Don’t follow apartheid way

● Path cleared for constitution to be amended

The constitutional review committee met and the ANC successfully pushed through a vote to allow the constitution to be amended for land expropriation without compensation to be allowed.

Shock, anger, uncertainty and a sense of betrayal – that’s what I felt. Why?

Like 60,000 other residents of District Six in Cape Town, I have been down this road.

In 1965 my family was forcibly removed from our home in District Six.

We were out on the street with nowhere to go.

My unemployed father looked like all the life had been knocked out of him.

My mother – a clothing factory worker who doubled as a dressmaker after she got home at 6pm – was keeping the roof over our head and food on the table.

Nowhere to go and with our belongings stored with relatives, my father decided to follow his brother who had moved to Durban – maybe there he would find work and a home for his family.

With only the clothes on our backs and one change in a bag my father packed up our crock of a car, with a special box for Captain, my Alsatian, mounted on the roof, and we reluctantly and with broken hearts left Cape Town.

In Durban, my uncle’s new in-laws (with whom he lived) invited us to share their home – they graciously gave our family a bedroom and the rest of them (four adults, three teenage girls, one teenage boy and two children under six ) shared two bedrooms and the living room.

My father went job-hunting while my mother tried to enrol us in school. This proved to be a lot easier said than done – the Group Areas Act was well established here.

My uncle (a Malay) had married an Indian woman and lived in an Indian area.

We were Malays and the local schools would not accept us because we were not Indian. They said we had to live in a coloured area and go to a coloured school – a day trip away by bus or train … and it would cost.

My father managed to get a job at the old Bluff whaling station.

My mother could not find employment and turned to dressmaking full-time.

My parents managed to rent a house but it was a fixerupper and cost three-quarters of my parent’s income.

I often heard them discussing how they could make ends meet – we lived from hand to mouth.

Life was very hard and we felt abandoned.

With what I went through as a person of colour for the next three decades I vowed I would fight so that my children, grandchildren and future generations would never have to suffer like that.

My whole life I have tried to live and work considerately with those around me.

Twenty years ago my husband and I bought a modest three-bedroom house to accommodate us, a teenage son and a mother-in-law.

For the next 10 years every cent we earned and didn’t need to keep our family fed and clothed, we paid off on our home.

We didn’t go to dinner, movies, dancing or on holiday; we didn’t buy the newspaper, a magazine or chocolates; we drove a “skedonk”.

We made sacrifices to ensure the roof over our head was paid for and that no one could take it away … until now with the threat of expropriation without compensation.

How can this be? How can we regress to a state that destroyed so many lives with the same practice before?

How can apartheid once again become the practice of those who govern us? How?

My grandmother was an activist and marched to Pretoria with the women in 1956.

My father was a revolutionary and was detained without trial for more than a year when I was just seven.

My family fought injustice and oppression, and while I have breath, so will I.

I call on the thousands who, like me, suffered and still suffer because they were removed from their homes and land. I call those who lived in District Six, South End, Cato Manor, Fietas, Fordsburg to rise up – we cannot stand by and allow this government to do to us what apartheid did.

Nerina Skuy Lorraine, Port Elizabeth