‘Triumph’ came decades later

FORMER RESIDENTS BACK IN SOPHIATOWN Each week Marie-Lais looks out for the unusual, the unique, the downright quirky or just something or someone we might have had no idea about, even though we live here. We like to travel our own cities and their surrou

It’s easy to become inured to the facts and visual history of horrors, but I find the real nightmare lurks in some seemingly innocuous detail. I’m seeing Sophiatown differently, thanks to a lively guided tour by Tshepo Letsoalo, the grandchild of a previous resident, and Klaas Hobe. Many old Triomf signs remain, one even misspelt as Triumf.

The name conjures up the discomforting but excellent movie by Michael Raeburn based on Marlene van Niekerk’s book. The Benades and other poor whites weren’t aware any “triumph” over land and robbery of life by their government would do them any good. Their focus was grubbingly narrow. Yet the massive damage of bodily dragging people out of their lives had been done.

It is impossible to imagine the traumas of the removals for those involved. In the Sophiatown Museum, among many by now quite familiar scenes of the forced removals, is one picture of a neat, long line of trucks on the move. The realisation that all of them contained people’s belongings and that the things they held dear were being so undramatically shipped away suddenly makes me crumple.

Part of the museum is housed in Dr Xumas’s original home-cumpractice, but it isn’t the only house that survived the graders of 1955. Another old house, now extended for new owners, was turned into holding cells during the time that those to be removed had not yet been relocated. All the gardens here are extraordinarily flat and it takes me a while to realise they’re still that way because everything was levelled by the graders.

A mighty oak was spared, a champion tree of South Africa, a status it holds in its absence. It was a meeting place for the original Kofifi locals, including Reverend Trevor Huddleston, but in the Triomf days it did not survive overly severe pruning by the denizens of the nearest house.

Next door we meet welcome human evidence of some form of “triumph”. Rebone Tshabalala and a friend, Victor Mokhine, have returned. A little girl when her family was forced out, Mrs Tshabalala says she was drawn back to where her umbilical cord was buried. She was the first returning “nonwhite” among neighbours who speedily sold up and moved away from “you people”. And today her grandchildren giggle around the tea table. Sophiatown Heritage Tours: 011 673 1271