Perspectives on a Changing Way of Life in Oral Histories from the Cape of Good Hope and Red Hill Areas
Silke Heiss University of Cape Town
from African Studies, Vol 60: Issue 1, 2001
Bonteberg ...
This paper emerged out of six months of oral history research conducted for the University of Cape Town Western Cape Oral History Project between May and October 1995. Interviews were held with a variety of people whose lives were, or had been, in some way or another connected with the natural environment in the Cape of Good Hope and Red Hill areas (see Map 1). Material was gathered with the intention of comparing various perceptions of, and modes of articulating, the natural environment. Differences in language, class, education and occupation, race, age, and gender among a total of 28 interviewees thus affected the analysis.
Broadly speaking, three basic types of articulation suggested themselves in the interviews: performative (or oral-gestural), descriptive (or literary), and finally, utterances which situated themselves ‘between’ these two by superimposing aspects of both. Interestingly, it was in this third, intermediary category that nostalgia for a ‘lost space’ was most apparent. Interests which recalled the natural environment as physical space and food resource, on the one hand, and as visual space and leisure resource, on the other, emerged as perhaps the most compelling aspect of the comparison. The above three types of discourse were, furthermore, grounded in the interviews, which ranged from marginalised subsistence to upper-middle-class professional lives. ‘Between’ these extremes were to be found, again, semi-subsistence, working-class/lower-middle-class existences, whose statements on the natural environment portrayed it as both a food and leisure resource, as well as physical and visual space. This shift in focus possibly demands more input on questions of memory and nostalgia, that is to say, the apprehension of vanished lives in vanished landscapes which formed the bulk of the interview material.
The paper provides, firstly, an overview of the common geographical space in question. Secondly, theoretical background to the topic, research methodology and sample are briefly discussed. Finally, interview material is explored in detail by juxtaposing perceptions of changing ways of life in the abovementioned cross-section of interviewees.
The Common Space
North to Slangkop ...
The interviewees mentioned in this paper have led significant portions of their lives in the Cape of Good Hope and Red Hill areas (see Map 2). Of these, the Cape of Good Hope enjoys greater international status in terms of its historical and strategic importance on the sea route to the east, as well as, more recently, ranking highly as a tourist destination (Winberg 1991). The purchase of some of the farmlands on the southern portions of the Peninsula by the Cape Divisional Council during the late 1920s and 1930s led to the establishment in 1939 of the Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve (Odden and Lee:n.d.). From its southernmost tip at Cape Point, the Reserve stretches northwards covering an area of 7 750 hectares to its boundary which spans Smitswinkel Bay on the east coast to Schuster’s Bay on the west (see Map 2).
In terms of its physical proximity to the Reserve, Red Hill could easily — at least conceptually — be included within the bounds of the Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve. Individuals who have resided eastwards near the Klawer Valley area (reserved for military purposes) as well as at Bothakamp, Maylands and Brooklands to the north (see Map 2) also consider themselves to have lived at Red Hill. While Red Hill itself is therefore just a 255,6m peak north-west of Simon’s Town, the Red Hill area as a whole denotes a range of former farms and military camps on the northern, southern and south-western slopes of Red Hill ‘behind’ Simon’s Town (Burman 1962:137).
Although uninhabited today, there is evidence that scattered fishing colonies lived within the Cape of Good Hope area during the present century. In the early 1940s they were compelled to leave so that game could be introduced into the newly declared Nature Reserve. By way of contrast — probably because of its proximity to Simon’s Town — Red Hill was and remains populated by peri-urban communities closely related by class and kin, some of whose history at Red Hill goes back at least a hundred years (Leatt 1967:4; West 1967:9). For most of this century, Red Hill was populated by a predominantly coloured community of about 500 men, women, and children (Leatt 1967:1). In the late 1960s the enforcement of the Group Areas Act in the Simon’s Town District dispersed the community across the greater Cape Town area, although many of its members remain relatively close by, living in the formerly coloured township of Ocean View.
Ironically, although the coloured families were moved out of what then became a ‘white area’, Red Hill today supports a thriving settlement of about 150 or more black ‘squatter ’ families, many of whom appear to be from Fort Beaufort in the Eastern Cape. Moreover, a preponderance of undeveloped and largely uninhabited land distinguishes the area. The narrow Peninsula is embraced by both the Atlantic and Indian oceans which have provided both recreational as well as full-time fishermen with substantial seafood resources over the centuries (Hallinan 1992:85; Kirkaldy 1988:19) . Some ex-Red Hill residents felt that the proximity of the sea was an ‘invitation ’ of sorts to go fishing:
The region is also hampered by the problems of extremely scant water resources compared with those of greater Cape Town. A number of natural springs in the Brooklands area have been sufficient to support no more than a few smallholdings, and most of the area’s rivers dry up during the hot, windy Cape summer (Burman 1962). The winter months at Red Hill and the Cape of Good Hope typically consist of torrential downpours, fogs and north-westerly gales, and many of the interviewees’ memories restricted themselves quite unconsciously to the summer months with their long twilight hours.
The focus of the project was to explore aspects of discourse in oral history interviews and, in particular, discourse on life in the natural — that is, ‘undeveloped ’ — environments of the Cape of Good Hope and Red Hill. It was therefore necessary to interview individuals whose life histories were inseparable from their existence on this strip of ‘undeveloped’ land and its surrounding waters.
As Smith (1984) has shown, industrial development in the twentieth century has effectively urbanised the countryside in material as well as ideological ways. The continuity between so-called rural and urban landscapes in the Southern Peninsula is in any case immediately evident in that former (coloured) Red Hill and Cape of Good Hope inhabitants were more often than not employed by the Navy Dockyard or the Simon’s Town Municipality — in the case of the men — while some of the women worked as domestic servants or flower sellers in Simon’s Town. Moreover, it will become clear that none of the interviewees are unaffected by the natural environment in this area, which has not only use but also exchange value. This is perhaps most starkly illustrated by the ‘impure’ and precarious semi-subsistence life-styles which many former Red Hill inhabitants led on ‘undeveloped ’, but nevertheless rented, land.
Theory and Method
Tussock marshes and reed beds ...
This paper responds to a general concern prevalent among local oral historians. The study of discourse in local oral history research has been, it appears, somewhat delayed in favour of transcribing ‘information’ transmitted by interviewees who have been called ‘informants’. Minkley and Rassool (1995:6–7,8) and Hofmeyr (1993) accuse South African oral history of having neglected discourse and language in analysis of oral testimonies (for similar comments about oral history outside South Africa see Tonkin 1992). This particular research project leans towards a conception of language as a transparent medium, and is thus attuned specifically to literary theory and techniques of textual analysis.
Existing studies on perceptions and articulations of the natural environment occupy the domain of a distinctly non-oral discourse. Notable texts in this area have located themselves within fields of representation (mainly writing and painting) where the natural environment is emphasised as a cultural concept rather than as a material object, and these have given rise to a number of theoretical works on nature as transmitting ideological value (Cosgrove 1984; Bunn 1993).
Wilson (1992) and Bramwell (1989) may be said to have extended the literature on nature and perception by means of practical assessments of the ideological value of nature in contemporary economic and political spheres — a task which Smith (1984) explored ten years before in his attempt to explain the process of what he terms ‘uneven development ’. Smith returns to orthodox Marxism to offer a broad theoretical framework within which one may position oral history material and explicate the social and historical processes involved in the “production of nature”. Unusual recent works on the natural environment are Hamilton-Paterson (1992) and Schama (1995). These books contain an unexpected mingling of discourses. Numerous scientific and historical passages interweave with semi-fictional or even mythical narratives, autobiography, anecdotes, written in an easily digested journalistic style.
In direct response to such written texts it seemed fruitful to find local voices and to hear what they had to say about the natural environment of the areas which had been integral to their everyday lives. The ‘open interview’ method associated with qualitative research formed the basis of the interviews. Most interviews began with an initial open-ended question (for example, “Could you tell me about your experiences at Red Hill/the Cape of Good Hope?”), and avoided direct or probing questions. Interviews tended to follow the chaotic, disjointed movements of live conversation which suited the project’s intention to gather undirected oral text. Interviewees were therefore given an often largely undefined space in which to speak, which accounts for repetition, pauses, factual vagueness and a relative lack of specific dates and place names in the interviews. It also accounts for reams of linguistically analysable oral text. A process of interviewee selection, primarily from suggestions by interviewees, drew from contacts between workers, landowners, environmentalists and families in the Red Hill and Cape of Good Hope areas.
Perceptions of Change
Perception ...
Perceptions themselves, as well as the ways in which they are expressed, are intimately connected with the different social classes to which individuals belong. More specifically, perceptions may be correlated to the experiences or actions within a particular social class. What complicated matters was the extent to which different group relationships with the natural environment not only diverged from, but also overlapped with, one another.
While the descendants of the subsistence fisherfolk represent an economically marginalised sector, there is evidence of some wage-labour in addition to informal economic activity such as fish and wood-selling. Wood-selling also formed a part of the livelihood of some of the poorer former Red Hill inhabitants . Moreover, most of the latter community were wage-labourers employed by the provincial government or the municipality , many supplementing their income with the sale of their own vegetables, eggs, meat and milk, derived from what was mainly subsistence existence at Red Hill (West 1967:27). Employment in the Reserve was related to race, social class and gender. Thus, prime leadership positions, such as rangers, were held exclusively by white males; secondary positions, for example, supervisors, drivers and storemen, by coloured workers. The lower positions were filled by inexperienced or young coloured workers, as well as by an increasing number of black labourers from the Eastern Cape.
Shifts within individuals lives from one type of activity to another — if not from one social class to another — can be seen most starkly in two interviews with descendants of fishing communities at the Cape of Good Hope. They are Dorothy Layters and her sister Sarah Klein, nee Layters. The Layters’ father had been a blacksmith from George, in the southern Cape, who had arrived in Simon’s Town looking for work. When his family joined him in 1916, they rented a small, whitewashed stone house in Baskloof where Dorothy Layters was born six years later. Soon afterwards, the family moved to another house situated in a pine forest on the banks of the Kromrivier, on a piece of land then belonging to a man by the name of De Villiers, where they initially supplemented their income by selling fish.
Layters states that her family originally lived in this virtually deserted area just above Die Mond (see Map 2). Around 1940 she moved away from her mother who, along with the only other two tenants in the area, was forced to leave the house herself a year later as result of the ground having been declared a Nature Reserve — “die diere-besigheid [the animal-business]”, as she calls it. Finally, in 1947 Dorothy Layters settled in Elsiesrivier at Red Hill — not to be confused with the Elsies River in Glencairn Valley — where she lived for twenty years.
In 1967, as a result of the Group Areas Act, Layters was one of the first to be moved to a house she was able to buy in Ocean View. (The entire community was moved gradually over a period of about 6 years.) Confrontation with the authorities over the sub-letting of her house in Ocean View, however, eventually forced Layters back to Red Hill Farm in 1991, where she currently pays a nominal rent from her meagre monthly pension for two tiny stables which are her living quarters. In contrast, all the other members of the former Red Hill community interviewed have remained in the suburban environment of Ocean View.
... shapes reality
Layters thus has a past which includes informal economic activity and wage labour (she has a brief history of charing). She has rented as well as owned property; she is familiar with an existence which is dependant on the sea for food while inhabiting small dwellings on expanses of largely unoccupied land; and she is acquainted with circumstances within a relatively fast-developing suburban environment such as Ocean View. Moreover, male members of her family have engaged in subsistence farming as well as farm labour in the Smitswinkel Bay, Perdekloof and Baskloof areas.
Layters’s earliest memories are linked to the Cape of Good Hope area — she and her sister were the sole representatives in this study of the former fishing community at the Kromrivier area. She says that: “Toe ek my oe¨ oopmaak toe is dit daar, daar agter, Nooi weet — by die see? [When I opened my eyes it was there, back there, you know, Nooi — by the sea?]”1 During the 1920s and 1930s the rent was fifteen shillings per month for their flat-roofed dwelling. While he worked as a blacksmith in Simon’s Town, Layters’ father had built a boat enabling the family to ‘trek-fish’ (trawl in a drag-net) in the Cape Point area to supplement their livelihood. In addition, Layters’ mother acquired a few donkeys for carrying bundles of chopped wood to be sold in Simon’s Town, thus supplementing the family’s income. Layters says that, “My Ma het Witsand toe gegaan, daar naby Kommetjie, haal jy kreef. Inkoop. En dan het hulle verkoop in die baai, en hout gemaak [My mother went to Witsand [on the coast, south-west of where Ocean View is today], there near Kommetjie, you get crayfish to buy. And then they sold them in the bay [False Bay], and we made [chopped] wood].”
It is not clear how many people there were in the Kromrivier fishing colony; Layters claims that her mother had had eighteen children, but many of these died before the family moved from George. Layters also indicates that she had several brothers but there was “Oom [Uncle] Pieterse”, Carl and Japie Booysen, and she recalls that: “Soos ons al kom is hulle besig met die trek, gaan net uit, die net uit [As we came they were busy with the trekking, the net went out, the net out].”
The community appears also to have been augmented by individuals who lost their jobs, like Sarah Klein’s first husband, who joined and assisted with fishing. Somewhere between 1922 and 1930 Layters’ father is said to have decided to stop working as a blacksmith because he could not drive. There are already the outlines of two basic perceptions of the natural environment. In the first case there is the sea as a food resource:
“My Ma was in die boot! [Gestures] Sy vang haar vis, en sy haal-trawl kreef met daardie [My mother was in the boat! [Gestures] She catches her fish, and she catch-trawls crayfish with those nets].” This memory of food-orientated experience is associated with plenitude: “Jene, Nooi, die see is vol vis en vol kos en vol kos. [Hell, Nooi, the sea is full of fish, and full of food, and full of food].” The perception of the sea and the natural environment in general as an unending food resource — “Die vis kan tog nie verdwyn nie man! [After all, the fish cannot disappear!]” — finds echoes in the testimony of the Red Hill residents. Mr Lotter says: “Kyk jy het aartappels geplant, jy het uie geplant, mielies, boontjies, ertjies, komkommer … marrows, rooibeet … kool [Look, you planted potatoes, you planted onions, maize, beans, peas, cucumbers … marrows, beetroot … cabbage].”
“Pampoen en ertjies! Wortels! [Pumpkins and peas! Carrots!]” exclaims Layters when remembering her brother’s and brother-in-law’s farm labour at Perdekloof. The perception that the environment is a plentiful food resource is not limited to those who earned their living from it, but surfaces also in the stories told by John Hare. In the early 1920s his grandfather and great uncle used to hunt for food, but also caught crayfish — “Because in those days already there were crayfish reserves down off the coast”, and “There was a place at Brightwater where they found a little stream, and there was kelp … in which they found crayfish.” The way that food is described by Layters and Hare is to a large extent gender-specific. Layters’ testimony is unusual in that the domain of hunting and fishing is traditionally male. In her case, the perception of nature as a plentiful food resource is inseparable from human labour: “Dis van jonk af swaar …2 Daai skuit het heeldag in die water gele, Nooi weet, in die see, en hulle kom wal toe, hier voor sonsak, dan is daai skuit mos dan swaar, Nooi, daai planke is mos swaar, Nooi … Ek moet hom dra, Nooi [It’s hard from a young age … That boat lay in the water for the whole day, you know, in the sea, and they’re coming towards the shore, here, before sunset, then that boat is heavy, Nooi, those planks are heavy, after all, Nooi … I have to lug it, Nooi].” This may be compared to the following from Lotter: “Ek en my ooms en my broer het daardie grond bewerk. Nie met ‘n ploeg of iets nie, maar met die hand. Maar ek praat nou nie van ‘n stukkie ground, ek praat nou van groot gronde [My uncles and my brother and I worked that ground. Not with a plough or anything, but by hand. But now I’m not talking about a bit of land, I’m talking about huge areas of land].”
The above quotations encourage one to uncover a second type of articulation, namely, the natural environment as space (implied by the mention of the sea by Layters, and made more explicit in the “groot gronde [large areas of land]” in the quotation from Lotter). This spatial delineation of the environment is palpable in repeated expressions of physical movement: “Die loopery! [All the walking!].” The need to cover large distances on foot was not limited to life at Kromrivier. At Red Hill, too, the Levendals said, “Ver stap en lang pale gaan saag [Going far to saw long logs of wood]”, and two cousins from the Red Hill settlement remember that:
OL: Dan klim ons sommer — ek en sy — ons — ek en Julie — ons klim sommer in die boom en dan saag ons droog hout daar uit die boom uit -
JY: Uit die boom uit -
OL: Op die boom met die saag.
OL: Then we would simply climb — she and I — we — Julie and myself — we would simply climb into the tree and saw dry wood out from the tree -
JY: Out from the tree -
OL: On the tree with the saw.
The spaciality of the natural environment is, moreover, communicated as a physical positioning of the body within space, made explicit by prepositions such as in, op and uit. This seems to solicit concepts of openness and freedom: “[Dit] was nie toegekamp op daai tyd nie. Dit was oop gewees [It was not fenced at that time. It was open],” declares Layters, “Daai tyd was die goed so lekker vry gewees [At that time everything [the fish] was so nice and free].” The connection between the ideas of space, physical movement and freedom is summarised in the interview with members of the Levendal family: “So het ons gelewe in Red Hill. Vry! Vry! Ek sal seˆ vry. Want as ons net so ‘n entjie uit die huis uitstap, so ‘n entjie stap, dan is ons in die veld [That is how we lived at Red Hill. Free! Free! I shall say free. Because if we just walked a little way out of the house, just a little way, then we were in the veld].”
An expression of the way in which the physical body is positioned within a spatial environment that makes it both possible and necessary to move is the following quotation from Layters:
King of the Hill ...
In 1927, when Layters was five, Hare’s grandfather and great-uncle, Percy and William Hare, bought Brightwater on the west coast of the Cape of Good Hope. For Hare, therefore, nature was a space which was possible to experience in an optic way, that is, without moving the physical body — “We’re sitting in an environment which allows us to sit back and view nature as a movie.” Where there is an absence of human labour, experience seems to become vicarious — nature becomes “a movie”. Furthermore, Hare’s evidence significantly employs the present simple tense. This is used not only to express events happening in the present (now), but also to express general (timeless) states of affairs — for example, we “sit back and view nature as a movie”. The present simple tense may also be employed, however, to narrate past events — at such times it is termed the present historic tense. It is this latter tense which Layters’s testimony (in the English translation) employs above. The use of the present simple tense in Hare’s remark indicates that there is a connection between the experience of nature “as a movie” and a timelessness, or sequencelessness, possible only in terms of sightseeing, rather than in terms of actively earning one’s living (Wilson 1992:20). None the less, when Hare casts his mind back to his boyhood days, when “we went down for the school holidays at Christmas time each year … and we’d stay for — for about three weeks”, there would at first glance appear to be an awareness of physical space, as well as a primary experience of food:
Hare’s verbal portrait is further framed by the final flourish of “it was the most magic environment.” In this way, the past is held as by a photograph and the memory appears more like a dream — indeed, as “magic” — than a tangible moment whose possibility has passed. In Layters’ and the Red Hill residents ’ discourse, on the other hand, concepts of plenitude and freedom arise from the labour on which the direct producer depends, and this is re-enacted by means of words and gestures imported into the present from the past. Where there is no such re-enactment, Layters’s memories become nostalgic articulations of a landscape that has disappeared — as in: “Daai tyd was die goed so lekker vry gewees” [At that time everything [the fish] was so wonderfully free]”, and “Daai jare kan ek sommer ‘n klomp afgehaal het, skulp — daardie tamatieskulp, by die frikkadel-maak, alles hier. Ek het sommer blikke afgehaal daai tyd, Nooi (my emphasis). [In those years I could simply take a whole lot, mussels — those limpets, to make fish-cakes, everything was there. I took whole tins-full [from the rocks] at that time, Nooi]” (frikkadel is more usually the name of a flattened meatball).
By comparison with Layters’ testimony, if nostalgia can be said to be present in the interview with Hare, it takes the form of what might be described as childhood reminiscences, a painless type of romanticisation. This is, surely, not only because the Hare family continues to frequent their private property within the official confines of the Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve. It must also be a result of the area always having been a holiday home to Hare. In contrast, Layters’ exclusion from the Reserve amounted to an exclusion from her former home.5
A more outspoken nostalgia certainly emerged from the interviews with the former Red Hill population. The conditions of possibility for nostalgia may therefore be said to involve a more costly recognition of the impossibility of returning, or regaining, home.
Towards Cape Point ...
The Cape of Good Hope was to be home to the Layters family for only another ten years, as in the late 1920s George Smith, the owner of Smith’s Farm, expressed his willingness to sell his land for an official Nature Reserve. At this time the Cape Times columnist Henry Hope and the entomologist Sidney Skaife were campaigning for land to be bought either by the government or the Cape Town City Council (Skaife 1963:52; Odden and Lee:n.d.). It is tempting to relate this sudden bustle around the Cape of Good Hope to the government ’s decision to nationalise Game Reserves in 1926 — a decision in its turn linked to the growth and development of South African cities, including Cape Town. During this time, writes Jane Carruthers, national parks “had a cultural function in that they indicated a growing romantic attachment to wildlife among whites”, a development linked to increased industrialisation, urbanisation and forms of labour amongst the white middle class (1993:6). Hare points out somewhat satirically:
Even more interesting is Wright’s contention that South African game rangers were eventually able, albeit only in the 1970s and 1980s, to articulate the idea that the physical body may position itself inside the environment itself — a possibility echoed in the testimony of Red Hill inhabitants analysed above: “Hang on fellows, you know, we don’t only have the big and hairies. We have everything around us. Let’s teach people to look down, look left, look right, look up.”
One could attribute this shift in perception to a more sensitive appreciation for nature in the late 1960s, but it is probably easier to argue that the Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve was at this stage conceived of as a quiet park on the fringes of the metropole, able to offer a true ‘getaway’ experience. Material conditions in Layters’ and the Red Hill residents’ lives, on the other hand, made it imperative to “look down, look left”. Human labour in its interaction with nature did not ‘getaway’ but literally had to ‘get in’. The river, for example, was needed to wash clothes. Layters says: “Ek het sommer binne-in die river gestaan en was — wasgoed [I just stood right in the river and washed — washing].”
Pine-tufts, which were cleaned with stones first, needed to be gathered for scrubbing the washing: “Daai met die lang bol wat die outydse mense ook maar hulle wasgoed mee gewas het — daai mannetjie … Hulle het gevryf die wasgoed soos ‘n borsel wat ook skrap [Those with the long tuft which people also did their washing with in the past — that male one … They scrubbed their washing [with it] like a scrubbing-brush].”
The use of surrounding vegetation was not limited to everyday tasks. Layters also recalls her mother’s treatment of wounds with tobacco leaves:
As already mentioned, both alien and indigenous vegetation was used as food or medicine by several people interviewed. Remedies included honeybush tea (harvested and sold on a limited scale in the southern Cape to this day), and varieties of buchu leaves, wild garlic, kruidjie-roer-my-nie (touch-me-not), wilde-als, klipdagga, kattekruie and bluegum (the latter currently targeted by alien-vegetation removal teams in the Peninsula). Moreover, flowers were picked mainly by women for decorative purposes. “Jy het presies geweet,” as Lotter said, “verskillende blomme, bome, plante. Jy het presies geweet in watter tyd van die jaar sal jy daardie blousel kry, en daardie plante sal kry. … So ek meen, die natuur was deel van jou lewe gewees [You knew exactly the different types of flowers, trees, plants. You knew exactly in what season you’ll get this bloom, and those plants … So I mean, nature was part of your life].” Some flowers (such as some species of Afrikaner Daisy) could be located only by their scent. Flowers supplemented incomes, being arranged in colourful mixtures of homegrown garden varieties and wild fynbos and taken down to Simon’s Town where they had been ordered. This flower-picking tradition has apparently not ceased — in many of the interviews a vase of wild fynbos blooms in season stood on some little table.
Topological Sorrow?
Hard spaces ...
By comparison with much of Layters’ and the Red Hill residents ’ testimony, Hare’s and Wright’s utterances possess a somewhat formal (more literary), if not detached, quality. At certain times, however, this remote quality emerges also in the testimony of some of the former Red Hill inhabitants . The labour of walking in the veld in order to find wood, quoted earlier, is abstracted or formalised. In the following quotation, while it does not quite create a ‘picture’ along the lines of Hare’s composition, physical gesture is nevertheless ‘alienated ’ — that is, removed from its originary spatial and temporal determinants. The Levendals said: “Ons was als versorg, ja — … ons was nooit sonder hout nie, want ons — we were always in advance with wood, want hulle het nooit opgehou om hout te kap, om dit te saag en te kap, en op te stoor in die stoorkamertjies in [We always had provisions, yes — … we were never without wood — we were always in advance with wood, because they never stopped chopping wood, sawing and chopping it, and storing it in the store-rooms].”
The above descriptive generalisation conceals beneath an expression of timelessness (“they never stopped chopping wood”), a pendulum which wavers between past and present, settling neither for a final ‘verbal portrait ’ or description (which aims to transport the listener back into the past), nor for a re-enactment or performance of original gestures (which ‘import’ the past into the present). This ‘pendulum’ seems to articulate the unresolved state in which many former Red Hill residents find themselves today: namely, hankering for their lost home at Red Hill, on the one hand, while on the other hand acknowledging the impossibility of returning. Lotter said, “Ek dink dit het my moed gebreek toe ons in Ocean View kom om tuin te maak — want daar wat ek nie lus gekry nie [I think when we came to Ocean View it broke my will to do gardening — because I didn’t feel like it then].”
The quality of uncertainty in the interviews with former Red Hill residents also manifests itself in explicit comparisons between past and present lives. While labour necessitated free physical movement at Red Hill, former inhabitants have since had to accommodate themselves and live with a sense of indignation. Mrs Levendal said, “Hulle was in niemand se pad gewees nie! [They were in nobody’s way!]” In terms of Proclamation 63 of 1967 Simon’s Town was finally declared a white area. Some doubt has existed as to whether everyone was moved under the Group Areas Act — some had to leave to make way for a dam to be built at Brooklands. The dam has, however, never been built, and most people declare that “We just got our letters at that time. … there were several meetings — nothing materialised, so — we had no backing — so we just had to take our bags and go” (Jurgens).
As mentioned earlier, there are dissenting voices who claim that residents were not forced to move: “Hulle was gretig om hier to kom woon het! [They were eager to come and live here!” (Lotter). When probed, this same voice elaborated the contradictions around the nostalgia for Red Hill:
OL: Ons het wonderlik groot geword! Ek prys net die Here vandag dat ons kan sit en -
JY: Ons kan dit hou [onthou]!
OL: En vir u alles vertel hoe ons groot geword het.
OL: We grew up wonderfully! I praise the Lord that today we can sit and -
JY: We can keep [remember] it!
OL: And tell you everything about how we grew up.
The bygone days at Red Hill are recalled as days of social harmony with clean air, physical exercise, good health and plentiful food. None the less, testimonies swing from one extreme — for example: “Daar is niks smaak aan vandag se hoenders [There’s no taste in today’s chickens]” (Mrs Levendal) — to the other:
In contradistinction to Layters’ navigation of various forms of labour and patterns of life, the former Red Hill inhabitants ’ shift to a suburban lifestyle is complete. Moreover, Layters’ narrations do not glorify the past. “Ek kan onthou, daai drewe,” she says, merely asking, “Waar kry jy dit nou? [I can remember those crayfish. Where can you get them now?].” The difference between Layters’ and former Red Hill inhabitants ’ nostalgia may therefore be said to lie in the sublimation, or glorification, in the utterances of the latter. By way of example, both Dora Layters and Olga Levendal fondly remember the highly nutritious fatty food supplied by nature in the past. Layters says: “Ek dink dis ‘n halfbottel visolie wat daar in [die geelbek] is — nei! dis sy eie vet by die kop! [I think it’s half a bottle of fish oil that’s in [the Cape Salmon] — no! It’s his own fat from his head!]” Mrs Levendal, on the other hand, remembers the “dikmelk” (lit. ‘thick milk’). She explains:
Then, on Fridays “My mother used to go down … to buy the weekend meat, that was Friday night, Saturday and Sunday roast, whatever. Always used to be roast that time, was no other thing but roast.… Roast and puddings!” (Jurgens). The importance of the Sunday meal echoes the importance of meals on ‘big days’ such as Easter and Christmas, which were times of copious amounts of food. The significance of festive occasions is linked to Christian traditions at Red Hill in the 1950s and 1960s. “Daardie tyd het ons nog middagkerk gehad,” recalls Lotter, “daar was nie ‘n Sondag wat verbygaan nie — jy mo`et kerk toe gaan [At that time we still had afternoon church, there wasn’t a Sunday that passed — you had to go to church].” These routines were unaffected by the weather; indeed, they were insisted upon despite the weather: “Dit maak nou nie saak of die son skyn nie, as dit ree¨n, as dit storm en die wind waai nie — maar kerk toe sal jy moet gaan [It doesn’t matter whether the sun is shining, whether it’s raining or storming and the wind is blowing — but you’ve got to go to church]” (Lotter).
In contrast to Layters’ testimony, therefore, where weekends or holidays are scarcely mentioned, the routine of the week at Red Hill was directly affected by the men’s formal work-hours, church and school: “Naweke was die so wonderlik vir ons. Dan is al die familie bymekaar [Weekends were so wonderful for us. Then the whole family would be together]” (Mrs Levendal). Furthermore, there are echoes of Hare’s reminiscences of his “magic” leisure-days at Brightwater over the Christmas holiday period in utterances such as:
Where the Layters' lived ...
The transition of the Red Hill community from a semi-rural to a more (sub)urbanised consciousness with its ability to articulate ‘pictures’ of the past appears to have developed gradually before the community was relocated. The physical actions attached to the demands of food and shelter were progressively pushed to the margins of daily existence:
Like Hare’s “magic environment”, Leonard Levendal’s phrase “dan kom die mense van orals [then people come from everywhere]” positions the mind, rather than the body, in an environment no longer concrete but imaginary, playing out before the mind’s eye a moving strip of dreamlike images. Moreover, physically impossible actions — such as people coming from everywhere — are expansions of original gestures (“loop ons af in die pad [we walk down the road]”). As suggested earlier, nostalgia involves the cognition of the impossibility (in the present) of gestures performed in the past. Such gestures become vulnerable to forgetfulness. In former Red Hill residents ’ testimony the forgetfulness of the body is sublimated as a formal (literary) — that is, non-performative — utterance: “So lank soos ek lewe sal ek nooit ooit daai tyd kan vergeet nie, en hoe ons opgegroei het daar as kinders nie [As long as I live I shall never ever be able to forget that time, and how we grew up there as children]” (Mr Levendal).
The appeal to memory in the above quotation is interesting if compared to claims that former members of the community may try to create a “prentjie wat nie daar is nie [a picture which is not there]” (Lotter). A “picture” which, it is implied, has forgotten the burden of carrying the physical body, and the quantities of water, wood and food it requires for its subsistence, through physical space. There is also evidence that gangs started to develop at Red Hill during the 1960s and 1970s, bearing names such as Bronkbokkies (Bronco jeans) derived from American cultural influences (Lotter).
The Levendals’ story is fascinating for what it reveals about the discourse of nostalgia. In the absence of a verbal demonstration of original, concrete gestures, Mr Levendal’s exclamation thrusts an unperformed, yet represented, or symbolised, past — “hoe ons opgegroei het [how we grew up]” — beyond the present into the future: “ek [sal] nooit ooit daai tyd kan vergeet nie [I will never ever be able to forget that time]”. This is nostalgia: an articulation of a future that has already arrived. Here, an unforgettable life has already been converted into representatives — magical images, evocative symbols and dreams — which, while they rehearse the past’s gestures, betray its physical intensity. Julie Yon articulates this process in the following moving utterance:
Former Red Hill residents’ testimony thus wavers incessantly between the specific recounting of physical labour and a more removed, increasingly optic, or descriptive, consciousness. The process of converting the former into the latter produces, it seems, an excess of affect which expresses itself as a glorifying nostalgia. Concrete physical motion, it appears, is exchanged for its representation as emotion in the form of image.
Former Red Hill residents’ descriptions of how they made use of the natural environment therefore occupy an intermediate ground which is rooted in their social strata, both past and present. At either extreme one may position the articulations of Layters and Hare. Mostly, Layters communicated a memory of the body, often physically re-enacted in the presence of the interviewer and her tape recorder. For example, the following ‘performance’ of the process of bringing a geelbek (Cape Salmon) on board the boat — even as transcribed here merely in written words — retains aspects of physical intensity: “Nou kry jy die wat diekant vang, vang diekant — bring hom uit — en die wat diekant vang — as hy vas is — ja hoe? Waar kom jy? Vat hom net met die kierie! [Now you get those that catch this side, they catch this side — bring him out — and those that catch that side — if he’s hooked — yes, huh? Where are you? Hit him with the stick!]” (Layters).
A comparable, but very different, intensity may be perceived in Hare’s interview. Nestling in “the leisure cushion” of his holiday house at Brightwater, Hare’s discourse is devoid of performative elements; yet it is driven by the eloquence of what one may be permitted to call an ocular passion: “The immense power of nature to create a spectacle,” he says, has produced “the most stunning views in the world … to take your breath away.” The wide variety of utterances about the natural environment reverberates in compelling alternations of concord and disunity — where the overwhelming “mystical, spiritual power” (Hare) of nature (as seen by some), is of no consequence (as articulated by others). The fifteen mussels one is allowed to remove nowadays from the Cape of Good Hope area, declares Layters scornfully, “soos die opgemaal is — dis nog nie eers ‘n frikkadel nie [once it’s minced — it’s not even enough for one fish-cake].” The oral histories selected and presented should likewise be seen as a small contribution to existing records of utterances about society’s inescapable relationship to nature.
Bonteberg Peak ...
Notes
In memoriam ...
References
Bramwell, A. 1989. Ecology in the 20th Century: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Bunn, D. 1993. “Relocations: Landscape Theory, South African Landscape Practice, and the Transmission of Political Value”, PreTexts 4(2), Summer: 44–67.
Burman, J. 1962. Safe to the Sea. Cape Town: Human and Rousseau.
Carruthers, J. 1993. “Diverging Environments: The Influence of National Parks on African and White Attitudes to Nature Conservation in South Africa”. Paper presented at the Thirty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, Boston, Mass., Dec. 4–7.
Cosgrove, D.E. 1984. Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. London: Croom Helm.
Cowling, R. 1992. The Ecology of Fynbos: Nutrients, Fire and Diversity. Cape Town: Oxford University Press.
Cowling, R. and Richardson, D. 1995. Fynbos: South Africa’s Unique Floral Kingdom. Photography by Colin Paterson-Jones. Vlaeberg, Cape Town: Fernwood Press in association with the Institute for Plant Conservation.
Hallinan, J. 1992. “A Heritage Interpretation Plan for the Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve.” Master’s dissertation, University of Cape Town.
Hamilton-Paterson, J. 1992. Seven-Tenths: The Sea and its Thresholds. London: Hutchinson.
Hofmeyr, I. 1993. “We spend our years as a tale that is told”: Oral Historical Narrative in a South African Chiefdom. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press; London: James Currey.
Kirkaldy, A. 1988. “‘The sea is in our blood’: Community and Craft in Kalk Bay, c.1880–1939.” Master’s dissertation, University of Cape Town.
Leatt, J. 1967. “The Matrifocal Family: A Study of Family Structure at Red Hill.” Honours essay, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cape Town.
Minkley, G. and Rassool, C. 1995. “Oral History in South Africa: Some Critical Questions”, Paper presented at the Africa Seminar, Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, 22 March.
Odden, E. and Lee, N. (n.d.). Cape Point. Cape Town: Don Nelson.
Schama, S. 1995. Landscape and Memory. London: Harper Collins. 1995.
Skaife, S.H. 1963. A Naturalist Remembers. Cape Town: Longmans.
Smith, C. 1966. Common Names of South African Plants. Botanical Survey Memoir No. 35. Pretoria: Botanical Research Institute, Department of Technical Services.
Smith, N. 1984. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Tonkin, E. 1992. Narrating our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
West, M. 1967. “Social Groupings in the Red Hill Community near Simonstown.” Honours essay, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cape Town.
Whisson, M. 1972. The Fairest Cape? An Account of the Coloured People in the District of Simonstown. Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations.
Wilson, A. 1992. The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.
Winberg, C. 1991. “Naming the Cape: The Historical Context of the Literary Motif.” Cape Town History Project Workshop, University of Cape Town, 11–12 Nov.
Horns of history ...
Interviews
Places and dates are given; transcripts are lodged in the Western Cape Oral History Project Archive.
Hare, John, b.1947. University of Cape Town, 12 May 1995.
Jurgens: Two sisters were interviewed and are both referenced under Jurgens in the text. They are: Constance, Dorothy, b.1952, and Williams, Erica, b.1946, both nee Jurgens. Ocean View, 21 June 1995.
Layters, Dorothy, b.1929, and Klein, Sarah, b.1905. Red Hill, 23 May (Layters 1), and 29 May 1995 (Layters 2).
Levendal, Leonard, b.1929 and Levendal, Olga, b.1937 (husband and wife), and Yon, Julie nee Levendal, b.1942. Ocean View, 1 Aug. 1995.
Lotter, Herbert, b.1948. Ocean View, 7 Aug. 1995.
Mitchell, John, b.1931. Klaasjagersberg, Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve, 3 May 1995.
Page, Millicent, b.1949. Wildschutsbrand, 23 May 1995.
Wright, Gerald, b.1939. Helderberg Nature Reserve, Somerset West, 24 May 1995.
Silke Heiss University of Cape Town
from African Studies, Vol 60: Issue 1, 2001
This paper emerged out of six months of oral history research conducted for the University of Cape Town Western Cape Oral History Project between May and October 1995. Interviews were held with a variety of people whose lives were, or had been, in some way or another connected with the natural environment in the Cape of Good Hope and Red Hill areas (see Map 1). Material was gathered with the intention of comparing various perceptions of, and modes of articulating, the natural environment. Differences in language, class, education and occupation, race, age, and gender among a total of 28 interviewees thus affected the analysis.
Broadly speaking, three basic types of articulation suggested themselves in the interviews: performative (or oral-gestural), descriptive (or literary), and finally, utterances which situated themselves ‘between’ these two by superimposing aspects of both. Interestingly, it was in this third, intermediary category that nostalgia for a ‘lost space’ was most apparent. Interests which recalled the natural environment as physical space and food resource, on the one hand, and as visual space and leisure resource, on the other, emerged as perhaps the most compelling aspect of the comparison. The above three types of discourse were, furthermore, grounded in the interviews, which ranged from marginalised subsistence to upper-middle-class professional lives. ‘Between’ these extremes were to be found, again, semi-subsistence, working-class/lower-middle-class existences, whose statements on the natural environment portrayed it as both a food and leisure resource, as well as physical and visual space. This shift in focus possibly demands more input on questions of memory and nostalgia, that is to say, the apprehension of vanished lives in vanished landscapes which formed the bulk of the interview material.
The paper provides, firstly, an overview of the common geographical space in question. Secondly, theoretical background to the topic, research methodology and sample are briefly discussed. Finally, interview material is explored in detail by juxtaposing perceptions of changing ways of life in the abovementioned cross-section of interviewees.
The Common Space
The interviewees mentioned in this paper have led significant portions of their lives in the Cape of Good Hope and Red Hill areas (see Map 2). Of these, the Cape of Good Hope enjoys greater international status in terms of its historical and strategic importance on the sea route to the east, as well as, more recently, ranking highly as a tourist destination (Winberg 1991). The purchase of some of the farmlands on the southern portions of the Peninsula by the Cape Divisional Council during the late 1920s and 1930s led to the establishment in 1939 of the Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve (Odden and Lee:n.d.). From its southernmost tip at Cape Point, the Reserve stretches northwards covering an area of 7 750 hectares to its boundary which spans Smitswinkel Bay on the east coast to Schuster’s Bay on the west (see Map 2).
In terms of its physical proximity to the Reserve, Red Hill could easily — at least conceptually — be included within the bounds of the Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve. Individuals who have resided eastwards near the Klawer Valley area (reserved for military purposes) as well as at Bothakamp, Maylands and Brooklands to the north (see Map 2) also consider themselves to have lived at Red Hill. While Red Hill itself is therefore just a 255,6m peak north-west of Simon’s Town, the Red Hill area as a whole denotes a range of former farms and military camps on the northern, southern and south-western slopes of Red Hill ‘behind’ Simon’s Town (Burman 1962:137).
Although uninhabited today, there is evidence that scattered fishing colonies lived within the Cape of Good Hope area during the present century. In the early 1940s they were compelled to leave so that game could be introduced into the newly declared Nature Reserve. By way of contrast — probably because of its proximity to Simon’s Town — Red Hill was and remains populated by peri-urban communities closely related by class and kin, some of whose history at Red Hill goes back at least a hundred years (Leatt 1967:4; West 1967:9). For most of this century, Red Hill was populated by a predominantly coloured community of about 500 men, women, and children (Leatt 1967:1). In the late 1960s the enforcement of the Group Areas Act in the Simon’s Town District dispersed the community across the greater Cape Town area, although many of its members remain relatively close by, living in the formerly coloured township of Ocean View.
Ironically, although the coloured families were moved out of what then became a ‘white area’, Red Hill today supports a thriving settlement of about 150 or more black ‘squatter ’ families, many of whom appear to be from Fort Beaufort in the Eastern Cape. Moreover, a preponderance of undeveloped and largely uninhabited land distinguishes the area. The narrow Peninsula is embraced by both the Atlantic and Indian oceans which have provided both recreational as well as full-time fishermen with substantial seafood resources over the centuries (Hallinan 1992:85; Kirkaldy 1988:19) . Some ex-Red Hill residents felt that the proximity of the sea was an ‘invitation ’ of sorts to go fishing:
…we used to [fish] for fun. Where we stayed [Red Hill Farm] actually we could see Olifantsbos [see Map 2] — you know just that little bay there, and we could see from our back door if it was high tide or low tide, like the rocks sort of showed — that’s low tide, then we knew, okay we can go now for whatever [crayfish, mussels, limpets]. (Erica Williams, nee Jurgens)The use of the sea for food emerged as a dominant theme in many of the interviews, and to this day it remains an integral part of many Peninsula inhabitants ’ lives. Furthermore, the Red Hill and Cape of Good Hope areas support much of the unique Cape fynbos — the name given to a diversity of shrub-like plants with 5 800 species peculiar to the southern and south-western Cape (see Cowling 1992; Cowling and Richardson 1995). Fynbos is of poor grazing quality and the Cape soils in this region have little agricultural value, but there is evidence of the use of fynbos for food and medicine among the original inhabitants of the region (Smith 1966). Traditions of the medicinal as well as decorative use of a large variety of fynbos shrubs emerge in the testimony of a number of individuals interviewed (Cowling and Richardson 1995:13) . In addition, since the establishment of the Cape Colony in 1952, when European settlers began introducing alien plants, fynbos has been invaded by some of these species, which include pines, wattles and hakeas.
The region is also hampered by the problems of extremely scant water resources compared with those of greater Cape Town. A number of natural springs in the Brooklands area have been sufficient to support no more than a few smallholdings, and most of the area’s rivers dry up during the hot, windy Cape summer (Burman 1962). The winter months at Red Hill and the Cape of Good Hope typically consist of torrential downpours, fogs and north-westerly gales, and many of the interviewees’ memories restricted themselves quite unconsciously to the summer months with their long twilight hours.
The focus of the project was to explore aspects of discourse in oral history interviews and, in particular, discourse on life in the natural — that is, ‘undeveloped ’ — environments of the Cape of Good Hope and Red Hill. It was therefore necessary to interview individuals whose life histories were inseparable from their existence on this strip of ‘undeveloped’ land and its surrounding waters.
As Smith (1984) has shown, industrial development in the twentieth century has effectively urbanised the countryside in material as well as ideological ways. The continuity between so-called rural and urban landscapes in the Southern Peninsula is in any case immediately evident in that former (coloured) Red Hill and Cape of Good Hope inhabitants were more often than not employed by the Navy Dockyard or the Simon’s Town Municipality — in the case of the men — while some of the women worked as domestic servants or flower sellers in Simon’s Town. Moreover, it will become clear that none of the interviewees are unaffected by the natural environment in this area, which has not only use but also exchange value. This is perhaps most starkly illustrated by the ‘impure’ and precarious semi-subsistence life-styles which many former Red Hill inhabitants led on ‘undeveloped ’, but nevertheless rented, land.
Theory and Method
This paper responds to a general concern prevalent among local oral historians. The study of discourse in local oral history research has been, it appears, somewhat delayed in favour of transcribing ‘information’ transmitted by interviewees who have been called ‘informants’. Minkley and Rassool (1995:6–7,8) and Hofmeyr (1993) accuse South African oral history of having neglected discourse and language in analysis of oral testimonies (for similar comments about oral history outside South Africa see Tonkin 1992). This particular research project leans towards a conception of language as a transparent medium, and is thus attuned specifically to literary theory and techniques of textual analysis.
Existing studies on perceptions and articulations of the natural environment occupy the domain of a distinctly non-oral discourse. Notable texts in this area have located themselves within fields of representation (mainly writing and painting) where the natural environment is emphasised as a cultural concept rather than as a material object, and these have given rise to a number of theoretical works on nature as transmitting ideological value (Cosgrove 1984; Bunn 1993).
Wilson (1992) and Bramwell (1989) may be said to have extended the literature on nature and perception by means of practical assessments of the ideological value of nature in contemporary economic and political spheres — a task which Smith (1984) explored ten years before in his attempt to explain the process of what he terms ‘uneven development ’. Smith returns to orthodox Marxism to offer a broad theoretical framework within which one may position oral history material and explicate the social and historical processes involved in the “production of nature”. Unusual recent works on the natural environment are Hamilton-Paterson (1992) and Schama (1995). These books contain an unexpected mingling of discourses. Numerous scientific and historical passages interweave with semi-fictional or even mythical narratives, autobiography, anecdotes, written in an easily digested journalistic style.
In direct response to such written texts it seemed fruitful to find local voices and to hear what they had to say about the natural environment of the areas which had been integral to their everyday lives. The ‘open interview’ method associated with qualitative research formed the basis of the interviews. Most interviews began with an initial open-ended question (for example, “Could you tell me about your experiences at Red Hill/the Cape of Good Hope?”), and avoided direct or probing questions. Interviews tended to follow the chaotic, disjointed movements of live conversation which suited the project’s intention to gather undirected oral text. Interviewees were therefore given an often largely undefined space in which to speak, which accounts for repetition, pauses, factual vagueness and a relative lack of specific dates and place names in the interviews. It also accounts for reams of linguistically analysable oral text. A process of interviewee selection, primarily from suggestions by interviewees, drew from contacts between workers, landowners, environmentalists and families in the Red Hill and Cape of Good Hope areas.
Perceptions of Change
Perceptions themselves, as well as the ways in which they are expressed, are intimately connected with the different social classes to which individuals belong. More specifically, perceptions may be correlated to the experiences or actions within a particular social class. What complicated matters was the extent to which different group relationships with the natural environment not only diverged from, but also overlapped with, one another.
While the descendants of the subsistence fisherfolk represent an economically marginalised sector, there is evidence of some wage-labour in addition to informal economic activity such as fish and wood-selling. Wood-selling also formed a part of the livelihood of some of the poorer former Red Hill inhabitants . Moreover, most of the latter community were wage-labourers employed by the provincial government or the municipality , many supplementing their income with the sale of their own vegetables, eggs, meat and milk, derived from what was mainly subsistence existence at Red Hill (West 1967:27). Employment in the Reserve was related to race, social class and gender. Thus, prime leadership positions, such as rangers, were held exclusively by white males; secondary positions, for example, supervisors, drivers and storemen, by coloured workers. The lower positions were filled by inexperienced or young coloured workers, as well as by an increasing number of black labourers from the Eastern Cape.
Shifts within individuals lives from one type of activity to another — if not from one social class to another — can be seen most starkly in two interviews with descendants of fishing communities at the Cape of Good Hope. They are Dorothy Layters and her sister Sarah Klein, nee Layters. The Layters’ father had been a blacksmith from George, in the southern Cape, who had arrived in Simon’s Town looking for work. When his family joined him in 1916, they rented a small, whitewashed stone house in Baskloof where Dorothy Layters was born six years later. Soon afterwards, the family moved to another house situated in a pine forest on the banks of the Kromrivier, on a piece of land then belonging to a man by the name of De Villiers, where they initially supplemented their income by selling fish.
Layters states that her family originally lived in this virtually deserted area just above Die Mond (see Map 2). Around 1940 she moved away from her mother who, along with the only other two tenants in the area, was forced to leave the house herself a year later as result of the ground having been declared a Nature Reserve — “die diere-besigheid [the animal-business]”, as she calls it. Finally, in 1947 Dorothy Layters settled in Elsiesrivier at Red Hill — not to be confused with the Elsies River in Glencairn Valley — where she lived for twenty years.
In 1967, as a result of the Group Areas Act, Layters was one of the first to be moved to a house she was able to buy in Ocean View. (The entire community was moved gradually over a period of about 6 years.) Confrontation with the authorities over the sub-letting of her house in Ocean View, however, eventually forced Layters back to Red Hill Farm in 1991, where she currently pays a nominal rent from her meagre monthly pension for two tiny stables which are her living quarters. In contrast, all the other members of the former Red Hill community interviewed have remained in the suburban environment of Ocean View.
Layters thus has a past which includes informal economic activity and wage labour (she has a brief history of charing). She has rented as well as owned property; she is familiar with an existence which is dependant on the sea for food while inhabiting small dwellings on expanses of largely unoccupied land; and she is acquainted with circumstances within a relatively fast-developing suburban environment such as Ocean View. Moreover, male members of her family have engaged in subsistence farming as well as farm labour in the Smitswinkel Bay, Perdekloof and Baskloof areas.
Layters’s earliest memories are linked to the Cape of Good Hope area — she and her sister were the sole representatives in this study of the former fishing community at the Kromrivier area. She says that: “Toe ek my oe¨ oopmaak toe is dit daar, daar agter, Nooi weet — by die see? [When I opened my eyes it was there, back there, you know, Nooi — by the sea?]”1 During the 1920s and 1930s the rent was fifteen shillings per month for their flat-roofed dwelling. While he worked as a blacksmith in Simon’s Town, Layters’ father had built a boat enabling the family to ‘trek-fish’ (trawl in a drag-net) in the Cape Point area to supplement their livelihood. In addition, Layters’ mother acquired a few donkeys for carrying bundles of chopped wood to be sold in Simon’s Town, thus supplementing the family’s income. Layters says that, “My Ma het Witsand toe gegaan, daar naby Kommetjie, haal jy kreef. Inkoop. En dan het hulle verkoop in die baai, en hout gemaak [My mother went to Witsand [on the coast, south-west of where Ocean View is today], there near Kommetjie, you get crayfish to buy. And then they sold them in the bay [False Bay], and we made [chopped] wood].”
It is not clear how many people there were in the Kromrivier fishing colony; Layters claims that her mother had had eighteen children, but many of these died before the family moved from George. Layters also indicates that she had several brothers but there was “Oom [Uncle] Pieterse”, Carl and Japie Booysen, and she recalls that: “Soos ons al kom is hulle besig met die trek, gaan net uit, die net uit [As we came they were busy with the trekking, the net went out, the net out].”
The community appears also to have been augmented by individuals who lost their jobs, like Sarah Klein’s first husband, who joined and assisted with fishing. Somewhere between 1922 and 1930 Layters’ father is said to have decided to stop working as a blacksmith because he could not drive. There are already the outlines of two basic perceptions of the natural environment. In the first case there is the sea as a food resource:
“My Ma was in die boot! [Gestures] Sy vang haar vis, en sy haal-trawl kreef met daardie [My mother was in the boat! [Gestures] She catches her fish, and she catch-trawls crayfish with those nets].” This memory of food-orientated experience is associated with plenitude: “Jene, Nooi, die see is vol vis en vol kos en vol kos. [Hell, Nooi, the sea is full of fish, and full of food, and full of food].” The perception of the sea and the natural environment in general as an unending food resource — “Die vis kan tog nie verdwyn nie man! [After all, the fish cannot disappear!]” — finds echoes in the testimony of the Red Hill residents. Mr Lotter says: “Kyk jy het aartappels geplant, jy het uie geplant, mielies, boontjies, ertjies, komkommer … marrows, rooibeet … kool [Look, you planted potatoes, you planted onions, maize, beans, peas, cucumbers … marrows, beetroot … cabbage].”
“Pampoen en ertjies! Wortels! [Pumpkins and peas! Carrots!]” exclaims Layters when remembering her brother’s and brother-in-law’s farm labour at Perdekloof. The perception that the environment is a plentiful food resource is not limited to those who earned their living from it, but surfaces also in the stories told by John Hare. In the early 1920s his grandfather and great uncle used to hunt for food, but also caught crayfish — “Because in those days already there were crayfish reserves down off the coast”, and “There was a place at Brightwater where they found a little stream, and there was kelp … in which they found crayfish.” The way that food is described by Layters and Hare is to a large extent gender-specific. Layters’ testimony is unusual in that the domain of hunting and fishing is traditionally male. In her case, the perception of nature as a plentiful food resource is inseparable from human labour: “Dis van jonk af swaar …2 Daai skuit het heeldag in die water gele, Nooi weet, in die see, en hulle kom wal toe, hier voor sonsak, dan is daai skuit mos dan swaar, Nooi, daai planke is mos swaar, Nooi … Ek moet hom dra, Nooi [It’s hard from a young age … That boat lay in the water for the whole day, you know, in the sea, and they’re coming towards the shore, here, before sunset, then that boat is heavy, Nooi, those planks are heavy, after all, Nooi … I have to lug it, Nooi].” This may be compared to the following from Lotter: “Ek en my ooms en my broer het daardie grond bewerk. Nie met ‘n ploeg of iets nie, maar met die hand. Maar ek praat nou nie van ‘n stukkie ground, ek praat nou van groot gronde [My uncles and my brother and I worked that ground. Not with a plough or anything, but by hand. But now I’m not talking about a bit of land, I’m talking about huge areas of land].”
The above quotations encourage one to uncover a second type of articulation, namely, the natural environment as space (implied by the mention of the sea by Layters, and made more explicit in the “groot gronde [large areas of land]” in the quotation from Lotter). This spatial delineation of the environment is palpable in repeated expressions of physical movement: “Die loopery! [All the walking!].” The need to cover large distances on foot was not limited to life at Kromrivier. At Red Hill, too, the Levendals said, “Ver stap en lang pale gaan saag [Going far to saw long logs of wood]”, and two cousins from the Red Hill settlement remember that:
OL: Dan klim ons sommer — ek en sy — ons — ek en Julie — ons klim sommer in die boom en dan saag ons droog hout daar uit die boom uit -
JY: Uit die boom uit -
OL: Op die boom met die saag.
OL: Then we would simply climb — she and I — we — Julie and myself — we would simply climb into the tree and saw dry wood out from the tree -
JY: Out from the tree -
OL: On the tree with the saw.
The spaciality of the natural environment is, moreover, communicated as a physical positioning of the body within space, made explicit by prepositions such as in, op and uit. This seems to solicit concepts of openness and freedom: “[Dit] was nie toegekamp op daai tyd nie. Dit was oop gewees [It was not fenced at that time. It was open],” declares Layters, “Daai tyd was die goed so lekker vry gewees [At that time everything [the fish] was so nice and free].” The connection between the ideas of space, physical movement and freedom is summarised in the interview with members of the Levendal family: “So het ons gelewe in Red Hill. Vry! Vry! Ek sal seˆ vry. Want as ons net so ‘n entjie uit die huis uitstap, so ‘n entjie stap, dan is ons in die veld [That is how we lived at Red Hill. Free! Free! I shall say free. Because if we just walked a little way out of the house, just a little way, then we were in the veld].”
An expression of the way in which the physical body is positioned within a spatial environment that makes it both possible and necessary to move is the following quotation from Layters:
En toe het ons ook gaat vishaal, Nooi. Daar. [Unclear] En die eerste keer wat ons moet deurgaan in daai vlak is Leier-Verloor. … Hoor die naam ook, Nooi. Dan gaan jy nou daardeur, dan kom jy anderkant, dan sien jy die pad, die main pad wat Cape Point toe gaan, daar gaan jy af na Hare toe … Gaan ons duskant deur, daai vlak deur — die tweede land was gewees ‘n Sirkels — Sirkelsvlei … Daar is ook groot waterskilpatte … so uit, met die koppies steek so uit die water — … Kom ons net weer deur. Try om die kort pad te loop, vat om …The above quotation is repeated below, accentuating the verbal expression of spatial experience. The words in bold signify physical movement — that is, a perception of the natural environment as concrete space.
And then we also went to catch fish, Nooi. There. [Unclear] And first we had to cross that plain, Leier-Verloor [Lost-our-Leader — see Map 2]. Listen, too, to the name, Nooi. Then you go through there, then you come out on the other side, then you see the path, the main path leading to Cape Point, you go down there towards the Hares … We go through on this side, through the plain — the second stretch was [called] Sirkels — Sirkelsvlei [see Map 2] … There are also large turtles … out like this, with their little heads sticking out of the water like this — … Again we just go through. Try to walk around the short path, take it round …
En toe het ons ook gaat vishaal Nooi. Daar. [Unclear] En die eerste keer wat ons moet deurgaan in daai vlak is Leier-Verloor. … Hoor die naam ook, Nooi. Dan gaan jy nou daardeur, dan kom jy anderkant, dan sien jy die pad, die main pad wat Cape Point toe gaan, daar gaan jy af na Hare toe … Gaan ons duskant deur, daai vlak deur — die tweede land was gewees ‘n Sirkels — Sirkelsvlei… Daar is ook groot waterskilpatte …so uit, met die koppies steek so uit die water — … Kom ons net weer deur. Try om die kort pad te loop, vat om …The perceptions of the natural environment firstly as food, and secondly as physical space, may be contrasted with nature as food for the eyes, rather than for the stomach, which is in turn linked to an absence of bodily movement and, by implication, of labour. The connection is described by John Hare:
I’ve had an incredibly fortunate background in that I have been privileged enough to be able to enjoy nature without being dependant upon nature economically. …So there I’m able to sit back and look at nature as almost a leisure cushion around me. (My emphasis)
In 1927, when Layters was five, Hare’s grandfather and great-uncle, Percy and William Hare, bought Brightwater on the west coast of the Cape of Good Hope. For Hare, therefore, nature was a space which was possible to experience in an optic way, that is, without moving the physical body — “We’re sitting in an environment which allows us to sit back and view nature as a movie.” Where there is an absence of human labour, experience seems to become vicarious — nature becomes “a movie”. Furthermore, Hare’s evidence significantly employs the present simple tense. This is used not only to express events happening in the present (now), but also to express general (timeless) states of affairs — for example, we “sit back and view nature as a movie”. The present simple tense may also be employed, however, to narrate past events — at such times it is termed the present historic tense. It is this latter tense which Layters’s testimony (in the English translation) employs above. The use of the present simple tense in Hare’s remark indicates that there is a connection between the experience of nature “as a movie” and a timelessness, or sequencelessness, possible only in terms of sightseeing, rather than in terms of actively earning one’s living (Wilson 1992:20). None the less, when Hare casts his mind back to his boyhood days, when “we went down for the school holidays at Christmas time each year … and we’d stay for — for about three weeks”, there would at first glance appear to be an awareness of physical space, as well as a primary experience of food:
[I]n that bush was built [our] cottage. And there were tunnels and passages in the bush, and there were — there were almost like galleries in the bush … And if we had people down there, we used to have sheep on the spit, and pig on the spit, in the bush … and we had hurricane lanterns hanging in the bushes, it was the most magic environment.The above quotation shows, however, that it was not the natural environment in which Hare found himself that provided the food. Notwithstanding Hare’s insistence that “we lived on crayfish and harders and Steenbras and Hottentot”,3 his recollections rather incorporate the meat which used to be transported to the family’s house at Brightwater on the roof of the lorry in which the family used to drive to the Reserve each year. Furthermore, although Hare’s memory as expressed above employs spatial nouns such as “tunnels”, “passages” and “galleries”, the quotation re-creates a picture — that is, it is the eye alone, rather than the total body, which moves, and the discourse therefore articulates exclusively optic, or visual experience, rather than total physical experience. Hare’s discourse describes rather than performs. This is borne out by his use of the past tense, which suggests an observer’s consciousness . Hare’s being highly literate — while Layters is illiterate — contributes to the ‘descriptiveness’ of his discourse, the ‘performative’ nature of Layters’s speech, on the other hand, enhances hers.4 For the holiday child, space is a spectacle which may be said to alienate the tangible space upon which it depends. Unlike the Layters family, Hare did not earn his living by labour or physically necessary actions: “I’ve been fortunate enough to open a tin for my food, and I don’t have to go and chop down a tree before [I make a fire].”
Hare’s verbal portrait is further framed by the final flourish of “it was the most magic environment.” In this way, the past is held as by a photograph and the memory appears more like a dream — indeed, as “magic” — than a tangible moment whose possibility has passed. In Layters’ and the Red Hill residents ’ discourse, on the other hand, concepts of plenitude and freedom arise from the labour on which the direct producer depends, and this is re-enacted by means of words and gestures imported into the present from the past. Where there is no such re-enactment, Layters’s memories become nostalgic articulations of a landscape that has disappeared — as in: “Daai tyd was die goed so lekker vry gewees” [At that time everything [the fish] was so wonderfully free]”, and “Daai jare kan ek sommer ‘n klomp afgehaal het, skulp — daardie tamatieskulp, by die frikkadel-maak, alles hier. Ek het sommer blikke afgehaal daai tyd, Nooi (my emphasis). [In those years I could simply take a whole lot, mussels — those limpets, to make fish-cakes, everything was there. I took whole tins-full [from the rocks] at that time, Nooi]” (frikkadel is more usually the name of a flattened meatball).
By comparison with Layters’ testimony, if nostalgia can be said to be present in the interview with Hare, it takes the form of what might be described as childhood reminiscences, a painless type of romanticisation. This is, surely, not only because the Hare family continues to frequent their private property within the official confines of the Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve. It must also be a result of the area always having been a holiday home to Hare. In contrast, Layters’ exclusion from the Reserve amounted to an exclusion from her former home.5
A more outspoken nostalgia certainly emerged from the interviews with the former Red Hill population. The conditions of possibility for nostalgia may therefore be said to involve a more costly recognition of the impossibility of returning, or regaining, home.
The Cape of Good Hope was to be home to the Layters family for only another ten years, as in the late 1920s George Smith, the owner of Smith’s Farm, expressed his willingness to sell his land for an official Nature Reserve. At this time the Cape Times columnist Henry Hope and the entomologist Sidney Skaife were campaigning for land to be bought either by the government or the Cape Town City Council (Skaife 1963:52; Odden and Lee:n.d.). It is tempting to relate this sudden bustle around the Cape of Good Hope to the government ’s decision to nationalise Game Reserves in 1926 — a decision in its turn linked to the growth and development of South African cities, including Cape Town. During this time, writes Jane Carruthers, national parks “had a cultural function in that they indicated a growing romantic attachment to wildlife among whites”, a development linked to increased industrialisation, urbanisation and forms of labour amongst the white middle class (1993:6). Hare points out somewhat satirically:
…people had the perception that a Reserve should be a game reserve, and that …a game reserve should have big spotted creatures and striped creatures and huge things that make huge piles of poo and eat … a huge quantity of bush each day.The idea of a game reserve is of course strongly tied to the experience of the natural environment in terms of the sense of sight, with its accompanying ‘reading’ of nature “as a movie” from within the confines of a car. In this context it is interesting to find that Gerald Wright, who worked at the Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve for almost thirty years, confesses that: “We’re … to blame for getting across the idea that if you go to a nature reserve or a game reserve, the big thing is to see big Animals.”
Even more interesting is Wright’s contention that South African game rangers were eventually able, albeit only in the 1970s and 1980s, to articulate the idea that the physical body may position itself inside the environment itself — a possibility echoed in the testimony of Red Hill inhabitants analysed above: “Hang on fellows, you know, we don’t only have the big and hairies. We have everything around us. Let’s teach people to look down, look left, look right, look up.”
One could attribute this shift in perception to a more sensitive appreciation for nature in the late 1960s, but it is probably easier to argue that the Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve was at this stage conceived of as a quiet park on the fringes of the metropole, able to offer a true ‘getaway’ experience. Material conditions in Layters’ and the Red Hill residents’ lives, on the other hand, made it imperative to “look down, look left”. Human labour in its interaction with nature did not ‘getaway’ but literally had to ‘get in’. The river, for example, was needed to wash clothes. Layters says: “Ek het sommer binne-in die river gestaan en was — wasgoed [I just stood right in the river and washed — washing].”
Pine-tufts, which were cleaned with stones first, needed to be gathered for scrubbing the washing: “Daai met die lang bol wat die outydse mense ook maar hulle wasgoed mee gewas het — daai mannetjie … Hulle het gevryf die wasgoed soos ‘n borsel wat ook skrap [Those with the long tuft which people also did their washing with in the past — that male one … They scrubbed their washing [with it] like a scrubbing-brush].”
The use of surrounding vegetation was not limited to everyday tasks. Layters also recalls her mother’s treatment of wounds with tobacco leaves:
“Ek het amper nou maar my duim ook hier afgesaag, en die saag het uitgespring — sprei die bloed so, toe het my ma van die twak om — so draai blaretwak — dat die bloed nou net so — weg is [I also almost sawed off my thumb, and the saw slipped — the blood was dripping, so my mother put some tobacco — tobacco leaves around — so that the blood was — just gone].”Another ‘natural’ home remedy is described by Herbert Lotter: “As jy jou nou miskien ongelukkig gesny het daar aan ‘n glas of iets — en dan het jy die spinnerak gevat … En dit help nou in die plek sit — en die bloed te stop [If you cut yourself, perhaps on a piece of glass or something — then you took spiderwebs … And it helps to put it in the place — and stop the blood].”
As already mentioned, both alien and indigenous vegetation was used as food or medicine by several people interviewed. Remedies included honeybush tea (harvested and sold on a limited scale in the southern Cape to this day), and varieties of buchu leaves, wild garlic, kruidjie-roer-my-nie (touch-me-not), wilde-als, klipdagga, kattekruie and bluegum (the latter currently targeted by alien-vegetation removal teams in the Peninsula). Moreover, flowers were picked mainly by women for decorative purposes. “Jy het presies geweet,” as Lotter said, “verskillende blomme, bome, plante. Jy het presies geweet in watter tyd van die jaar sal jy daardie blousel kry, en daardie plante sal kry. … So ek meen, die natuur was deel van jou lewe gewees [You knew exactly the different types of flowers, trees, plants. You knew exactly in what season you’ll get this bloom, and those plants … So I mean, nature was part of your life].” Some flowers (such as some species of Afrikaner Daisy) could be located only by their scent. Flowers supplemented incomes, being arranged in colourful mixtures of homegrown garden varieties and wild fynbos and taken down to Simon’s Town where they had been ordered. This flower-picking tradition has apparently not ceased — in many of the interviews a vase of wild fynbos blooms in season stood on some little table.
Topological Sorrow?
By comparison with much of Layters’ and the Red Hill residents ’ testimony, Hare’s and Wright’s utterances possess a somewhat formal (more literary), if not detached, quality. At certain times, however, this remote quality emerges also in the testimony of some of the former Red Hill inhabitants . The labour of walking in the veld in order to find wood, quoted earlier, is abstracted or formalised. In the following quotation, while it does not quite create a ‘picture’ along the lines of Hare’s composition, physical gesture is nevertheless ‘alienated ’ — that is, removed from its originary spatial and temporal determinants. The Levendals said: “Ons was als versorg, ja — … ons was nooit sonder hout nie, want ons — we were always in advance with wood, want hulle het nooit opgehou om hout te kap, om dit te saag en te kap, en op te stoor in die stoorkamertjies in [We always had provisions, yes — … we were never without wood — we were always in advance with wood, because they never stopped chopping wood, sawing and chopping it, and storing it in the store-rooms].”
The above descriptive generalisation conceals beneath an expression of timelessness (“they never stopped chopping wood”), a pendulum which wavers between past and present, settling neither for a final ‘verbal portrait ’ or description (which aims to transport the listener back into the past), nor for a re-enactment or performance of original gestures (which ‘import’ the past into the present). This ‘pendulum’ seems to articulate the unresolved state in which many former Red Hill residents find themselves today: namely, hankering for their lost home at Red Hill, on the one hand, while on the other hand acknowledging the impossibility of returning. Lotter said, “Ek dink dit het my moed gebreek toe ons in Ocean View kom om tuin te maak — want daar wat ek nie lus gekry nie [I think when we came to Ocean View it broke my will to do gardening — because I didn’t feel like it then].”
The quality of uncertainty in the interviews with former Red Hill residents also manifests itself in explicit comparisons between past and present lives. While labour necessitated free physical movement at Red Hill, former inhabitants have since had to accommodate themselves and live with a sense of indignation. Mrs Levendal said, “Hulle was in niemand se pad gewees nie! [They were in nobody’s way!]” In terms of Proclamation 63 of 1967 Simon’s Town was finally declared a white area. Some doubt has existed as to whether everyone was moved under the Group Areas Act — some had to leave to make way for a dam to be built at Brooklands. The dam has, however, never been built, and most people declare that “We just got our letters at that time. … there were several meetings — nothing materialised, so — we had no backing — so we just had to take our bags and go” (Jurgens).
As mentioned earlier, there are dissenting voices who claim that residents were not forced to move: “Hulle was gretig om hier to kom woon het! [They were eager to come and live here!” (Lotter). When probed, this same voice elaborated the contradictions around the nostalgia for Red Hill:
Kyk, in een sin was jy uitgeforseer. Maar nie op ‘n … mate dat seˆ jy baklei daarteen — nee … En die lewe gaan swaar nog, jy verstaan dit met ons, as jy seˆ, kyk, jy moet net werk, kom jy gaan nou water dra en jy gaan houtkap en al dit. So mense het gesien — dit gaat ‘n beter lewe wees. … [En] waar sou ons kinders vandag gewees het?Many former residents echo the acknowledgement that an effective shift in social classes took place. Moving back to their former home environment would now be costly and physically strenuous. Furthermore, descendants of former residents are now familiar with modern conveniences available in Ocean View. (Red Hill lacks municipal facilities to this day). The move from Red Hill therefore also entailed a move from former semi-peasant to suburban, lowermiddle-class existence. In this context, the pain of homesickness — “Daar is nie salf om in te smeer nie vir die groot wond wat agtergebly het in ons [There is no balm to spread on the great wound that has remained in us]” (Mrs Levendal) — is romanticised as delight in a glorious past:
Look, in one sense you were forced out. But not in a …way which said you’re fighting against it — no …. And life is still hard, you understand, with us, if you say, look, you must just work, come you’ll carry water now and you’re going to chop wood and everything. So people say — it would be a better life. … [And] where would our children have been today?
OL: Ons het wonderlik groot geword! Ek prys net die Here vandag dat ons kan sit en -
JY: Ons kan dit hou [onthou]!
OL: En vir u alles vertel hoe ons groot geword het.
OL: We grew up wonderfully! I praise the Lord that today we can sit and -
JY: We can keep [remember] it!
OL: And tell you everything about how we grew up.
The bygone days at Red Hill are recalled as days of social harmony with clean air, physical exercise, good health and plentiful food. None the less, testimonies swing from one extreme — for example: “Daar is niks smaak aan vandag se hoenders [There’s no taste in today’s chickens]” (Mrs Levendal) — to the other:
"No ways shall I eat something like that [chicken] again! [Laughter] … I mean, just to think of it now, you know — makes you quite sick, you know. …Growing up with these things, having it almost as pets, and now you’ve got to slaughter, and kill them to eat them! (Jurgens)
In contradistinction to Layters’ navigation of various forms of labour and patterns of life, the former Red Hill inhabitants ’ shift to a suburban lifestyle is complete. Moreover, Layters’ narrations do not glorify the past. “Ek kan onthou, daai drewe,” she says, merely asking, “Waar kry jy dit nou? [I can remember those crayfish. Where can you get them now?].” The difference between Layters’ and former Red Hill inhabitants ’ nostalgia may therefore be said to lie in the sublimation, or glorification, in the utterances of the latter. By way of example, both Dora Layters and Olga Levendal fondly remember the highly nutritious fatty food supplied by nature in the past. Layters says: “Ek dink dis ‘n halfbottel visolie wat daar in [die geelbek] is — nei! dis sy eie vet by die kop! [I think it’s half a bottle of fish oil that’s in [the Cape Salmon] — no! It’s his own fat from his head!]” Mrs Levendal, on the other hand, remembers the “dikmelk” (lit. ‘thick milk’). She explains:
Nou as ‘n koei ‘n kalf het — so twee, drie dae daarna — dan — hulle roep dit beesmelk — dis so ‘n dik melk, dit is nog nie skoon as dit gekook is. Nou as daardie melk gekook is — aah! Dan is dit net so stukke botter — dit was heerlik! O!Mrs Levendal’s words are interesting because at first glance they appear simply to re-enact the original gesture of drinking and tasting the milk. However, as the interviewer is made to visualise the pieces of butter swimming in the milk, the performative exclamations serve to glorify this past way of life. Layters’ nostalgia for the fat fish of yester-year seems verbally scant by comparison: “Dik visse daai jare gewees. Die mense vang nie meer daai visse nie, ek weet nie waar daai vis is nie, Nooi [Fat fish in those years. People don’t catch fish like that any more, I don’t know where those fish are].” Whereas in the quotation by Layters the fish are unambiguously gone, Mrs Levendal’s testimony again leans towards a quality of ‘always-ness’. This ‘always-ness’ may be connected to the fact that Red Hill residents generally remember their previous existence in terms of repetition, regularity and order:
Now when a cow calves — about two, three days after that, then — they call it beesmelk — it’s a thick milk, it’s not yet clean if you boil it. Now if you boil that milk — aah! Then it’s just pieces of butter — it was delicious! Oh!
Ons beeste het dan soggens gaan ek ‘ie beeste melk … dan gaan hulle veld toe … toe wat ek weer vanaand kom hulle kry. Ons koop ‘ie voere, en kry hulle voer, en dan — dit is nie ver wat ons loop om hulle te gaan haal nie, en dan bring ‘le weer in ‘ie kraal in die aand, en dan word hulle weer gemelk, en so gaan ‘t weer, elke dag (Mitchell)This regularity and order was dictated by the constraints of school and work — “My grandfather used to get up early in the mornings and used to feed [and] milk the cows before he went to work” (Jurgens). The days of the week were set aside for different tasks which were linked to life in Simon’s Town: “Ja, my mother — they used to send in their order to the shopkeeper on a Monday and then it gets delivered on a Wednesday” (Jurgens).
Our cattle — then in the mornings I’d go and milk the cattle… then they wander into the veld … then in the evenings I round them up again. We buy fodder and they are fed, and then — we don’t have to walk far to get them, and then we take them back into the enclosure in the evenings, and then they are milked again, and so it continues every day.
Then, on Fridays “My mother used to go down … to buy the weekend meat, that was Friday night, Saturday and Sunday roast, whatever. Always used to be roast that time, was no other thing but roast.… Roast and puddings!” (Jurgens). The importance of the Sunday meal echoes the importance of meals on ‘big days’ such as Easter and Christmas, which were times of copious amounts of food. The significance of festive occasions is linked to Christian traditions at Red Hill in the 1950s and 1960s. “Daardie tyd het ons nog middagkerk gehad,” recalls Lotter, “daar was nie ‘n Sondag wat verbygaan nie — jy mo`et kerk toe gaan [At that time we still had afternoon church, there wasn’t a Sunday that passed — you had to go to church].” These routines were unaffected by the weather; indeed, they were insisted upon despite the weather: “Dit maak nou nie saak of die son skyn nie, as dit ree¨n, as dit storm en die wind waai nie — maar kerk toe sal jy moet gaan [It doesn’t matter whether the sun is shining, whether it’s raining or storming and the wind is blowing — but you’ve got to go to church]” (Lotter).
In contrast to Layters’ testimony, therefore, where weekends or holidays are scarcely mentioned, the routine of the week at Red Hill was directly affected by the men’s formal work-hours, church and school: “Naweke was die so wonderlik vir ons. Dan is al die familie bymekaar [Weekends were so wonderful for us. Then the whole family would be together]” (Mrs Levendal). Furthermore, there are echoes of Hare’s reminiscences of his “magic” leisure-days at Brightwater over the Christmas holiday period in utterances such as:
En dan hier — net so voor Kersfees — en dan word dan ‘n vark geslag, hoenders word geslag, ‘n — sommer ‘n hele bees — by Higgins — daar by hulle in die tuin was so ‘n groot wilgeboom wat so oor die pit — the well — by die pit gehang hetUnlike Hare’s reminiscence, however, the above shows a consciousness of physical space which arises directly from human labour. Although the routine of, say, school at Red Hill may have created a leisure space in the form of weekends, it did — at least as late as the 1950s — also involve physical work: “Die skool het eintlik ‘n groot grond gehad daar, daar het ons tuine gemaak. Elkeen het sy eie tuintjie gehad en — dit is part van jou skool [The school actually owned a large piece of land there, which we tended. Each one had his or her own little garden and — it was part of your school-work]” (Lotter). Not only that, but Lotter also recalls that, “Dan moet jy nou-nou houtkap vir die onderwyser ook”, and “Ek was nog ‘n kind, ek moet nog pype goed aangedra het vir die … vloere en goed. So eintlik dit was ook van ons — vir ons handewerk in skool gewees, gehelp met daardie geboue [You would also have to quickly chop some wood for the teacher … I was still a child, I had to help carry pipes and things for the… floors and stuff. So actually our handiwork was also in that school, we helped with those buildings].”
And then here — just before Christmas — then they slaughter a whole pig, chickens are slaughtered, a — a whole ox, just like that — at Higgins — there where they had such a big willow tree hanging over the well like that — over the well]. (Mrs Levendal)
The transition of the Red Hill community from a semi-rural to a more (sub)urbanised consciousness with its ability to articulate ‘pictures’ of the past appears to have developed gradually before the community was relocated. The physical actions attached to the demands of food and shelter were progressively pushed to the margins of daily existence:
“Nou na werksure, hier onder af, kom hy op, dan kom hy werk hy nou in die tuin. Miskien nou soos maanskynaande, dan werk die ou tot hier twaalfuur, Pa, dan moet my Ma skree: ‘Hendrik! Hendrik! Kom huistoe!’ [Now after work, down here, he comes up, then he comes and works in the garden. Maybe now on moonlit nights, then the old man works in the garden till twelve, my father, then my mother has to shout: ‘Hendrik! Hendrik! Come home!’]” (Page).In the same way as Hare’s testimony, many of the former residents ’ memories are thus ‘held’ in mid-motion in a zone of eternal Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, and so on, after work or school, as seemingly timeless habits are described: “Saterdags was onse dag gewees. Dan maak ek musiek vir die mense. Een vir die gitar en die piano accordion, dan loop ons af in die pad en dan kom die mense van orals [Saturday was our day. Then I make music for people. One for the guitar and the piano accordion, then we walk down the road and then people come from everywhere]” (Mr Levendal).
Like Hare’s “magic environment”, Leonard Levendal’s phrase “dan kom die mense van orals [then people come from everywhere]” positions the mind, rather than the body, in an environment no longer concrete but imaginary, playing out before the mind’s eye a moving strip of dreamlike images. Moreover, physically impossible actions — such as people coming from everywhere — are expansions of original gestures (“loop ons af in die pad [we walk down the road]”). As suggested earlier, nostalgia involves the cognition of the impossibility (in the present) of gestures performed in the past. Such gestures become vulnerable to forgetfulness. In former Red Hill residents ’ testimony the forgetfulness of the body is sublimated as a formal (literary) — that is, non-performative — utterance: “So lank soos ek lewe sal ek nooit ooit daai tyd kan vergeet nie, en hoe ons opgegroei het daar as kinders nie [As long as I live I shall never ever be able to forget that time, and how we grew up there as children]” (Mr Levendal).
The appeal to memory in the above quotation is interesting if compared to claims that former members of the community may try to create a “prentjie wat nie daar is nie [a picture which is not there]” (Lotter). A “picture” which, it is implied, has forgotten the burden of carrying the physical body, and the quantities of water, wood and food it requires for its subsistence, through physical space. There is also evidence that gangs started to develop at Red Hill during the 1960s and 1970s, bearing names such as Bronkbokkies (Bronco jeans) derived from American cultural influences (Lotter).
The Levendals’ story is fascinating for what it reveals about the discourse of nostalgia. In the absence of a verbal demonstration of original, concrete gestures, Mr Levendal’s exclamation thrusts an unperformed, yet represented, or symbolised, past — “hoe ons opgegroei het [how we grew up]” — beyond the present into the future: “ek [sal] nooit ooit daai tyd kan vergeet nie [I will never ever be able to forget that time]”. This is nostalgia: an articulation of a future that has already arrived. Here, an unforgettable life has already been converted into representatives — magical images, evocative symbols and dreams — which, while they rehearse the past’s gestures, betray its physical intensity. Julie Yon articulates this process in the following moving utterance:
You know, one day Mrs Kilday told me in church: “You know, Julie, I had a dream I’m feeding pigs.” So I said, “Here in Ocean View?” “Nee,” se sy, se vir my, “Nee, daar in Red Hill.” Ek sien nog die mooi pink — the creepers she had there. With pink flowers hanging down where she did her washing. Sy seˆ vir my, “En ek sien nog my mooi pink blomme so afhang, en ek voer die varke, en dis Red Hill”. Sy seˆ vir my, “Ek het nog nooit gedroom van Ocean View nie, dis Red Hill!” And you can go to anybody that comes from Red Hill — many of them will tell you, “I had a dream”, but I’ve never dreamt about Ocean View, it’s Red Hill.If one washes away the dust of regret from phrases such as “ek sien nog [I still see]” in the quotation above, one may see, glittering beneath this dust, an image of Red Hill whose potatoes, beans, cabbage, wood and flowers have turned into “gold”: “They took our gold from us! That I can say … They took our gold from us. That was a golden place” (Mrs Levendal). The term “gold” for a past life on a past land is revealing, not only in that Olga Levendal stands to gain some form of monetary compensation for the expropriation of her land by the Simon’s Town Municipality in 1971 (see Whisson 1972:15–17, for a discussion of perceptions of the pre-apartheid era as a ‘Golden Age’ among the coloureds in the Cape). It is also significant because the natural environment, which had previously been articulated in terms of its use-value (as a food resource and as a space for free movement), is here converted into a term whose significance is precisely its exchange value.
You know, one day Mrs Kilday told me in church: “You know, Julie, I had a dream I’m feeding the pigs.” So I said, “Here in Ocean View?” “No,” she says, she says to me, “No, there at Red Hill.” I still see the beautiful pink — the creepers she had there. With pink flowers hanging down where she did her washing. She says to me, “And I still see my beautiful pink flowers hanging down like that, and I’m feeding the pigs, and it’s Red Hill.” She says to me, “I have never dreamed about Ocean View, it’s Red Hill!” And you can go to anybody that comes from Red Hill — many of them will tell you, “I had a dream, but I’ve never dreamt about Ocean View, it’s Red Hill”.
Former Red Hill residents’ testimony thus wavers incessantly between the specific recounting of physical labour and a more removed, increasingly optic, or descriptive, consciousness. The process of converting the former into the latter produces, it seems, an excess of affect which expresses itself as a glorifying nostalgia. Concrete physical motion, it appears, is exchanged for its representation as emotion in the form of image.
Former Red Hill residents’ descriptions of how they made use of the natural environment therefore occupy an intermediate ground which is rooted in their social strata, both past and present. At either extreme one may position the articulations of Layters and Hare. Mostly, Layters communicated a memory of the body, often physically re-enacted in the presence of the interviewer and her tape recorder. For example, the following ‘performance’ of the process of bringing a geelbek (Cape Salmon) on board the boat — even as transcribed here merely in written words — retains aspects of physical intensity: “Nou kry jy die wat diekant vang, vang diekant — bring hom uit — en die wat diekant vang — as hy vas is — ja hoe? Waar kom jy? Vat hom net met die kierie! [Now you get those that catch this side, they catch this side — bring him out — and those that catch that side — if he’s hooked — yes, huh? Where are you? Hit him with the stick!]” (Layters).
A comparable, but very different, intensity may be perceived in Hare’s interview. Nestling in “the leisure cushion” of his holiday house at Brightwater, Hare’s discourse is devoid of performative elements; yet it is driven by the eloquence of what one may be permitted to call an ocular passion: “The immense power of nature to create a spectacle,” he says, has produced “the most stunning views in the world … to take your breath away.” The wide variety of utterances about the natural environment reverberates in compelling alternations of concord and disunity — where the overwhelming “mystical, spiritual power” (Hare) of nature (as seen by some), is of no consequence (as articulated by others). The fifteen mussels one is allowed to remove nowadays from the Cape of Good Hope area, declares Layters scornfully, “soos die opgemaal is — dis nog nie eers ‘n frikkadel nie [once it’s minced — it’s not even enough for one fish-cake].” The oral histories selected and presented should likewise be seen as a small contribution to existing records of utterances about society’s inescapable relationship to nature.
Notes
- The word Nooi is probably best translated as ‘Miss’. However, ‘Miss’ fails to connote the aspect of endearment or familiarity which is present in Nooi. Layters’ use of Nooi in this context is indicative of the extent to which she considers herself to be my senior.
- The interviews for this project offered much in the way of interesting material on parent-child relationships, an analysis of which unfortunately falls outside the scope of this paper.
- Harders, Steenbras and Hottentot are types of fish. The name ‘Hottentot’ is a derogatory reference to the original Cape inhabitants the Khoi, and in this context apparently derives from the fact that these fish were easily caught in great numbers along Peninsula shores.
- It is relevant to note here the respective etymologies of the words ‘describe’ and ‘perform’. The root of ‘describe’ is the Latin scribere (to write), which, in conjunction with the prefix de- means literally ‘to write down’. The word ‘perform’, on the other hand, is derived from the old French word parfournir, which literally means ‘to furnish’, that is, ‘to provide form’, and today still denotes physical action and gesture.
- Once again a note concerning etymological origins is useful here. The word ‘nostalgia’ is the Latin for ‘homesick,’ deriving from two Greek words combining the meanings ‘return home’ and ‘pain’. In the context of this paper, the concept of ‘home’ should be taken to indicate the places which Layters and the former Red Hill population inhabited as residents, rather than only as temporary, if repeated, holiday-makers like the Hares. Incidentally, the word ‘inhabit’ derives from the verb habere (to have), while the root of ‘resident’ is sedere (to settle).
References
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Interviews
Places and dates are given; transcripts are lodged in the Western Cape Oral History Project Archive.
Hare, John, b.1947. University of Cape Town, 12 May 1995.
Jurgens: Two sisters were interviewed and are both referenced under Jurgens in the text. They are: Constance, Dorothy, b.1952, and Williams, Erica, b.1946, both nee Jurgens. Ocean View, 21 June 1995.
Layters, Dorothy, b.1929, and Klein, Sarah, b.1905. Red Hill, 23 May (Layters 1), and 29 May 1995 (Layters 2).
Levendal, Leonard, b.1929 and Levendal, Olga, b.1937 (husband and wife), and Yon, Julie nee Levendal, b.1942. Ocean View, 1 Aug. 1995.
Lotter, Herbert, b.1948. Ocean View, 7 Aug. 1995.
Mitchell, John, b.1931. Klaasjagersberg, Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve, 3 May 1995.
Page, Millicent, b.1949. Wildschutsbrand, 23 May 1995.
Wright, Gerald, b.1939. Helderberg Nature Reserve, Somerset West, 24 May 1995.
