Battered, but by no means broken

AS MUCH as forced removals dispossessed many black South Africans materially and spiritually, they were never the last and definitive word on our humanity.

Former residents from areas across Cape Town and beyond, up the line to Simon’s Town and from places such as Goodwood and Parow, did not end up defeated in the apartheid slums of the Cape Flats. They carried with them their laughter, along with their songs of lament. Pots and pans dented by the heads of errant lovers and husbands would still conjure the comforting aromas and tastes of food infused with masala, dhanya, barishap, the roast lamb of Easter and the delicacies of Eid and Diwali.

Yet we cannot be aloof to the trauma experienced to this day of people who, in the poignant indictment by the late Vincent Kolbe, “had been put out of their souls”.

In this week of painful memories Ruth Jeftha spoke of how her mum refused to move from her Bloemhof Flats home, her quiet defiance eventually crumbling as first the electricity was cut, then the water supply. She moved out of her flat on a Saturday. She died on the Monday.

Helga Jansen remembers a ritual observed by her father, Donald, which seemed strange to her as a child – the Sunday afternoon drive from their home in Ocean View where her dad and mother, Beverley, were teachers at the local primary school. The destination was always the same – the Harfield Village home where Donald had grown up.

The pathos of young children sitting quietly in the car on a street outside a house while their father sat with his memories of a stolen time he could never forget.

The life of Leonard Patientia gives us insight into how people set about rebuilding their lives beyond “the old familiar places”. We laid Leonard to rest on Thursday at the place where he had been baptised, confirmed and married, the Anglican Parish of St Phillip the Deacon, Chapel Street in District Six. He grew up in Frances Street around the corner from the lovely Beatrice Brink, who he would later marry.

When I met Leonard in 2001 he was in his late fifties and still had the athletic swagger of his young, Casanova days. He was a celebrated athlete at St Phillip’s Primary and later at Zonnebloem, where he had been victor ludorum. On Saturday afternoons he excelled as a flank in the Temperance Rugby Club. Some of the members of the club, with its apparent roots in the temperance movement, struggled to uphold its teetolism standards.

“But,” Leonard once confided in me, “we never drank before a game.”

For a short while Leonard and Beatty lived in Bridgetown and then went on to Heideveld, where they were founder members of the Church of the Holy Spirit.

Gerald Adams, a retired accountant who had once lived at 53 Longmarket Street, spoke at Leonard’s funeral. He recounted at the time the church was founded, Leonard worked for the City Council “and had been given the okay by the City of CT to use their building material store as parish office”.

The builders of the new faith community, under the watchful eye of Father Charles Albertyn, came from all over. William Mackrill was the former organist at St Paul’s on Bree Street. The other organist, Henry Williams, was a jazz artist “who use to gig at the Zambezi Club in Darling Street”.

Adams remembered how families offered their houses for services and other church-related activities: “Hester McKenzie, formerly from Mowbray, opened her home in Jonkershoek Road for the first Anglican Sunday School for children in the area.”

Leonard would roll with my pastoral punches, sometimes taking them on the chin and occasionally responding with a deft, telling knockout blow. This was the case when I decided that after 20 years as church warden he should choose between that post or remaining on as a lay minister.

He chose the latter and to publicly seal the agreement I handed him a present during a Sunday service. Leonard, pokerfaced, opened the gift, Woolies winter pyjamas, and said, “Thank you Father, ma’ ek slaap kaal.” He sauntered back to his seat.

Leonard Eric Patientia was my friend and I will miss him.