Shanil Haricharan’s column on Sylvia Vollenhoven’s journey of self-discovery
“WE SHALL not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
Poet TS Eliot’s words resonate in the warm and cosy lounge bathed in afternoon spring sun on Basil Road in Plumstead, in Cape Town.
Sylvia Vollenhoven’s radiant smile, her legs folded meditatively on the couch, adds to the relaxing ambience. On the floor below, her elderly dog sleeps soundly.
My mind wonders to the late 1950s when the distraught 5-yearold Sylvia, a dark-skinned girl with thick curly hair (derogatively referred to as “kroeskop” and “kaffir”), was ejected from the park on Basil Road by young white boys.
Then she lived with Ma, her maternal grandmother, Sophia Petersen, a “sleep-in cook general”, in her employer’s servant quarters on Woodley Road nearby. Also, a short distance away is Brentwood Road, Wynberg, where the young Sylvia grew up with the Petersens, Davids and the Vollenhovens.
Her search for wholeness, identity and belonging has come full circle.
In Sylvia’s quest, her Ma’s indomitable spirit and love throughout her life, and lately the wisdom of a 19th century Bushman visionary, //Kabbo, guided Sylvia’s long, painful journey and rebirth from a “functional alcholic wage slave” to a storyteller – her ancestral calling – a modern-day Keeper of the Kumm (word for story in the /Xam language of the Bushman people).
As the illegitimate first-born to Eileen Petersen and Ebrahim Hendricks in Bo-Kaap, in the Cape Town city centre, all ties were cut with her Muslim father’s family early in her life.
She moved to a shed at the back of her uncle Willie Davids and Auntie Gracie’s home in Wynberg.
She experienced social exclusion from a young age. The Vollenhovens referred to her as the “kroeskop bastard child”.
The children in Wynberg and at school, mostly with straight hair – who could pass for white – and from middle-class homes, taunt and exclude her.
Sylvia railed against the “kaffirtjie”, “Boesman” and “hotnot” name-calling all through her fractured childhood. The ostracised primary school girl becomes a “kroeskop rebel” retaliating against the “almost-white girls”.
The toxic seeds of rejection and humiliation, sown early in her life, fester into her troubled adulthood against the backdrop of a patriarchal, racially polarised and iniquitous society.
To purge her shame of her derisive identity, she dreams of straightening her hair, like Aunt Collie, with a thick metal comb heated on a Primus stove.
Sylvia reflects on the Cape Town society half a century ago: “Shunned by real whites and avoiding contact with dark-skinned coloured people, the almost-white families of Cape Town’s almostwhite suburbs protect fragile identities with coded behaviour which takes me years to decipher.”
The young Sylvia lives with her devout Christian Ma: her “centre of belonging”. They develop a powerful spiritual and maternal bond. Ma is also a lonely spirit, “her heart longing for Swellendam, the place of her birth, the centre of our world”.
Ma bears a deep scar on her head from a beating with a hosepipe steel nozzle by the white farmer for her attempt to escape the dehumanising life of modern-day slavery as a teenager.
The formidable matriarch, Ma, used to say: “Homesickness is a disease of the soul.” Ma’s family are descendants of the indigenous people, the Khoi and San, and imported slaves.
“My grandmother’s stories sustained me, but they have gaps, starting with the details of our history. Nowhere in my upbringing does anyone offer a story of who we are as the descendants of the First Nations.”
The little girl visits her mother only on weekends. Without her mother, she feels “lonely and cold”. Her mother marries Freddie Vollenhoven. They have a baby daughter.
Sylvia plays alone, conversing with her little doll friends in the garden of Ma’s employer’s home.
Later, at South Peninsula High School, the teenager is exposed to Black Consciousness, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and progressive-minded and inspiring teachers like the prolific writer and her Latin teacher, Richard Rive. A turning point in her life of seeking answers to the forbidding question: “Who am I?”
Sylvia recalls her personal transformation: “Out of the window go my hair, nose and skin-tone issues. It was not easy and takes time.
“Truth is simple, but superficiality is complex. The troublesome shallowness that occupied my early years falls away. In its place was a newfound confidence in being black and proud. Black and angry. Black and self-righteously aggressive.”
Peaks of intense delight and decadence, and lows of distress and despair defines her emotional roller-coaster journey during adulthood. Starting with a green identity card in the 1970s classifying her as “Other Coloured” rather than “Mixed” of her childhood.
She comes to realise that classification “other coloureds were closer to their African ancestry in appearance, while Cape coloured status were descendants from the admixture of colonials and slaves from the East”.
Her professional career navigates through the fault lines of race and gender. As a young journalist, she endures the mainly racist and misogynistic bosses and colleagues at the Cape Herald, The Argus, and The Star.
Later, she is the foreign correspondent for the Swedish newspaper Expressen, and a producer at the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), covering major historical events: President Samora Machel’s funeral in Mozambique; the release of Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela (forming a close relationship with Mandela, who requests her to be part of a documentary team producing his story); the battlefields of Angola, and, later, working in Ghana with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation training young journalists.
The distinguished and fissured fabric of her life’s tapestry textures the joy and pathos…
Of the incest with her stepfather when she was young, the psychiatric treatment at Groote Schuur in her early twenties, her suicidal and violent episodes, her reckless binges with booze, drugs and sex.
Of two marriages and two divorces. One with Basil Appollis, renowned theatre and TV drama director, actor, writer and singer. A son, Ryan Lee, from her first marriage to Bob Seddon.
As Sylvia reminisces: “My life choices mirror a history of relentless chaos and complexity.”
While in Ghana, Sylvia became gravely ill. Mainstream modern medicine failed to heal her maladies.
Her journey of healing takes her to an Art of Living ashram in India, and later to African traditional healers.
“It has been a very long journey from my upbringing in a fundamentalist Seventh-Day Adventist family to an exorcism and cleansing with a team of white sangomas. The forbidding dictates of the Old Testament have dominated my life, and within that milieu, African spirituality was not even up for discussion.”
Through ancestral rituals to restore her equilibrium, she discovers her healing would be through storytelling: “A story is a medicine for a person,” she learns from her Sangoma.
As part of her healing, Sylvia delves into the story of //Kabbo / Uhi-ddoro Jantje Tooren, born in 1815, in the Northern Cape, “a pipe-smoking, revolutionary Bushman hunter driven by his need to safeguard his fragile culture”. //Kabbo’s stories of violence, dispossession and trauma – related to philologists, between 1871 and 1873 at the Breakwater Prison – form part of the Bleek-Lloyd archive housed at the University of Cape Town, entered into Unesco’s Memory of the World Register.
In her exploration, Sylvia begins “to understand that centuries of trauma have to be acknowledged before we move on”.
“Of all these tags that hint at identity, the one that caused me
‘Nowhere in my upbringing does anyone offer a story of who we are as the descendants of the First Nations’
the most harm was ‘coloured’. An exploration with //Kabbo became the key to unlocking the painful prison of colouredness.”
Failing to do so, Sylvia cautions: “Until we see ourselves in //Kabbo and engage with the //Kabbos in our own histories, we will continue to flounder in a sea of social problems.”
A beaming Sylvia tells me of the abundance of energy in her life, and the passionate pursuits that nurture her storyteller vocation, such as the documentary and TV series.
She is also excited about the huge awakening amongst the coloured communities over the past decade in reclaiming their heritage and questioning the given truths through a variety of initiatives.
Conversing with Sylvia, reading her book, The Keeper of the Kumm, and having watched her stage play, evokes joyful and painful memories of my own past, a descendant of a colonial indentured labour system, and throws up many questions for the contemporary narratives that dominate the weaving of the South African tapestry. If we cease from exploring “Who am I?”, and tell our stories, we lose our individual and collective souls.