A vibrant mosaic of first-class nostalgia
DANNY Pillay is a dancer. Nimble-footed, he has the aristocratic air of the wellschooled.
His Chatsworth flat is a short walk from my Bangladesh market district. It is crowded with books and papers of every description.
If he were cast in a stage play, it would be in the role of a harried university professor.
Pillay was born in Magazine Barracks, Somtseu Road, in 1942 and was part of a handful of boys privileged to enter the elite Sastri College.
The surprise is that he was able to get into high school in the first place.
“To a woman, man and child, we were poor people,” he says. And like poor people everywhere, formal education was their ticket to trounce their circumstances.
Pillay’s parents and grandparents were able to pool funds. That was the silver lining. As the son of an only child, his grandparents were keen to contribute to his schooling.
He would have started out at Depot Road Indian School, which was just across the road from the Leicester Square district in which his family lived.
The principal there, much to the chagrin of the local residents, filled the school with children from the surrounding communities of Greyville and the Casbah.
In spite of their protests, Pillay and his friends had to trek across the railway line and Umgeni Road to Greyville School.
From there he made the competitive merit grade necessary for Sastri.
Last weekend, he walked me through the Sastri gate, 57 years after he entered it for the first time.
He was filled with nostalgia. Dancha, as he was known to schoolmates, was a star athlete but, alas, the record books have long disappeared.
People of his generation have their heads filled with stories and too few people are writing them down.
Pillay’s life rings with Professor Eskia Mphahlele’s which is told wittily in Down Second Avenue.
He describes life in Marabastad from about 1930 to its destruction, like Magazine Barracks under the Group Areas Act.
As a child, Mphahlele lived in the Asiatic Bazaar, the Indian section of the location. Like Pillay, a first class pass got him into St Peter’s School in Rosettenville and later Adam’s College on the then Natal South Coast.
The feminist intellectual Phyllis Ntantala, who died last year aged 96, tells her fascinating story in A Life’s Mosaic.
Bloke Modisane penned the brilliant Blame Me on History, which conjures the kaleidoscope of Sophiatown, also flattened under apartheid.
Modisane worked at Vanguard bookshop which was owned by a trade unionist.
Rich life histories are all around us, begging to be read or written.
• Higgins promotes #Readingrevolution via Books@antiquecafe in Windermere and #Hashtagbooks in the Shannon Drive Shopping Centre in Reservoir Hills.