5

Ascribing Otherness and the Threat to the Self: Representations of Slums and the Social Space of Others

In Buitengracht-street, the Princess was attracted by a beautifully designed but dilapidated old Dutch house. Most of its windows were shattered and its oak panelled hall was serving as a communal kitchen. Past this house, but a few generations ago, the British Governors of the Cape and the flower of Cape Town’s society used to parade in the evening. Lady Anne Barnard, it is said, knew it well. Yesterday Princess Alice found it harbouring incredible squalor.1

The Cape Times, ‘Princess Alice in Slumland’

In 1929, Princess Alice went down the rabbit hole and landed up in ‘Slumland’. And like Wonderland it was busy with disturbing characters. For ‘the slum’ loomed large in the popular imagination as a weird liminal space at the edge of middle-class respectability. Slumland threatened the loss of the Self and, without much exaggeration, the whole of Western Civilization – as so clearly symbolized by the fate suffered by the old Dutch house and its associated ghosts of Empire described above. Off with her head indeed. But it was surprisingly only one of many rabbit holes that the Princess managed to fall into in the course of her duties as the Vicereine of South Africa; Old Cape Town was riddled with them – or so it seemed. As we shall see below, newspaper articles and official reports often described places like District Six as rabbit warrens filled with animal-like humans. In the broad brushstrokes of sensationalist journalism and the finer details of official reports, District Six and Old Cape Town was depicted – ascribed – as the location of Otherness. But ascribing Otherness worked in dual ways, locking the inhabitants inside the tainting walls of derelict buildings, or alternatively, the ‘animalistic’ inhabitants tainting the walls of the housing stock by miasmic association. This slippage is rife in discourse on ‘slums’ and is tellingly present when the Garden Cities and Town Planning journal tried to define ‘what is a slum?’2 Verbatim extracts of George Duckworth’s paper read at the RIBA give the answer:

A slum, then, is a street, court or alley which reflects the social condition of a poor, thriftless, irregularly employed and rough class of inhabitant. The outward signs are bread and litter in the streets; windows dirty, broken and patched with brown or white paper; curtains dirty and frayed and blinds half drawn and often hanging at an angle. The street doors are usually open, showing bare passages and stairways lacking balustrades, while the door jambs are generally brown with dirt and rubbed shiny by the coats of the leisured class, whose habits are to lean up against them.

The transference and slippage between building and person is beautifully and literally articulated in the last sentence – the dirt of the building rubbed off onto the skin of the loitering unemployed, and the dirty practice of loitering ironically becoming a cleansing, rather than the tainting, of dirty buildings.

In Cape Town, the ‘slums’ of District Six and parts of Old Cape Town were stigmatized and devalued, opening both the inhabitants, and the buildings, eventually to forced removal and relocation. And solidifying the nascent race politics of a divided South Africa to boot. For the act of ascribing Otherness was also the consolidating of the Self; every hyperbole employed to shock the reader was a strengthening of the veracity of the project of Empire, of the ‘obvious hierarchy’ of races and cultures. Imperial discourse on the architecture and inhabitants of the slums became a key founding layer in the construction of apartheid. And it is to this discourse that we now turn.

ASCRIBING OTHERNESS: ‘KENNELS’, ‘HOVELS’, AND OTHER ANIMALISTIC ASSOCIATIONS

From newspapers3 and magazines,4 to petitions,5 conferences,6 and official documents7 the word ‘hovel’ is ubiquitous in the 40-odd years this book covers. Although words like ‘pondokkie’8 and ‘shanty’ were occasionally used, especially towards the end of the period of study and mostly to describe peri-urban dwellings, ‘hovel’ associated the ‘slum’ dweller with an animal status.9 It should be noted, however, that many of the descriptions of dwelling spaces using this emotionally charged word, especially those after the ’flu epidemic of 1918, were intended to shock the general public and officials into providing some form of social housing or better health conditions in certain areas. Nevertheless, the use of this word in identifying and describing Other-spaces reinforced the identity of those inhabitants as Other. It was used as early as 1888 to undermine the voting rights of recently urbanized Natives living in the city: As J. Easton, ruminating on Four Questions of the Day admonished the reader: ‘Think for a moment of that ignorant and disgustingly dirty fellow, the occupier of one of these wretched hovels, having a voice in the government of this town equal to that of the mayor himself.’10 Clearly, a ‘hovel’ did not constitute the legitimizing capacity that property-based voting rights were intended to bestow.

The link between slum-dwellers and the animal world was often made through words other than ‘hovel.’ In an article titled ‘A Hotbed of Horrors,’ the Architect, Builder & Engineer ran an exposé on slum conditions, choosing Wells Square – a place of much notoriety to be explored in the following chapter – as their focus.11 In this example, the association of the urban poor with the animal world is made very clear: ‘It may have been a square once; it’s a sink now. What once was open space is covered by hovels, kennels, rabbit warrens, call them what you will, but for Heaven’s sake don’t call them human habitations.’ For their part the Cape Times ran a series of reports on the ‘Underworld of Cape Town’ where the association of human ‘type’ with dwelling ‘type’ is defined:

Within a stone’s throw of the University [in the city] exist squalid hutches and warrens occupied by people of colour who could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be described as the better class. These premises are being whitewashed now. The landlords have had a shaking up [from the series]. Perhaps they fear demolition.12

And in 1918 the City Council, after the tour they took of the city’s poorer neighbourhoods, reported seeing ‘the dens and kennels in which people lived worse than rats.’13 At a much later date the Cape Times was still calling poor people ‘sub-human’14 through their association with their dwellings. The simple act of naming and associating people with animal-like dwellings ascribed a sense of Otherness that would ultimately bolster and naturalize segregationist ambitions.

The primary concern that drove most of the writing on slums was the condition alternatively called ‘overcrowding’ and ‘congestion.’ As was noted in the previous chapter, the latter term was also used to describe the aesthetic problems with the density of buildings in the city, but it was the density and number of bodies in dwellings that was typically meant by the word. Congestion, in these terms, was one of the major causes for concern for the agents of Empire. In the shadow of Victorian morality and the required separation of sexes, it was generally understood that ‘living under such conditions [of congestion and overcrowding] is not only bad physically, but also bad morally.’15 Although there were sentiments to the contrary, the overwhelming consideration was that this condition of dense living was endemic – essential – to the Native and Others in general. Again, animal-like adjectives reinforced this perceived condition as problematic and threatening. We find this in the records of the Commission for a Native Location for Cape Town in 1901 (hereafter CNL) concerning District Six:

We have a considerable amount of overcrowding among the low-class Jews. The Kafirs seem to like to herd together; they would prefer to have a room filled. The Europeans prefer the reverse, and it is the result of circumstances that they herd together.16

Again, the animal qualities associated with the word ‘herd’ are fairly obvious. These generalizations were echoed by Robert Wynne-Roberts, the City Engineer of Cape Town, who was of the opinion that a satellite Native ‘location’ was not desirable and preferred the supervisory possibilities that lodging-houses could apply in ‘civilizing’ Natives:

You would be able to have supervision over them. They want to live under conditions they are used to live. They like to huddle up together. If they are under the lodging-house principle you can get them to live in a more civilized way by force. You will in this way do the native more good than anything you can think of. Once you begin to improve his morals in that respect you raise him to a higher level. If the natives are in a location they would be huddled together as they please, and you cannot expect to improve them in this way.17

Whatever the City Engineer’s paternalist intentions, Natives, it seemed, ‘naturally’ preferred to live ‘huddled together.’ This essentialist attitude also carried through to the view that it was ‘their nature’ to spoil: ‘If some people were put in the Governor’s house they would soon turn it into a condition worse than a Kafir kraal.’18 Others lamented the ‘noteworthy ease with which natives usually adapt themselves to slum conditions.’19 Whilst a report by the Department of Native Affairs in 1919 suggested: ‘So long as the native is content to live in squalor so long will the native population of the towns be an offence and menace to the European section of the community.’20 It followed then, that Natives were somehow naturally unable to keep ‘their’ living quarters in any kind of decent order, whilst the sentence itself hints that this should be enough to legitimize the possible dispossession of natives from their dwellings in the city.

The idea that Others had a natural tendency of living in dense areas cut across the then hardening racial lines: Coloureds were considered as prone to dense living as Natives.

On a ‘Visit of Inspection’ to Wells Square, the Municipal Reform Association stated matter-of-factly that they found ‘as many as 17 [coloureds] living in one house.’21 For the English middle class the tendency was for four or five people to occupy a house; this statistic would have been beyond the need for hyperbole and would have been enough in itself to induce shudders. A few years later, at a conference between the government’s Central Housing Board and the city’s Housing and Estates Committee (hereafter Housing Committee) to consider a housing scheme for Coloureds, it was reported that ‘Councillor Zoutendyk stated that the object of the Scheme was to get rid of the congested areas. He pointed out that it was very difficult to get the people in District Six out of their “hovels,” even if they were offered nice houses. They would rather live in congested areas.’22 For that matter consider the following quote which links the increase in density of bodies in space to an increase in social degenerates. The particular locality under consideration is the area of District Six that was known as the ‘Dry Docks’ which, contrary to expectations of its name was at the foot of Devil’s Peak mountain, just below the recently developed De Waal Drive:

Seventeen years ago, when we first started mission work there, the cottages were inhabited by very decent coloured folk, each family occupying a room and occasionally two rooms. But now things have altered and the overcrowding is deplorable, two and in some cases three families living and sleeping in one room, 12 × 12 feet. And even then only one family rents a room. They sometimes take in a lodger or two. Many of the respectable people are still there and trying to live good, quiet lives, but there are dilapidated rooms abutting on filthy backyards which are not fit for human habitation, which shelter numbers of girls and men of the lowest type.23

District Six and its ‘hovels’ were being conflated with a particular kind of unfathomable person happy to live in dense, sub-human conditions. But it was not just particular areas of Old Cape Town that were problematic. The whole idea of urban living in general was considered degenerate, and could literally lead to a genetic degeneracy.24 Just in case they forgot themselves, the Central Housing Board’s report of 1935 quotes Raymond Unwin on just how different the English are in terms of domestic space. Unwin, who, as we shall see in the third part of this book, had a definitive influence on domestic space had this to say: ‘The English people retain their love of individuality for themselves and their family life which springs largely from their cottage homes … They dislike the “herd” life and the “herd” mind which tenement existence is liable to foster.’25 That a family would choose to live in a tenement or a flat was largely incomprehensible. Consider the cultural self-assuredness in the following quote from the 1935 report of the Central Housing Board, which was the main organ of central government financing municipal housing: ‘On the continent of Europe, flats are provided for many classes of workers, most of whom are owing to the nature of government control inarticulate as to their desires or wishes for home life.’26 In other words, were they able to protest, then their choice would naturally go against the flat and be in favour of the single-family detached unit. Yet the sentence carries with it the innuendo that continental Europeans – those other than English – could be and were marked as Other by their choice of dwelling type. ‘Neighbours have nothing in common, not even a cabbage patch, and the tenant of a flat cannot forget that neither he, nor his neighbour, is “king of the castle.”’27 It would seem that those who lived in flats then were all ‘dirty rascals.’ This Othering also played its part with regards the idea of degeneracy, the logic being that given a choice nobody would consider flats as a desirable dwelling type, therefore, its inhabitants must either be indigent, or more simply, prone to degeneracy.

There were, however, some voices that suggested that people who lived in overcrowded dwellings in Old Cape Town did so not because they chose to or were innately programmed to, but because they could afford nothing else. The sentiment of helping the ‘worthy poor’ was summed up by Princess Alice at her opening speech for Cape Town’s Housing Week in 1929:

You cannot expect decency, morality, or health under such conditions. And yet, if you or I were forced to pay a rent we could not afford, and were faced with hungry children, why, I am certain we should do exactly the same! There are lots of decent, respectable people struggling along in those frightful conditions, whose marvellous patience and resignation are beyond praise. But that is no reason why their poverty should be exploited as it so obviously is in many cases.28

Nevertheless, the majority of reports and representations depicted high density living as confirmation of the difference of those people already marked as such due to other indicators such as skin colour, language and dress. Caught up within this confirmation was the further Othering that suggested that this propensity to dense living was a ‘natural’ phenomenon for a variety of groups of people who, due to their racial inferiority, were also close to animals in their dwelling habits and character. The fact that many families were of an extended or, non-nuclear, type is another point that may have created the sense that they were Other. Whatever its cause, the ‘herding,’ perhaps hinting at the dangerous animal world of ‘Africa,’ struck the agents of Empire as a condition needing to be controlled and eradicated.

CONTAMINATION AND THE THREAT TO CIVILIZATION AND THE SELF

Slums and Other-spaces of Cape Town were viewed by most of the middle-class and those in power as a threat ‘to civilisation, to humanity, and to Christianity.’29 Throughout the period of study, and ranging from magazines30 to civic meetings,31 slums were represented as a direct threat to Western civilization, which needed protection from this cancerous attack. What exactly constituted this threat, what allowed Dr Jane Waterston to state ‘Nothing sickens me more than the manner in which these people live in this town,’32 and what potential effects this had on the reordering of Cape Town is the subject of the following section. It explores, in particular, the problem that the bodies of servants and Others coming into White homes presented to the agents of Empire.

Within many and various verbal representations, Other-spaces were often made threateningly present in the spaces of the Self. Unlike overcrowding, where the threat to Western civilization was to come indirectly through the ‘natural’ degeneracy of particular groups, here the threat was to come directly through the ‘contaminated’ body of servants or through the inanimate objects touched or serviced by Others in spaces represented as Other, and thereby into the home of the Self or directly onto the body of the Self through ‘contaminated’ clothing. Typically it was servants themselves, or rather, their bodies entering the home who were the main focus of this perceived threat. The following quotes can be taken as exemplary of the kind of sentiment often expressed:

In Cape Town, the people of the slums come into the houses of Sea Point, Rondebosch and Wynberg as servants, housemaids, and ‘boys:’ they become cooks and washerwomen. They handle the food Europeans eat, make and wash the clothes Europeans wear, tend and even nurse European babies. I wonder how many infectious and contagious diseases have been introduced into European homes by servants?33

It was not only newspapers that carried such sentiments. In an editorial in the Architect, Builder & Engineer on the need for housing and written after a visit to Parkwood on the Cape Flats, the author ominously noted that it was ‘out of these squalid kennels that we saw servants go forth to work in such homes as yours and ours.’34 Yet it was not only the movement of servants into the Home that was deemed a threat. As the Cape Times rightly recognized, the urban poor were the backbone of the colonizer’s economy and wealth and were always, therefore, connecting the Self to their ‘hovels’ through inanimate objects, especially clothing and food:

Somewhere or other in Cape Town – either in insect-infested huts in Ndabeni or in dirty pens in city hovels – are living men and women, black and coloured, who handle daily most of the things we eat and wear. The pollution which surrounds them at night touches us all somewhere by day. Here are the real foundations of our civilisation – embedded in the filthy ooze of a human cesspool. We spend many thousands a year on maintaining a costly public health service, and at any moment a dirty, plague-stricken native from one of the underground haunts of Cape Town – where infection, once lodged, is bound to spread like a consuming fire – can blow the whole edifice of our security to pieces with one hot breath.35

In many of the articles on ‘slums,’ the use of space, and how this related directly to the Self through the handling of things ‘we eat and wear,’ was identified as a major cause for concern. Not only was the holdall phrase ‘hovel’ used to summarize the Otherness of the space, but care was taken to describe in detail the surroundings in which these Others worked and lived as this quote on Wells Square (Figure 5.1) illustrates:

In one case we saw a coloured cobbler working at an open window of the smallest size, through which appeared a room of not more than one hundred square feet. In this were several beds. The flooring was decayed, the worker and his surroundings indescribably filthy. Whose boots was he mending?36