A story of a place and the proud history it made
ONE of the most informative and interesting sub-genres of South African writings is the biography of place. We have biographies of individuals, institutions, of families and we have biographies of place.
South African literature is, unsurprisingly, linked inextricably to place. It was Es’kia Mphahlele, one of South Africa’s much-loved writers, who spoke of the “tyranny of place” in our experience and in our writing. And Zakes Mda, one of our erudite and prolific writers, speaks of “setting” and landscape, which are the “storing places of memory”.
Some of the best known examples of writings on place include Richard Rive’s Buckingham Palace (District Six), Can Themba’s Requiem for Sophiatown, and Aziz Hassim’s The Lotus People (Durban’s Casbah).
These iconic places constitute a living, breathing, embodied material landscape, similar and different all at once and their representation in fiction or non-fiction transmutes them into a deeply symbolic landscape.
While it is a truism that “character is fate”, as stated of realist novels, in South African literature it would be more appropriate to assert that place is fate.
Indeed, place is the central theatre of our lives – where you were born, where you lived, where you went to school and where you created and enjoyed “community” were all dictated by apartheid legislation.
The recently published book on Asherville-Springtown by Pravin Ram and Hemant Nowbath (with contributors Swaminathan K Gounden and A Ramlochan) is an amazing compendium of lively and life-filled stories of people and place, (as its sub-title promises).
As Dr Dilly Naidoo states of the book in his foreword: “It gives us glimpses of a fundamental South African experience communicated through places, people and history.”
Ironically, in the grand plan of apartheid social engineering, spatial ghettoising was intended to produce “a frozen racial landscape”.
However, in our reading of cities, both globally and locally, urban theorists have shown how urban, and suburban spaces, are not inert backdrops.
Informative
These spaces are actively produced by and, in turn, produce social processes.
Indeed, this is patently true of Asherville-Springtown, as the book ably demonstrates, crammed-full as it is with the most informative inserts and profiles of different aspects of this place and its peoples.
A book such as this goes a long way in elucidating the new sociology of space, place and people that we see burgeoning around us.
We appreciate that these physical locations are colourful spaces where a range of elements mingle and interact.
The book, with its important documentary narratives, then, is a typical South African story of place with its racially separate facilities such as the educational institutions, sporting groups, recreational facilities – like the well-known swimming pool in the area, Balkumar Swimming Bath, named after Balkumar Singh, who was a leading inspiration in the Durban Indian Surf Life Saving Club.
Asherville-Springtown also has a “plethora of places of worship” and religious institutions, reflecting the broad and diverse religious groupings and denominations found here.
All, in their different ways, are engaged in the one remarkable effort to build community to forge and engender individual and collective identity through sheer resilience.
With the commendable and indispensable rise of civil society in South Africa, prompted by both local and global social and political imperatives, we have the development of associations, movements, organisations, institutions, welfare groupings and socio-cultural groupings that grew autonomously from the state.
Alongside the inner city, places like Asherville-Springtown as well as KwaMashu, Phoenix, Clermont, Wentworth and Chatsworth in the greater Durban area are among those remarkable spaces that might be described as the “trenches of civil society”.
All the “signature” sites of the area which we have long appreciated of Asherville-Springfield as place are well depicted in the book: Springfield Training College (where I taught for many years with Ben Persad as head of English and with English education stalwarts like Rad Thumbadoo, HB Singh, Thayalan Reddy and Prem Sundar), the David Landau Community Centre (the beating heart of this place), King George V Hospital and Clayton Gardens Home for the Aged (the homes for Durban’s most vulnerable) and the different historic institutions of St Aidan’s Mission, where a cross-section of community leaders were schooled and fashioned, leaders such as Rama Thumbadoo and NM Israel.
The dazzling array of people in Asherville-Springtown includes political activists, literary writers, leaders of different faith traditions, sportsmen and sportswomen and sporting administrators, educationalists, community workers, civic leaders, traders and many more.
Included are interesting portraits of worthy women and the diverse and invaluable roles they played in the area of Asherville-Springtown.
The book has served as an amazing trigger, with many recalling their own memories and associations connected with Asherville-Springtown.
Reading Professor Krishna Somers’s response to the book, we appreciate that memory, both individual and collective, is history.
Writing from Perth, Australia, Somers pays tribute to the pioneering work of Dr David Landau, who created a community centre in an urban setting, having established the Pholela Health Centre in rural Natal.
AHe also commends the work of Dr Paul Sykes, who was responsible for the development of the Friends of the Sick Association, Reverend Satchell, who he personally knew and who was a founding figure in the history of St Aidan’s Mission institutions, Dr Mohamed Mayat in developing Shifa Hospital and Mr Ranji S Nowbath, a lawyer and “self-trained journalist of the highest order”.
For my brother, Jonathan Jack, now living in the UK, the book “brought back fond memories” of friendships forged.
Luminaries
He was a student at the Springfield Training College in the 1960s and, boarding nearby, he came into contact with luminaries in the area.
Jonathan recalls that he lived in the same street as Dr Gonam and, at another time, next to Dr S Cooppen and Mr Maniraj Singh, who were noted educationists.
He was to meet Dr Cooppen years later in Boston, in the US, and he reconnected with Mr Singh when he became superintendent of education in the Chatsworth circuit.
He states that he first met his now close and long-standing friend, Mr Thegragh Kassie, at the training college in the early 1960s.
Alongside this, and most importantly, the book shows that Asherville-Springtown is a particularly significant place in the “geography of struggle” in South Africa.
We know full well that popular resistance to colonial/ apartheid rule in South Africa “had a varied geography”.
The mass movement led by the ANC and its allies through the 1980s and 1990s, which finally brought the apartheid government to its knees, occurred largely in South Africa’s post-war urban and suburban townships. As in other places in the new South Africa, in Asherville-Springtown, the change in street names – the most significant change being from Stanley Copley Drive to Dr RD Naidu Drive – cryptically embodies a minefield of this struggle history and is a necessary and constant reminder of it.
As Dr Deena Padayachee, an award-winning author, also featured in the book, observes: “This is a tome that, through its heart-warming photographs and carefully worded memoirs, captures the essence of the values, the civilisation, the greatness and honour of a people who were able to rise above and beyond the injustice and inequity of a racist, traitorous regime, and create the foundations of a free and just society – a society that looked the unjust in the eye and triumphed.”
Asherville-Springtown launched many distinguished persons who made an incredible contribution to our wider society.
Alan Joseph, from Tarndale Avenue, belonged to a very vibrant group of players involved in local theatre in the 1960s and started the Upstairs Theatre with Saira Essa.
He went on to working with theatre greats such as Barney Simon, Mannie Manim, John Kani, Athol Fugard and Janice Honeyman at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, which was the undisputed centre for brave and vibrant politically engaged theatre during the apartheid era.
Of course, as a space where politics, class, power and identity interact, Asherville-Springtown was also a contested terrain.
We see competing forces at work as Asherville-Springtown, like Chatsworth, for example, was both a site of social encounter and of social division. It is a force field for the play of politics and of power.
The predictable “regimentation” designed by the former regime was embedded in the institutional life here and collusion with the policies of the apartheid government are a discernible strand in the narrative of the place that is Asherville-Springtown.
An interesting phenomenon in apartheid’s separate spaces, I would argue, was the role that private homes played in our history. The traditional view that it is the streets and public squares that are the sites of the making of modernity and homes are spaces where traditional roles are entrenched and re-enacted without innovation and change was questioned and overturned in the fight against apartheid.
Homes were not static, private, secluded domiciles. Homes were highly charged political spaces.
In South Africa we need to recognise that political history, domestic history, suburban history and urban history cannot be considered separately.
The home was the undisputed ‘incubator”, the place “where hope and history rhyme”, to use the title of Amina Cachalia’s autobiography, which also shows pointedly the role of the home in Johannesburg in the political struggle against apartheid in South Africa. These homes could also be a fortress or prison, as many of our political stalwarts were subjected to house arrest.
Strategising
Excellent examples of such political homes in Asherville-Springtown were those of Dr Gonam, Swaminathan Gounden, Dr RD Naidu, and IC and Fatima Meer (who lived in an adjacent suburb, but worked in the area and in many others). They were places of “rendezvous with history” for political leaders, who engaged in much planning and strategising during the time of the varied “defiance campaigns” across the decades of the liberation struggle.
All in all, the authors have endeavoured to present a wide-ranging and comprehensive biography of Asherville-Springtown, beyond partisanship and sectarianism and the impressive list of acknowledgements shows the veritable living and breathing archives that their story-tellers and contributors were.
They are to be congratulated on presenting the “infinite variety” that is Asherville-Springtown. This is not one convergent totalising story but a multitude of divergent stories all contributing to a most remarkable mosaic – a worthy and veritable testament – of a people and a place.
And, of course, there are many more. So many stories remain invisibilised, marginalised, suppressed and the ethical and moral challenge prompted by the book is to continue the project of ferreting out a holistic narrative of people and place. What an example to the rest of the city, to the rest of the country, to the rest of the world.
Shabbir Banoobhai, one of South Africa’s most accomplished and prescient poets, and who is featured in the book, commends it for being “a magnificent achievement... a priceless record”.
He observes that we owe a “deep debt of gratitude” to the authors. As a student at Springfield Training College, Banoobhai says the book “brought back so many memories in its sweeping embrace of a time and place that made me and so many others who we are today – preserving something precious of our lives: the sparks that kindled in our hearts, flames that still burn on”.
Indeed, Asherville-Springtown – People and Place, in its depiction of journeys undertaken and roads trod, offers one a promontory – a vantage point – from which to gaze at the vistas stretching in the past, in order to live in the present, and beyond, into the future.