An oasis in a demeaning world

QUESTIONS of identity were unavoidable in Patric Tariq Mellet’s life. As a small child he watched as his immediate family were mistreated, arbitrarily classified and separated through apartheid laws. He endured a turbulent childhood, shuttled between foster families responding to his mom’s plea for “a home for a well-behaved Catholic boy” and surviving Dickensian conditions in the ‘Huis’, a hellish children’s asylum in Vredehoek. Despite deception about his birth father, Patric found a path towards his roots and a sense of self, which sparked the fire of resistance in the young Cleaner’s Boy – a term of endearment that referred to his mother.

Patric Mellet’s autobiography demonstrates a spirit of unbridled defiance. In small and major ways, he liberated himself from an unpromising and tragic early life to a life of undoubted impact and influence. A freedom fighter, a mystic and always a firebrand.

Extract

AT THE bottom of Hanover Street was the area historically known as Castle Bridge, a beautiful triangular oasis shaded by trees, named after the place where a bridge once crossed the Castle moat. Cape Town once had

the Camissa river system, which comprised many springs, streams and a forked river which flowed into the sea. From 1660 the colonial authorities started building aqueducts and canals to harness and redirect the water, and in places built the first bridges over the river and streams.

By the mid-1800s the Camissa river system was radically reconfigured into a series of canals: Buiten-singel, Buitenkant, Kasteel Sloot, Kaisergracht and Buitengracht. In those years, to get to District Six, you had to cross several of these canals, hence the suburb’s old name “Kanaldorp”.

From 1860 the Camissa river system was steadily driven into underground tunnels which still exist today, and water pumps were erected to supply water across the city. An outbreak of the plague, spread by rats living in the remaining waterways, at the beginning of the 20th century, finally got rid of the last of the openly flowing Camissa waterways, except for the restored moats around the Castle of Good Hope and the pools within.

The public toilets at Castle Bridge, one for females and one for males, weren’t segregated by race. The toilets were kept in pristine condition by its two guardians, Doll van Rooy, the “spook lady”, and Abubaker Jaffa, the khalifa. Doll was very pale, like a ghost, while Jaffa was very dark in complexion; both would have given you a fright if they’d jumped out at you in the dark. Both were also very sage and wise, and both could spin a good yarn that had listeners in stitches.

The city council’s official grand name for the toilets was “chalets” and those employed to take care of the toilets were called “chalet-keepers”.

In our local Cape patois, a toilet is called a jamang, related to the Indonesian word jambang, meaning “pot”, so, for us, Aunty Doll was the jamang-keeper.

The jamang chalet of Castle Bridge became a very special place in District Six because of those spiritualist guardians: my Aunty Doll, a smoker with a rasping laugh, was a clairvoyant and gifted spiritual guide, and everyone would come for consultations with her at her chalet on the female side of the jamang, while Mr Jaffa, a khalifa who presided over ratiep ceremonies (a trance-linked art form practised by some Muslims that is rooted in Sufism) was also a deeply spiritual man who led a Sufi group practising the very old South-east Asian and Indian ratiep in which, in a high state of spiritual trance, devotees can walk on hot coals, pierce themselves with skewers and draw sharp swords over their bodies without bloodshed or harm.

Aunty Doll and Mr Jaffa were two of a kind, who enjoyed each other’s company and who respected each other and their spiritual gifts, sharing a little oasis in a very cruel and demeaning world.

My Aunty Doll had a welcoming array of African violets, ferns and chilli plants in the doorway and lobby just as you entered the chalet, where she would sit on her chair like a queen on her throne, flanked by vegetation handmaidens. When the company inspectors came around to the laundry shop, I would sometimes go down to sit with Aunty Doll and take in her world, listening to her telling the fortunes of her visitors by reading tea leaves or studying their palms. She often spoke of her excursions in the spirit realm. I loved her world, which gave me a sense of belonging.

Aunty Doll and Mr Jaffa were my angels to balance out the many demons who did me so much harm in my other world of the children’s asylum.

The humorist Mr Jaffa would say that the chalet at Castle Bridge was a place of racial harmony under apartheid, because it was a great equaliser, where all men stood shoulder to shoulder at the urinals, regardless of colour, all aiming percy at the porcelain and breathing a sigh of relief and happiness as their waste went down the same drain. And, in fact, the chalets survived apartheid, only having been demolished in 2020 as a result of vandalism and replaced by a fenced-off mini-park.

****

On 11 February 1966, District Six was declared a whites-only area under the Group Areas Act, and within two years forced removals of all people classified “Coloured” were in full swing. Sixty thousand people were systematically cleared, street by street, removed to the new “Coloured” suburbs many kilometres away on the windswept and desolate Cape Flats, as buildings were razed to the ground. District Six was renamed Zonnebloem.

In those years, I remember how people talked in worried tones about the creeping destruction, of the imminent ethnic cleansing under the Group Areas Act and the building of the new freeway, the Eastern Boulevard (today’s Nelson Mandela Boulevard). The spectre of destruction and forced removals stifled that happy spirit and slowly the music died.

Something inside of me also died when I could no longer go to that world. By the time I entered my teens, large parts of District Six were nothing but rubble, broken bricks, twisted metal and the colours of rust that dominated my childhood. The last of the removals took place as late as 1986.

The same forced removals took place across the city environs, into the Cape Peninsula and countryside towns. Once reasonably integrated southern and northern suburbs were cleansed of people classified as “Coloured”, “Indian” and “Native/ Bantu/black”.

People were moved in council trucks or private bakkies. The little muisnes (mouse nest) houses built on the sandy Cape Flats had tiny rooms that couldn’t accommodate everything the families brought. If your goods couldn’t fit on the trucks or in your new abode, you’d have to sell them to the second-hand dealers or auctioneers, who would hang around waiting for the pickings from those undergoing forced removals.

To this day people find their old prize possessions in strange places.

People who owned property were forced to sell for peanuts, and white people moved into the vacated and expropriated homes that weren’t demolished, scoring cheap although often very highly valued houses, and sometimes the antique contents of those homes too.

The City of Cape Town has never apologised or taken responsibility for paying reparations. There’s never been a land and homes tribunal to deal with this horrific part of the city’s history. A half-baked land restitution process for property owners has been dismally managed. But the real situation was that most of the 60 000 people forcibly removed from District Six were tenants rather than homeowners; there has been no restitution for them.

The displaced now have hundreds of thousands of descendants, many of whom are backyard dwellers, or living in shacks, or are homeless street people. They have not only never received justice, they’re also increasingly victimised by the aggression of the City of Cape Town police.

Cleaner’s Boy is published by Tafelberg, an imprint of NB Publishers, and retails at R325