As I unpack a dusty storage box of bulky video cassettes shot by former news cameraman Jimi Matthews, memories of Cape Flats youngsters fighting street battles with apartheid police in the 1980s spill out — along with a scuttling spider and evidence of a gecko inhabitation.
Two decades of Matthews’ footage pass through my hands after overseas documentary filmmakers ask me to catalogue his work. Months later the job is done but the adrenaline of that highly politicised era lingers in my memory like dynamite residue. That’s why, when a notification from Culture Connect pops up on my screen advertising a tour of Athlone’s political and cultural sites, I am in the mood to attend.
Athlone, 15km east of Cape Town’s city centre, is typically where I visit friends or succumb to the lure of Cape Malay specialities such as spicy, coconut-flecked koesiesters and fragrant boeber. This time, however, I’m curious to see how Athlone, designated under apartheid as a coloured-only suburb, is being presented to tourists wanting to learn about SA’s divided and violent past. The guide is Tony Hartman of Mindshift Tours whose struggle to resolve his racial identity turns out to be central to his tour.
The whiff of freedom was in the air when the financially embattled apartheid government clamped down with states of emergency from the mid-1980s. Meanwhile, ANC president-in-exile Oliver Tambo had called for South Africans to make the country ungovernable and apartheid unworkable. In Athlone, revolts by schoolchildren and workers were amplified by its poets, writers, musicians and artists, who produced works challenging the apartheid regime.
The first stop on the tour is the memorial statues to uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) cadres Coline Williams, 22, and Robbie Waterwitch, 20, who died when their limpet mine detonated behind the public toilets opposite the Athlone magistrate’s court in 1989. The pair had intended to plant the device beside the court 100m away as part of an MK bombing campaign aimed at disrupting elections for segregated local authorities.
The rough-hewn statues, sculpted by Guy du Toit and Egon Tania, capture the ANC comrades in a state of high alert as they scan Old Klipfontein Road for apartheid security police and informers. These statues replaced the original bronze figures that were stolen for scrap in 2008.
From this evocative memorial we walk 200m to Super Fisheries, whose owner Rashaad Pandy invented a gargantuan sandwich known as the Gatsby. You will need two arms to haul the bayonet-shaped loaf out of his tiny shop and about five hungry people to assist with demolition.
“It started by accident,” says Pandy, a sprightly 72-year-old with no plans to retire. “I was building a house and I promised the workers I’m going to have some supper for them. But when I came to my shop, there was only some chips, some polony and some bread left. All I did was I took some chips, fried some polony and put some atcha on there. I cut it and I also had a piece. Then the one guy, Froggie, he tell me, ‘larney, this is a smash hit, a Gatsby smash hit!’” says Pandy.
“Did Froggie mean it was a hit like the movie, The Great Gatsby, which was screening at the time?” I ask.
“No, it was because of Gatsby’s hat, the round one,” says Pandy, evoking images of actor Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby in 1974 wearing a puffy “newsboy” cap. “At that time there wasn’t a long bread. It was only afterwards that people came to me and said the round bread is difficult to cut. They were cutting it in wedges. So I changed it to the long one,” says Pandy.
In the 1980s Athlone’s “struggle” streets — Thornton, Belgravia and Klipfontein roads — reverberated with the sound of police loudhailers ordering protesters and the media to clear the area followed by the whipcrack of sjamboks and the hiss of teargas. On October 15 1985, the police used live bullets in an ambush known as the Trojan Horse massacre.
At the memorial on the site of this attack, Hartman recounts how security forces hid in crates on the back of an unmarked truck driving down Thornton Road. When faced with a youthful crowd of rock-throwing protesters, the security forces opened fire, killing Michael Miranda, 11, Shaun Magmoed, 15, and Jonathan Claasen, 21. Footage of the event captured by an international film crew sparked an outcry abroad. The memorial takes the form of a sinister steel silhouette of three members of the security forces aiming their rifles in defence of a doomed, racist regime.
Outside Hartman’s childhood home in Main Avenue, he recounts how he regularly returned from high school to find a Casspir, an armoured vehicle, parked on the curb. With local schools a hotbed of political resistance, his parents had enrolled him in a private, mainly white, boys-only high school in Rondebosch.
“This was the first time I engaged with white people. I had to learn how to switch socially between the coloured camp and the white camp. Even now the question of my identity is still something I struggle with,” he says, his voice unsteady with emotion.
“I wrote matric in 1985 — and if this was the case you were seen as a sell-out because many Athlone schools were closed due to boycotts. For a few days I stayed with my [white] English teacher in Rosebank so I could get some quiet space. And here’s the crazy thing. I came home and told my mom I was staying in Bridge Street. ‘What number?,’ she asks. When I answer she looks at me and says: ‘That used to be our house. It’s where I grew up. We were [forcibly] moved to Penlyn Estate.’”
The scars of the forced removals of tens of thousands of people, uprooted to places like the Cape Flats because of the colour of their skin, remain part of Cape Town’s physical and psychic landscape — along with the legendary beauty of Table Mountain set amid the rugged Peninsula.
Matthews, who grew up in a politicised home in Athlone, still feels a connection to the area. “While the memorial to Robbie and Coline is inspiring, Ashley Kriel’s is just a piece of plastic against a wall. It explains nothing. It’s an insult,” he says. Kriel, an MK operative, was shot dead by a member of the security branch at a “safe house” in Athlone on July 9 1987.
For Matthews, inadequate memorials such as this fail to properly honour lives dedicated to the struggle, now that collective memory of that turbulent period has faded.
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