Hostel 33: a portal to the past

A road sign with a museum icon used to beckon from the roadside outside Lwandle (“the sea” in isiXhosa), a township near Strand Beach on the False Bay coast of the Western Cape. Until now, I have joined the stream of motorists whooshing past the sign on the N2, our sights set on Sir Lowry’s Pass and its cantilevered traverse through the Hottentots Holland mountains.

It is only after reading a slim book — Hostels, Homes, Museum: memorialising migrant labour pasts in Lwandle, South Africa by Noëleen Murray and Leslie Witz — that I learn where the road sign leads and decide to follow its call. However, when I reach the turn-off after a 50km drive from Cape Town, the museum sign is no longer there — repeatedly replaced and stolen, it turns out — and I must proceed without its guidance into the aptly named Onverwacht Road.

The turn-off is your gateway to Hostel 33, the only preserved hostel block in the apartheid-era Lwandle migrant labour compound. The Old Community Hall on Vulindlela Street now houses a museum where you can learn about the history of the migrant labour system, which was most rigorously enforced in the Western Cape. Launched in 2000, this was the first township-based museum in the province. From the museum hall, a local guide will walk you to Hostel 33, the unique artefact of the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum.

Open the weathered turquoise door of Hostel 33 and step into a space once inhabited by African men caught in the brutal vice of apartheid’s influx control and Coloured Labour Preference Policy, turning them into “temporary sojourners” in the Western Cape and splintering family life. The compound was built on land bought in 1958 by the Stellenbosch Divisional Council from a white farmer. Its 22 barracks housed African men from the Eastern Cape working for white employers in the Helderberg basin.

With the abolition of influx control in 1986, female partners and children were legally allowed to join African men in urban areas — though in reality they had been visiting the men in Lwandle in defiance of police raids throughout the 1980s. According to former academic Sean Jones, by 1989 women and children comprised 54% of Lwandle’s hostel occupants, often oscillating between their rural and urban bases. By this time, a single hostel block built with 16 “bedspaces” in dormitories was accommodating between 50 and 70 people, resulting in severe overcrowding.

Hostel 33 is today a quiet and reflective curated space. This was far from the case in 1989 when Jones conducted his ethnographic study of children living in dire conditions in the Lwandle hostels, later published as Assaulting Childhood. Jones describes a squalid, noisy, violent setting spawned by apartheid and inhabited by people on the edge of survival.

While many people lived in Hostel 33 over the decades, some cubicles in the long, rectangular building now depict the intimate lives of specific families. The cover of Hostel, Homes, Museum shows the unit occupied by the Peter family with Makhosonke’s wedding suit, his Fats Waller’s Handful of Keys album and turntable, a paraffin lamp and enamel crockery. However, on entering this space, I learn that vandals had broken into the hostel months earlier, stealing some of these historical artefacts and probably hotfooting it to the scrapyard with their loot.

In the Mtshizana family unit, two narrow iron bedsteads are stacked on top of each other to create a “bunk” to accommodate four people sleeping two to a bed. Tata Mtshizana sold meat from the other half of the cubicle after bribing the authorities to turn a blind eye to his entrepreneurial efforts. Family photographs hang from the walls along with a tiny brown pullover to keep one of the Mtshizana twins warm on chilly days. Part of a wall is papered over with faded Sunlight soap wrappers from an occupant’s place of work.

From there, museum guide Kamohelo Kolisang walks us to Hostel 33’s notorious latrine block, also part of the museum. It consists of a row of six cubicles with no doors. Inside each unit is a large bucket with a plank for a toilet seat. AmaBhaca workers from the Nguni ethnic group collected “night soil” twice a week, but this was woefully inadequate to cope with the overflow and stench from the buckets.

Walking between the museum buildings, you witness the past intertwined with the present. With the exception of Hostel 33, the hostel blocks were converted into family homes in the democratic era. As a result, visiting the site entails walking in areas where people are going about their daily lives. A trio of schoolgirls strides by in jeans and crop tops, washing is hung out to dry, a woman tends a rare garden that has defied the limits of Lwandle’s sandy soil. Music accompanies you wherever you walk — Ella Mai’s Naked, the reggae beats of Lucky Dube and Afropop love songs.

It’s payday in Lwandle and in anticipation of a large crowd, a string of shisanyamas on Vulindlela Street have fired up wood in half-drums. “Come back later,” says Kolisang. “It’s gonna be crazy!” Chops and steaks are coated in amber spices, and a smiley (sheep’s head) is bubbling away in a huge pot (R30 half head, R60 whole head). A sheep is being gutted and skinned under a hardy tree on the corner opposite the museum.

Lwandle residents work in retail, construction, on farms and as domestic workers, according to Kolisang. However, with SA’s official unemployment rate at 32.1%, the informal sector supports many others. We pass a shop selling traditional medicine, a hair salon in a container (wash R50, cornrows R100, braids R300 and up), Luke the Famous Tailor, Cosmetics & Tuckshop, and a shed housing a gym with spartan equipment.

We return to the museum hall to find a creche graduation party in full swing. Tiny girls in white tulle and satin are seated like a display of shiny meringues while the boys sport crisp white shirts and the parents wear proud expressions. Music is pumping and food is steaming in bain-maries.

About 90% of tourists visiting the museum are international students, says Kolisang. However, tourism in areas where the urban poor live can be contentious. While supporters highlight its economic benefits and educational value, opponents caution that such visits can be voyeuristic. Given this, should tourists confine their visits to wine farms, the V&A Waterfront and game reserves?

“I think they should make an effort to come to Lwandle,” says Kolisang, who grew up and lives in the area. “As much as it’s an uncomfortable history or uncomfortable space to be in, it’s part of SA. It’s a personal thing. If you feel the need to come, it’s morally acceptable.”

Set back from the national road, the apartheid government tried to hide the dehumanising hostels from public view. By visiting, you arguably help to bring this hidden history to light.

“The one thing that makes local people uncomfortable, though, is taking pictures, so ask me to get permission from them first. It’s because they might post us on social media,” says Kolisang. Respecting people’s homes and privacy is important, too. Hostel 33 is a two-roomed dormitory. When it first opened to the public, people were still living in one room. Despite a security gate, the occasional tourist would peer in, “so the occupants would lurk on the far side of their space”, says Kolisang. “In situations like these, people will just smile, but eish it’s not a comfortable space to be in.” An RDP house was later given to these occupants.

Kolisang views the museum as part of the community. “If we forget to lock the door of the hostel, for example, someone will come to the museum to tell us,” she says. The hostel project was the brainchild of Bongani Mgijima, at the time a heritage studies student living in Lwandle, and community worker Charmian Plummer. Not only are staff and board members locals, but the museum hosts a variety of activities such as local history programmes, career expos and speech competitions for schools nearby. Spooling through recent posts on its Facebook page also turns up an indigenous games day, storytelling for children, a theatre performance and domestic workers’ project.

Lwandle once consisted of row on row of blocks built on a barren site with a 70ha buffer zone separating the compound from areas reserved for whites. “There are no streets, no houses and no gardens at Lwandle. There are no fences, no parks, no playgrounds and no pillar boxes. There are even no trees and no grass,” Jones wrote at the time of his study. Today, ask Google maps for an aerial satellite view of Lwandle and it will reveal a densely built area stretching from the N2 to the sea.

According to the museum pamphlet, “Today Lwandle is home to families from all over Africa who have come to seek a better life in the Western Cape. It has developed into a fully functional community with amenities and facilities to support its growing population.”

Yet viewed from above, the herringbone formations of the original hostel layout remain clearly visible, like the ribs of shipwrecks in the sand. Their presence is a reminder that the past continues to shape the present, and that the migrant labour system left indelible economic cleavages in its wake.