Catherine Wagner: Venerable District Six survivor 1924-2019
Among first to lose her house to forced removals, she fought — and lost — battle to go back home
● Catherine Wagner, who has died in Cape Town at the age of 94, was one of the oldest surviving former residents of District Six, which was demolished by the apartheid government.
Wagner was kicked out and her home was demolished when it was declared a whites-only area by the National Party government.
It was the home where Wagner was born on September 27 1924, and where she had lived until one day in 1966 officials from the grotesquely named department of community development knocked on her door.
Until this point, District Six, which ran down the slopes of Table Mountain into the city of Cape Town, was a vibrant community of about 60,000 residents, many of whose families had lived there, often in the same houses, for generations.
The throbbing central artery of District Six was Hanover Street, which led directly into the city. Residents who lived at the lower, city end of Hanover Street became the first victims of one of the most infamous forced removals in the history of apartheid.
Wagner and her husband Cyril, who had moved into the house when they were married, lived at this end of Hanover Street with their young family and were among the first to be moved.
They were handed an eviction notice and ordered to start packing their worldly belongings immediately. They were told that if they went peacefully they’d be moved to one of the better and less distant parts of the Cape Flats, Athlone, where the newly built houses were marginally bigger.
They were warned that if they resisted they’d be sent to further parts of the Cape Flats, where the houses were smaller and more densely packed. These areas would become the poorest and worst afflicted with drugs, crime and gangsterism.
The Wagners agreed to go without a fight because they decided that fighting would get them nowhere.
“That was the apartheid government,” they said in a statement four years ago. “When that government said we had to move, we had to move.”
Within days 213 Hanover Street, the only home Catherine had ever known, in an area she remembered as the cultural heart of the neighbourhood, had been demolished, her memories reduced to a pile of rubble.
It was from this house she’d first seen Cyril, a young soldier from the Bo-Kaap on leave from fighting the Nazis in North Africa, walking jauntily past, and walking past again and again, each time telling her that one day she’d be lying in his arms.
She remembered being somewhat disdainful at first but he won her over and they were married in 1944, both just 19.
Long after the 1966 eviction, she remembered having to part from neighbours and friends she’d known all her life, including the friend who owned the corner grocery shop where she worked every day. She remembered never seeing them again.
She remembered the heartbreak, which remained as raw as ever.
And more fiercely than anything else she nurtured the dream of one day returning. It seemed a hopeless dream until the ANC government signed the Restitution of Land Rights Act in 1994 and told the former residents of District Six that they could return home.
In a fever of hope and excitement Wagner filled out the necessary paperwork in 1995. After hearing nothing and making many inquiries, she was told it had been lost. She filled out the paperwork again, and again she was told it had been lost. She filed another claim in 2000 and heard nothing for years.
Unlike her husband, she never lost her faith that she would die a resident of District Six. He was more cynical, and found her unflagging optimism irritating.
It was optimistic people like his wife, he said, that the government was able to manipulate into believing they were doing a good job in spite of the evidence.
They reapplied for restitution in 2014. By this time she’d become a feisty stalwart of the District Six Working Committee. In 2015 she and Cyril, both in their nineties by then and in wheelchairs, led a march to the steps of the City of Cape Town’s civic offices to express their anger at the endless delays in the process, and demand action.
When nothing happened she put pressure on the District Six Working Committee to take the government to court. In November last year the Western Cape High Court gave the minister of rural development and land reform three months to come up with a restitution plan for people evicted from District Six.
Catherine said this gave her hope, though by then she no longer hoped for much.
“If I could only go back to District Six for one day, and die the next, then that would make me very happy indeed,” she said.
She died in her sleep at her daughter’s home in Elsie’s River.
She is survived by two daughters (a third daughter predeceased her) and her husband Cyril, 95, who decided long ago that the only government home he would get “is in the Maitland cemetery”.