It is funny, but of all the people coming forward with information, the men I spoke to remembered the Scala [Theatre] rather fondly in light of their love lives and, while the women remembered it too, none of them admitted to going there,” laughs Veena Partab, an English lecturer at the Durban University of Technology and one of the drivers behind the recently launched Research of Curries and Surrounds Heritage Development Project.
The recently refurbished Scala, which will be used as a dining hall for students at the Durban University of Technology, is one part of an effort to restore memory to an area about 1,5km in diameter — in which the university’s campus is squarely placed — which is crammed with physical and social history.
Included in its borders (Greyville racecourse to the north, Grey Street to the east, Berea Road to the south and Botanic Gardens Road to the west) are mosques, churches, temples and schools with histories shaped by community responses to apartheid as well as Curries Fountain Stadium — synonymous with both political activism and non-racial sports born out of activism.
It was at Curries where, during a pro-Frelimo rally to celebrate Mozambique’s independence in 1975, black consciousness leaders such as Steve Biko and Strini Moodley were arrested and later charged in the Saso trial. Non-racial professional football was also launched at the grounds in 1961 under the auspices of the South African Soccer League when Moroka Swallows beat Durban’s Aces United 8-3 and where the likes of the late Henry ‘Black Cat” Cele, Dharam Mohan and Bernard ‘Dancing Shoes” Hartze appeared.
The area’s streets have often drawn comparison with Cape Town’s District Six for their racially mixed profile prior to the forced social displacement that followed the 1950 Group Areas Act, while in its buildings clandestine political meetings were held. It was also where the Three Doctors’ Pact of cooperation against apartheid was signed by the then Natal Indian Congress’s Dr Monty Naicker, the ANC’s Dr Alfred Bitini Xuma and the then Transvaal Indian Congress’s Dr Yusuf Dadoo.
Activists such as Phyllis Naidoo and ZK Matthews lived next door to neighbourhood characters such as ‘Kilroy”, a madman-genius who would apparently leave solved mathematical problems and scribbled Shakespearean quotes in his sometimes violent wake.
The Scala, according to Partab, who grew up in the area, ‘was built in the late 1950s and by the 1970s had become a bug house where homeless street children would while away rainy days watching a film on heavy rotation”.
According to Rodney Choromanski of CNN Architects, who refurbished the cinema, many of the original elements, such as the metal frame of the screen, were retained to give it a contemporary multi-functionality as well as to allude to its history. On the ‘memory wall” strips of wooden panels border six-metre photographs of the area’s history, evoking a sense of film-reel clips, while the cinema has been updated on the outside with modern industrial metal fittings.
Len Rosenberg, the project’s progenitor and Durban University of Technology’s head of physical planning, says the area’s significance as a heritage site is only rivalled by the reconciliatory and empowerment salve it will provide to residents and former residents whose stories have largely been ignored by history textbooks and contemporary popular culture. ‘There is an ignored history in this area which is in danger of being lost because a generation is slowly dying and we are hoping to document this.
‘It is precious, because it not only rejects a traditional apartheid version of history with its legacy of stereotypes, but I think it returns a certain humanity to many people who lived and remember this area: to make them realise that their life stories are important and perhaps it will give them closure too,” he says.
Rosenberg anticipates the first phase of the project to include information collection involving various Durban University of Technology departments, including architecture, town planning, photography and journalism, as well as a partnership with South African History Online for a period of 12 months, during which a virtual museum will take shape on the web.
He believes that the project would ‘dovetail nicely” with the eThekwini Municipality’s Warwick Junction urban intervention programme.
Rosenberg foresees that a heritage tourism trail, a Curries Fountain museum and sports development centre will eventually develop from the initiative.
For more information about the Research of Curries and Surrounds Heritage Development Project or to contribute personal memories contact 031 373 6732 or email [email protected] The booklet, Wellspring of Hope: The Legacy of a Sportsfield, is also available for sale.