We was robbed. Well, OK, it was a long time ago. But collectively we, as a family, are still smarting as if it happened just the other day, and in broad daylight, at that.
What happened was this. My grandparents, ever since their children could remember, had lived in a modest, four-bedroom house on Scanlan Street
in Queenstown, close to the central business district. It stood next to the large Anglican church, and just across the road from the red-brick Anglican seminary where they trained unsuspecting young Xhosa men to become priests of the cloth and so on.
Queenstown, or that part of it, anyway, seemed to be a steady, easygoing sort of place at the time. Apart from the white priests at the seminary, my grandfather had many friendly associations with a number of white people. Before he retired from active life, he had been a court interpreter — quite a respectable job in those days — and had earned the respect of the judges, clerks and attorneys whose work he facilitated. (Of course, this is not to say that he or any of his peers was in any way fully integrated into their lives.)
After he retired, he opened up a little shop a couple of streets away from the Scanlan Street house, on the strip of land that marked the boundary between “white” Queenstown and the growing black township on its outskirts. Although my grandparents did not have any white neighbours (priests didn’t count) they did not feel they were exactly living in the township either. They were just going about their normal daily business as if they were human beings.
All sorts of people used to drop in to the little family shop. You could buy anything from a bicycle to baked beans, and have a civilised chat with the old man while you were about it, if you cared to. For example, there is a white man who used to live on a farm just outside Queenstown who remembers dropping in to buy cigarettes from time to time, and became quite familiar with some of the young sons of the family.
This is not to say that everything was hunky-dory all the time. Way back in 1921 (the year my father Todd, one of the old man’s sons, was born) there had been a nasty incident in the vicinity that in some ways gave a foretaste of what was to come.
“There was a religious sect back home in the Cape Province,” my father later wrote. “They were known as the Israelites. They were the followers of the Xhosa religious leader Mgijima. He and his followers had refused to yield the land they occupied in the Bullhoek district near Queenstown. They regarded this district as their spiritual home. But the South African government wanted that piece of land for re-allotment and white occupation. Mgijima said he would not budge. If they were to be forced out of the land the bullets would turn to water. God had told him so. General JC Smuts mowed the Israelites down and out of the territory. Those of them that remained fled to Queenstown to pursue their religious belief.”
In the late 1950s and early 1960s the Nationalist government that succeeded the legendary war hero General Smuts accelerated the process of fiddling round with people’s birthright in order to create a landscape that made more sense to their ideology of separate development. Black people were to be shuffled out of the towns and into townships and bantustans.
The white fellow who used to drop into my grandad’s shop for cigarettes also ironically became a victim of these removals. The government, in its wisdom, decided to clear some white farmland to make way for what it would declare as the Ciskei bantustan. His farm was one of those earmarked, and he and his family had to move on. He lost touch with his Queenstown chums for good.
Perhaps the respect in which my grandparents were held by those people at the courthouse saved them from the humiliation of losing their much-loved home in their lifetimes. But after they died, their children and grandchildren did not fare so well. In the early 1960s notices were issued to the residents of Scanlan Street (including a certain Mr Moerane, friend and immediate neighbour of the Matshikizas, and maternal uncle to one Thabo Mbeki, who was later to become president of South Africa) warning them that the area had now been rezoned for Indian occupation. They should get ready to move any second now, and not be so daft as to expect any compensation for this wretched act, either.
My cousins who were then occupying the house (which had been jointly bequeathed to my father and one of his sisters in my grandparents’ will) did not hang around to see if the government’s bullets would turn to water the second time around. They moved on. The house was bulldozed to the ground.
The astonishing thing is that nothing was built in its place. To this day, the plot of land stands empty between the church and the Moerane’s old house, which is still standing.
So now, as the descendant of one of the rightful owners of the house, I am trying to claim our family’s little piece of land back — from the Mbeki government! What a palaver.
For more than three years correspondence has been flowing back and forth between me and various land claims commissioners in the Eastern Cape. They are all on our side, but have to go through the motions, which become more and more tortuous every month. Death certificates, affidavits, powers of attorney have to be forwarded. There is no immediate end in sight.
To cap it all, the local municipality is now claiming that there never was a property standing on that plot of land in the first place. My grandparents, and their house, so the implication goes, were probably just a figment of my imagination.
I guess it is hard to understand the pain and anger that one feels when one is at the receiving end of this ongoing insult. Like I say, we was robbed. But how long can we continue to be robbed of our dignity, on top of everything else?
John Matshikiza is a fellow of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research
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