Relatives would no longer be able to respect their ancestors with a proper reburial, let alone visit and maintain the graves.
In the 1980s, under Ciskei rule, the Seymour council battled with the bantustan’s Department of Public Works for compensation for the black community. That battle has continued into the post- apartheid era, with water affairs and forestry stipulating compensation depends on next of kin identifying the watery graves – even though time and water have made identification impossible.
“That’s the question. What are we supposed to do, take up diving?” asks an exasperated Kota. “The dam is very deep. How on earth are we going to afford diving gear anyway?”
In October last year, Kota and a department official noted that only 20 graves in the old cemetery were above the waterline. The department’s statistics, he said, are “completely misleading”.
But as the dam level dropped this year because of the area’s biting drought, more graves became visible. Since October, through painstaking detective work, Kota and the community have traced the next of kin of almost all of the 1 000 buried under the dam, even people who had long left Seymour for the cities.
Giving up the idea of short-lived cash compensation for individuals in favour of department-funded projects “that will benefit our children instead”, Kota’s council and the department were finally set to sit down and chip away at a settlement this Wednesday.
Kota and his community, well prepared, had waited for this historic moment for 32 years. “But they called and said they were unable to attend,” he said. “They gave no reason.”
The department’s provincial officials were unavailable for comment this week.
“Really, the department is taking its time and is not co-operating and the transitional local council is now thinking of going to court. As a community we were so prepared, but the department seems to have no interest,” Kota says.
“Seymour was never developed in the past. There is no sewage, the streams to the dam go straight through the township and people are using buckets to get their water, which is not of good quality because of the poor purification plant.”
Going to court will be costly to both parties, Kota concedes.
But tradition is paramount to his community and respect for the ancestors, which has gone wanting for three decades, will be worth every cent in subsequent benefits.