Memories of forced removals: Former residents of the Durban Municipal Magazine Barracks and the Group Areas Act.
Abstract
Two powerful phenomena around which people coalesce in the present, and
which consequently give rise to notions of “community”, are recollections of
historical suffering, and an affiliation to low income working class districts.
Exploring both themes are particularly useful when looking at the experiences
and the memories of the nearly three and a half million South Africans who
were displaced from long standing settlements, beginning in the late 1950s
as a consequence of the Group Areas Act. It has been argued that in response
to being victims of land dispossession, many have created a counter narrative
to the Apartheid justification of Group Areas. Over years this has led to the
construction of romanticised memories of life before forced removals which
has a profound influence on the way they see themselves today. While the
motives and the broader political and economic impact of the Group
Areas Act has been widely studied, it also crucial to look at these subjective
experiences of ordinary South Africans and how they were both, impacted
upon, and responded to forced removals in different ways. Historians trying
to access this kind of information, not contained in official state records,
are dependent on oral testimony and consequently human memory. Oral
testimony does however present various methodological challenges. This
paper is concerned with the subjectivities and fluidity of human memory, and
focuses specifically on former residents of the Magazine Barracks, with their
own unique experiences and interpretations of forced removals. Rather than
seeing the fluidity of memory as only a limitation, looking at what former
residents chose to speak about and what they chose to omit is also revealing
about how they responded to the state laws imposed upon them. Built in 1880
to house Indian municipal employees of the Durban Corporation and their
families, the severely overcrowded Magazine Barracks was home to over seven
thousand people by the 1960s when it was evacuated and residents sent to
Chatsworth. Despite poverty and very poor living conditions, former residents
today speak nostalgically about the community that they had created and have
very fond memories of growing up in the Magazine Barracks. They established
numerous voluntary associations to promote cultural and welfare endeavours
as well as many sporting bodies. Albeit the improved living conditions and economic opportunities that former residents of the Magazine Barracks were
able to take advantage of after moving to Chatsworth, today some of them
argue that if it were possible they would prefer to go back to way that they
lived in the barracks.