Page Content: "People do not see it [the sadness and humiliation] for I have learnt, by looking on the bright side, to joke about it; it is an escape mechanism. It hurts, no doubt about it. I am 77 and it still hurts. It requires swallowing hard to keep it [the sadness] back. No, people do not know what is happening within you. It has a left a wound that one cannot heal with medication."
These words, shared by Mr Desmond Poole, a former resident of Die Vlakte, is now forever emblazoned on a panel on a public installation on the second floor of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences' building at Stellenbosch University. Poole was born in Die Vlakte and was forced to leave his home in Merriman Street at the age of 28 along with the rest of his family after the area was declared a whites only area in 1964 due to the Group Areas Act. The family would move to various neighbourhoods – Poole to Idas Valley, his mother to Strand and his grandmother and many other residents to Cloetesville where they would try to rebuild their lives again.
About 3 700 people who were classified 'coloured' were moved from the centre of the town over a period of two years from 1969 to 1970, with six schools, four churches, one mosque, a cinema and 10 businesses affected. The area stretched from Muller Street in the north to Merriman Avenue in the south, eastwards to Joubert Street and then to the west in Bird Street.
Poole, along with Stellenbosch University's (SU) Rector, Prof Wim de Villiers, were the guest speakers at the 12 November opening ceremony of the installation of the Die Vlakte history in the Arts Faculty's building, which is erected on land that was expropriated under the Group Areas Act.
In his talk, Poole described the area and the diverse group of people, both so-called coloured and white persons, who lived there.
"I grew up right here where we are sitting now," he said pointing to the ground of the lecture hall where the Arts building currently stands. "It was here that I polished the wooden floors in my grandmother's house."
Poole described how the change in the political atmosphere slowly permeated the everyday existence of persons of colour in the area. Recalling an incident where his grandmother, who was responsible for washing Lord Kitchener's clothes, laughed off Kitchener's disrespectful behaviour towards her, he said: "Lord Kitchener would come to her house to collect his washing and would come into the house with his horse, and one day I said to her, 'Ma, but doesn't he respect you', and she would just laugh."
"I grew up in a time when white and brown did not shy away from borrowing a cup of sugar or an onion from each other. It was nice to experience those years, where there was no talk of separatism. You just lived, you enjoyed life. We didn't know what Apartheid was in that time because it wasn't there."
Poole talked of how his family grew fruit and vegetables on their property and kept chickens in their back yards, much like other neighbours in the area. In the afternoons, Merriman Street would be turned into a play area by children from the neighbourhood who used the space for games and sport.
All this was shattered when the forced removals started in 1969 and says Poole, still has an impact on communities today.
"Our family was a rainbow nation. What you see today, I experienced [on Die Vlakte], but then they brought in the Group Areas Act and divided us according to our skin colour.
"Economically, our communities were impoverished. The political ideology also played a huge role and left a feeling of inferiority amongst our people and took its toll…and even today, this feeling still remains amongst many of our people."
Speaking on the evening, Prof De Villiers described the opening of the installation as "a historic moment" to "revisit the past in order to create a different, more just future".
"This event brings us together to consider what drove us apart, so that it will never happen again. The University is reaching out to the community and saying, we apologise – for not speaking up when you were driven out, for taking what was not ours, for keeping the doors of learning closed to you for so long."
De Villiers added that the "University acknowledged its contribution to the injustices of the past" and in the spirit of restitution and development, created a bursary fund for former residents of Die Vlakte, including their children and grandchildren, earlier this year.
Other initiatives which preceded the installation, said De Villiers, included the Memory Room in the University's Archives and the photo exhibition in the original Lückhoff School building in Banhoek Road in Stellenbosch, which depicted various parts of the area's history.
"While the Group Areas Act and forced removals in Stellenbosch gave rise to much bitterness, it did not succeed in demolishing the awareness that in this town, brown and black and white people share a history that cannot be easily disentangled. On a practical level, the historic core of Stellenbosch owes much to slaves, artisans and master builders. And today, many who migrate here in search of a better life find themselves trapped in poverty on the outskirts of our town, yet they make invaluable contributions to the riches of our existence here, whether we realise it or not."
The installation, which include panels filled with photographs of the area and depicting the everyday lives of the people who lived there, also include testimonies from former residents and their children and grandchildren as well as a write-up on the historical context of the time. Feedback from students from the Visual Arts and English departments, who were involved in the project and produced a set of proposals for memorialising the forced removals, can be seen here, as well as a clear panel which allow visitors to share their thoughts on the installation.
The project was initiated at the request of the Faculty's Dean, Prof Johan Hattingh, in December 2013. Hattingh appointed a committee to develop an exhibition that would memorialise the forced removals of residents of Die Vlakte.
Behind the scenes, a committee consisting of Prof Annemaré Kotze from the Ancient Studies Department, Prof Louise Green from the English Department, Prof Albert Grundlingh from the History Department and Dr Elmarie Costandius from the Visual Arts Department worked tirelessly for 18 months to capture a part of the history of Die Vlakte.
At the opening, Hattingh welcomed guests, which included academics from the University, students and surviving residents from Die Vlakte and their families.
"I am painfully aware that the forced removals and the subsequent history caused untold pain over a very long time that cannot be put to words completely and fully – and cannot adequately be represented in a few panels that we have on this floor. While expressing deeply felt meanings, it cannot be otherwise that our panels are incomplete, provisional, first formulations, requiring expansion, things to be added, new angles and points of view still to be explored," said Hattingh.
He also acknowledged that he was "painfully aware" that the opening event of the installation "conjured up emotions and feelings that came from very deep within" and had witnessed personally "people crying in front of these panels, remembering their own stories of a past still affecting [everyone] today".
"I would like to emphasise that these panels represent one storyline, one narrative about forced evictions from Die Vlakte, and that it is possible, no, it is necessary to bring in other story lines, other narratives to advance the meaning of what happened on this land where we stand now. This means that we are not at the end of a process but at its beginning, with many steps and many phases still to follow."
Mr Yusuf October, the Vice Chairman of Die Vlakte Community Forum, also had an opportunity to address the guests. The Forum focuses on redress and reconciliation within the community that lived in Die Vlakte.
"Our main objective is to empower the Stellenbosch community, in particular Die Vlakte community, economically and socially through access to education. We would like all roleplayers in our community of Stellenbosch to take hands so we can achieve greater things in the process of redress and reconciliation," he said.
Standing in front of one of the panels at the end of the evening, reminiscing with others about the years they spent in Die Vlakte, Poole said: "This installation is important, especially for those who know nothing about the story of Die Vlakte. As we [fellow residents] talked earlier, I realised, we lived through this and hopefully people will realise that we were ordinary people, who once lived here and had a community here".
Photo: A former resident of the Die Vlakte, Ms Sybil Kannemeyer (89), shares some memories of her time growing up in the area with some other residents (from the left) Mr Desmond Poole, Mr Mogamat Cassiem Ras (Chairman of Die Vlakte Community Forum), Dr Elmarie Costandius from the Visual Arts Department at SU, Mr Yusuf October (Vice Chairman of Die Vlakte Community Forum) and Prof Johan Hattingh, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. (Hennie Rudman, SSFD)
