In person Mr Jeffrey Rademeyer’s voice is more disarming than the clerical tone it takes on over the phone. He also stands taller than the Facebook photos let on. So when he rises to address a Colesberg heritage dialogue / legacy project session at the N1 government building on Human Rights Day, those gathered listen intently, slightly craning their necks to meet his eyes.
An eclectic motley has come out on the day. Mostly elders; old hat thoroughbreds who retrace the townships back to a time when the schools were no more than a cow-dung-smeared church floor and water was hauled from communal water tanks. The demographics reflected an intercultural melting pot drawn from enclaves as far flung as the former Transkei or the highlands of Lesotho. Boasting a grounded work ethic, the predecessors are said to have been an enterprising lot; backwater pastoralists, livestock farmers, or packers, shop assistants and block men in town. Mostly, though, many had spent their working days out on the surrounding farms. But on this day, the subjects are offloading and bouncing off ideas that might inform the direction that the proposed project might pursue.
Described as ‘a walking encyclopaedia’ Mr Mleleki’s memory stretches far … very far back. In fact, in his wistful, at times humorous monologue, it is not lost on him on how the sheer idea of the initiative is unprecedented to people who, like himself, are from a time when the forebears tended to keep things – their origins included – very close to the chest. His father, a sallow man who laboured hard with his hands, was a product of the times. ‘I’m not a Motaung,’ Mr Mleleki recalls him often reiterating, ‘I’m an Englishman!’
Exactly what this cryptic pronouncement meant is a question that has hung over him for decades. But he expresses gratitude that finally, there are people who want to start piecing together and documenting the long-haul history of those who came before us. For this reason, he has generously availed himself to the cause so much so that at the recent session his colleagues at the farming cooperative that they’ve got going had to urgently whisk him away but not before his parting message; ‘you can’t know who you are, if you don’t first know where you come from.’ Everybody nodded.
Mama Katie de Wee, a teacher, is a loquacious, thoughtful speaker and, apart from a longstanding personal desire to put together a book on the education history of the township, she also ruminates on the socio-cultural and cross-generational impact of legalised segregation. Surprisingly, her area of interest is less in traditional apartheid ie. apartheid as a technology of white supremacy than its enduring efficacy in wedging enduring divisions amongst black and brown people.
To her, the term ‘Coloured’ is a misnomer, an accident of history. If she could have it her way, we’d all just be ‘people’ but when pressed on the racial tagging she still feels that ‘Coloured’ ought to refer to a people’s culture than simply a racial classification. ‘Does a White English man having a child with a Black Xhosa woman make that child Coloured,’ she asks? That scion, she continues, will unlikely have any reference to what it socially means to be Coloured. She also touches on the intra-cultural form of racialisation affecting the various communities. How, for instance, loose and subliminal racial slurs still thrive unchecked in these spaces. She makes the example of how having a dark skin might invite epithets like the K-word from the lighter-skinned Coloured population.
Everybody cogitates….
As someone who was active in the Struggle and witnessed the massacre of the Colesberg Four ‘with my own eyes,’ the last thing Mr Solomzi Mtubu would want is for the memory of those martyrs to slip the local consciousness. Back then, he was a student and activist – an ‘agitator’ in the security parlance of the day – nonetheless he was instrumental in working (‘with many others,’ he insists) towards the preservation of this part of Kuyasa’s history. Acknowledging the trauma and unhealed wounds of those times, the project, he feels, would also be therapeutic to those who were simply expected to move on from the psychological implications of those events. ‘There are deep-seated wounds in the community,’ he says, ‘wounds wat ons moet krap.’ The various dialogue sessions, he believes, will offer precisely the opportunity to scratch at these wounds until they have healed.
Currently a work in progress, Rademeyer’s long-term vision is geared towards creating a sustainable project that will serve the community for years. Of course endeavours of this nature, he says, that aim to function independently and are primarily community-driven might be met with some suspicion. Although, he’d sent out an invitation to the local Umsobomvu Municipality, sadly no one from there could make it. It being Human Rights Day, Rademeyer simply chalked it up to the possibility that there were other events that required the municipality’s attention. That said, Rademeyer is adamant that he has only the community’s interests at heart.
In his mind’s eye, he envisions a book published about the history of the town, ‘but the critical factor,’ he notes, ‘is to break down social breakdowns … and [the project must] culminate into the development of Colesberg.’ Inspired by what he terms ‘the Chinese model,’ which ‘is steeped in culture and history,’ he feels that the town’s communities have lost their ‘connectedness’ – an indispensable prelude towards social cohesion, he believes. Central themes in his vision centre around what sort of future the town is building, which by default, would be inherited by the next generation.
Aware of potential limitations, he has already reached out to several universities whom he feels would contribute richly in as far as granting access to archived material as well as providing training. He believes that the project has the potential to outlive even those who start it. Somewhere in the future he sees a library in Kuyasa which should also stimulate a tourism aspect. Those crumbling stone houses that eParkeni has recently written on, he sees these ‘ancestral homes as monuments,’ and should thus be protected. Majority of the development that goes on in town is of a commercial bent and he hopes that in future there might be equal enthusiasm in developing the historical / heritage aspect as well.
Despite that this is her husband’s baby, Mrs Rademeyer – it must be said – was punctiliously scrambling about to ensure that those gathered were treated to a hearty meal. Yes, the dialogues were fruitful but that curry lamb stew made everything just that much more enjoyable.