Tiervlei, Lwandle and a bed called Home
Tuesday 26th January: Katy and I drive out to the N1 City Mall, a sprawling metropolis of warehouse buildings housing chain stores and fast food restaurants, next to the highway. I have boycotted MacDonald’s for my whole adult life, but today we enter the dreaded golden arches for, of all things, a community arts meeting. The oddness of the setting begins to make sense as Edwina and Sheila explain their project. The whole area where the mall now presides used to be called Tiervlei, but the ‘coloured’ residents were moved off this land by the Apartheid government in the resettlements of the 1950s. The area their community lives in is now called Ravensmead, but the older folk still call it Tiervlei. Edwina and Sheila are setting up a cultural centre in an attempt to keep the history of this place alive, and provide much needed space and activities for young people in the area. They give us a tour, pointing out a few old houses that still remain, and the course of the buried river and marshlands that people had to build on. They show us how the highway cuts the community in half, and tell us about the riots in the 1980s, when this was the main route from the airport to the rich white neighbourhoods. It’s a fascinating place, and a classic example of the systematic division imposed on people by apartheid. We have been invited by Edwina & Sheila to run creative workshops with different generations in Tiervlei, to make some artwork to help launch their centre in an old school building.
The following week, we go to the township of Lwandle, to visit the Migrant Labour Museum. This museum documents the migrant labour system and the hostels that started here in the 1950s, to house workers coming mostly from the Eastern Cape. The hostels permitted only employed men over 18 years of age, and their work meant that they would only go home for a few weeks per year. We are shown round by the curator, Lunga Smile. He is a fantastic guide, and he talks us through the displays, telling stories of overcrowding, divided families, and the dehumanising laws of the Apartheid system. We see some incredible photographs: David Goldblatt’s haunting images of workers queuing for the bus at 3am, to begin their 18 hour day; an image of a whole family occupying a bunk with another family on the bunk below them; a newspaper clipping from the 1980s showing a man proudly standing in his shack, smiling, accompanied by a derogatory article suggesting that the township bred disease. Lunga asked us to think carefully about how we represent Lwandle and it’s inhabitants in our own photographs.
The township that has developed around the old hostels now houses around 80,000 people, in converted hostels, houses and shacks. Conditions aren’t exactly luxurious, but there are no longer four families sharing one tiny room. Lunga takes us to see Hostel 33 – the one hostel that has been left in its original form, and we stand inside, trying to imagine how so many people lived together in this space. I am struck by what a luxury it is to have space and privacy. Mine and Katy’s concerns about having to share a room pale into insignificance.
Lunga asks each of us what ‘home’ means to us, and where it is. We discuss this for a while, thinking about the homes we grew up in, and the various places we call home now. He tells us about a book, ‘A Bed Called Home’ and ponders on whether the cramped bunks of the hostels were ever truly home for their occupants. For some people, Lwandle was never home, but always a temporary dwelling – a necessary but unwelcomed place. For others the hostels and then the township became home, and their children and grandchildren were born here. I think about the elderly people in Tiervlei, who will always remember the homes lost to them when they were forced to move. South Africa is scarred with memories of injustice, of forced ‘resettlement’ and appalling conditions for people of colour. But people in places like Lwandle and Tiervlei are proudly keeping their histories alive, not wanting the younger generations to forget how they came to be here, and the rights they have won through years of struggle.
Rebecca Beinart
