Gail Snyman’s Coloured Experience Tour of the Wentworth ghetto — created by apartheid in Durban’s industrial South Basin — is as much about confronting a divisive history of oppression as it is about confronting the community’s propensity for memory loss.
‘It’s still an old joke that when we visit each other’s houses you’ll find the picture of the Scottish grandfather hanging proudly in the lounge, but where’s the grandmother? Because she was African, her picture is probably stuck away in a chest under the bed somewhere,” says Snyman, a playwright and cultural activist.
‘We’re afraid of our roots, which is dangerous for any community. If you don’t have a sense of history, if children don’t have a sense of where they come from, then their future suffers,” says Snyman, who believes that while ‘it’s changing a little” the Wentworth community’s denial of a history of miscegenation — and their African ancestry especially — is debilitating and adding to a sense of societal stasis.
‘People are still wary of the ANC government, they are still untrusting of blacks and say it was better under apartheid. There are a lot of people and NGOs working hard for positive change, but that sense of a minority still being marginalised is very strong,” says Snyman, who has lived in Wentworth since 1959.
Snyman moved there from neighbouring Merebank (which had been declared an Indian area) at the age of nine, after the Group Areas Act was promulgated in 1950 and the forced removals to divide South Africa into monoracial residential areas began in earnest.
Wentworth, like most ghettos, has a history of unemployment, bloody gang wars and drug abuse fed by the National Party’s covert pumping of mandrax into townships to anaesthetise political activism. It also suffers from the vagaries of apartheid urban spatial planning, with the nearby oil refineries and other industrial pollution causing respiratory illnesses and cancers among the neighbouring communities.
Tracing the area’s beginnings, the tour is as historical as it is sociological. It reflects apartheid’s harshness as well as its absurdities, presented with the colloquial humour typical of its inhabitants.
Included is the first coloured settlement, White Town — named for the colour of the limestone walls rather than any aspirations of the residents — and the first government houses, called Noddy Houses ‘because they were so small and looked like something out of Enid Blyton’s books”.
In stark juxtaposition, the tour winds through Millionaires Mile (a white area overlooking the Indian Ocean), breathes in the oil refineries — where struggles by activist groups such as South Durban Community Environmental Alliance for cleaner air are discussed — and stops over at the Rainbow Chicken Houses, temporary housing that was set up in 1975 and ‘nicknamed after the battery chicken houses of a local chicken company because of the claustrophobic similarities”. The original inhabitants still live there, across the road from the Engen refinery, yet to find succour from government.
Pointing to the multiracial history of the area, the tour also includes the first Zanzibari settlement and the Juma Musjid. By 1877 there were about 500 Zanzibaris in Durban — ostensibly Makua-speaking Muslim ‘freed slaves” from northern Mozambique who were brought to work on KwaZulu-Natal’s sugar plantations towards the end of the slave trade.
‘They became the ‘mystery tribe’ when the forced removals began,” says Snyman. ‘The government wanted to move them to Umlazi because they were black Africans, but they didn’t share a common culture or language [speaking Makua or Portuguese and being Muslims] with the locals so they ended up in [then recently created Indian township] Bayview in Chatsworth, purely because they were Muslims.”
Aspects of the anti-apartheid struggle are also part of the tour: ‘We visit the Alan Taylor Residence — which is now owned by Engen — where black medical students from the University of Natal such as Steve Biko and Zweli Mkhize used to live because they weren’t allowed to live in residences on campus.
‘The student doctors used to provide a free service to the community every Sunday so they could practice and we got much-needed medical attention.
‘Then there is the place where, in 1986, Robert McBride shot at the Sapref refinery and the workshop where he and his father stored that arms cache,” says Snyman.
‘I remember the day [of the shooting] clearly. It was Mother’s Day, the first Sunday in May, and suddenly there were what sounded like all these explosions. When we first moved in, in 1962, Sapref put flyers into all the post boxes to warn people that if there were explosions or danger from the refinery coming from the west, we should run to Clairwood racecourse; if it was coming from the east, we should run to Treasure Beach. Of course we’d all forgotten about this more than 20 years later and people were running all over the place. When we later found out it was McBride, people were incensed,” she says, laughing.
The tour ends on a personal note at Snyman’s parent’s home on Olive Grove ‘where people have lunch — a bunny, a beer, some wine — and the photo album and stories come out”.
The Coloured Experience Tour caters for large and small groups. Contact Gail Snyman on 083 643 1923