7

Distortions in the Mirror: Segregation, Control and Garden City Ideals at Langa Native Village

To put the matter in an extreme way, the native home is essentially a place of refuge from the weather, from wild beasts, from the observation of possible enemies, and for the fulfilment of those perfectly natural functions of cover and shelter that savour rather of the bird’s nest than of the highly organized and complicated villa which the European considers as essential for his requirements. No sewing rooms, boudoirs, studies, offices, billiard rooms and music salons, or other apartmental concomitants of a complex social life enter into the picture, and the problem being thus reduced to the simplest possible elements is one which should be capable of a simple and satisfactory solution … Simple, however, as the needs may be, there are certain requirements that must be satisfied in every reasonably human habitation, and those requirements are stated as follows:- The need for shelter, warmth, reasonable privacy, the storage of food, attention to hygiene, durability, comfort, and ease of ingress and egress. Most of these requirements are ignored in the ordinary Kaffir hut, but all of them are met singly in varieties which we have had opportunities for seeing and studying upon records. The ordinary hut contains little, if any, means of egress for the smoke of a fire from within, takes no thought for the necessity of food storage, gives a maximum amount of inconvenience in ingress and egress by reason of the smallness of its entrance doorway and the awkwardness of the placing of its roof-props from within, takes no account of sanitation owing to defects in light and air, has no arrangement for privacy, and few, if any, of the requirements incidental to the lowest conceivable standard of human comfort.1

Assessing how and where Natives should live in the city was first answered in 1884 when the colonial government of the Cape of Good Hope implemented the Native Locations Act.2 Locations suggest Native American ‘reservations’ – territories within the state where the cultural life of Natives supposedly continues regardless of the catastrophic upheaval of colonization. Locations were territories through which Empire could contain ‘Africa.’ More to the point, however, the legislation became a line snaking across the land, circling, quarantining and segregating out peripheral areas contaminated by colonialism. The aim of the Act was to rationalize the management and space of locations – particularly those on private land, which had tended to emerge somewhat organically over time. It was precisely because urbanizing black people were being housed in marginal zones surrounding urban areas – on private farms beyond municipal control – that it was enacted. These areas were not tribal territories, though they began to show threatening signs of Native space within White territories, or at its boundary.

In terms of the Act, a location was any area containing dwellings of three or more Native men – ‘Kafirs, Fingoes, Basutos, Hottentots, Bushmen and the like’ – who were not in the employment of the farmer on whose land they were residing. Implicit in the Act was the understanding that single unemployed black men who had moved from tribal protectorates into urbanizing areas were a potential threat that needed to be managed and controlled.

In fact, it went so far as to give the Governor and his agents the power not only to delimit the area to be used for the erection of dwellings on private and public land, but also to limit the number of dwellings allowed in the space, in other words, to plan the very space of the location. Once the licensed location was established, an inspector would be appointed whose duties included keeping a register of the number of dwellings as well as the names and occupations of the inhabitants. This inspector had to be given notice if an inhabitant of the location wanted to erect a new dwelling, presumably to maintain order within the space. The understanding of black urbanites as transient inhabitants of the White city was strong enough to allow a hut in a location that had not been occupied during that calendar year to be destroyed. Although the Act did not restrict the kind of dwellings that could be erected in the location, its concern for containment and the allowance for the planning of the space was one of the first uses of ‘White space’ in the control of Natives. By setting aside the territory, its distinctive Otherness could be managed – psychically, as well as literally.

It is important to realize that the Natives Location Act and its amendment of 1899 did not restrict black people’s ability to purchase land or prevent their access to accommodation within the municipal areas themselves. District Six in Cape Town was an area in which many jobseekers were accommodated as rent-payers. It took the Native Reserve Location Act of 1902 to fundamentally change this.3 This Act gave the Governor power to proclaim specific municipalities as exclusionary zones wherein Natives, with a few exceptions, could no longer reside. This was ostensibly to limit the spread of future outbreaks of bubonic plague which had struck Cape Town in 1901 – even though there had been no evidence that the incidence of the disease was higher in Native areas than in European suburbs.

The corollary of this exclusion of Natives from the space of the city was the need to establish the Reserve Locations in which those employed in the municipal areas were required to live. The Native Reserve Locations Act was the first instance of housing per se as a conceptual responsibility of the State, although this occurred largely through default of the State’s attempts to sanitize the city as a White space. Not only was the Governor allowed to make rules on the provision of dwellings, he could regulate ‘the erection and use of private dwellings, buildings and other structures in the location, and the ventilation, lighting, materials, and manner of construction of all such dwellings, buildings, and other structures.’ Whereas the Native Location Act had considered the containment of Native space in the city through means of boundaries sufficient in the ‘sanitizing’ of the city, the Native Reserve Locations Act went one step further. It anticipated the potential eradication of Native space in the city. Government architects could now define the built environment of the location on their own terms. Finally, the Native Reserve Locations Amendment Act of 1905 allowed Natives to erect their own dwellings on terms and conditions agreed to by the Governor.4 However this affirming possibility of self-built housing was not enacted in any substantial way.

THE VISIBLE PRESENCE OF NATIVES IN THE CITY AND THE MAKING OF NDABENI

Cape Town, unlike the two ‘frontier towns’ of Port Elizabeth and East London, had no immediate local Native population from which to draw unskilled labour and consequently had no history of using ‘locations’ to avoid housing unskilled labour whilst simultaneously maintaining racial segregation through spatial boundaries.

In the minutes of the Commission on a Native Location for Capetown5 in 1900 (hereafter CNL), concern was voiced over the physical presence of ‘the Native’ within the space of the city, which in the view of one of the interlocutors had already been ‘turned into a location.’6 To say as much would be to suggest that the city had become a Native space and was suffering a kind of invasion of Otherness. The idea of a location was approached with much ambivalence during the Commission and even though the idea of what constituted a location was changing, the very word7 was likely to conjure an image of uncontrolled areas of Native dwellings and insanitary conditions as had developed in Port Elizabeth8 and East London9 – rather than the highly controlled social space later associated with it.10

In Cape Town, the Native Locations Act was used to house indentured labourers in barracks at the docks much like the mine compounds in Kimberley and Johannesburg. But by the end of the nineteenth century there was a growing immigrant population of mobile Natives who found accommodation within the space of the city itself. It was a real problem for the agents of Empire and the White middle class in general. Contrary to the English reverence for laissez faire development, free markets and the sanctity of individual liberty, the CNL was established to deal with this ‘invasion’ and maintain the city as a White space. How to resolve the spatial contradiction between the need to house what the Cape Times called ‘a floating population of uncivilized natives’11 near their place of work (largely in the docks, brickfields and in the city itself) while ridding the city of the visible presence of this ‘alien Kafir population,’12 was one of the main thrusts of the CNL. It was actually the arrival of the bubonic plague in February 1901 and the enactment of quarantine laws of the Public Health Act of 1897 that ultimately brought about selected forced segregation in the City, albeit informed and guided by the recommendations of the CNL.13 Nevertheless, the raw verbatim reports of the witnesses and interlocutors at the commission explored below indicate the views of those in power at the time and offer insight into their understanding of race and the production of the city as a White space.

One of the main causes for concern was the extensive spatial distribution of Natives in many dwelling houses throughout the city. The Cape Times quoted statistics from the MOH of some 80 places at which 1,600 Natives were living within the city proper.14 Aside from the lone voice of the City Engineer, the general agreement of those giving evidence was that having Natives distributed throughout the city was an intolerable affair, not only due to the decrease in value of property next to lodging houses,15 but also in terms of limiting the distribution of what Dr E.B. Fuller, the MOH, called ‘Kafir foci’16 and the ‘nuisance’ associated with the dwellers themselves.17 Black people were living in lodging houses established by Missions and Churches such as St. Columba’s Home and St Philip’s Mission, or in the 200-roomed Metropole run by the Salvation Army, and in residences owned by black people in Hortsley Street.

Whatever the precise distribution, the majority found accommodation in the racially and ethnically heterogeneous District One and District Six.18

It was not only the distribution of their dwelling spaces throughout the city that was the governing concern but the unchecked visible presence of black people in public that rattled those in positions of power. In fact, one of the spurs for the CNL had been a ‘tribal fight’ almost a year before within the city itself and had caused much talk of how to get rid of the ‘barbarians,’19 although it should be noted that the establishment of a location was a longstanding consideration of the City Council before this particular event.20 Labourers from rural areas were the main focus of the commission and the attitude of those giving evidence about removing educated or ‘civilized Natives’ was somewhat ambivalent.21 Poorer black people, marked as ‘primitive’ through the combination of skin colour and their ‘tribal’ clothing, were an extreme Other. There was a strong desire to rid the city of ‘raw kafirs.’22 As Dr Jane Waterston observed: ‘Another tremendous mistake seems to me to consist in the natives being allowed to pass through the principal thoroughfares on their way to their work. The men who come down Grave Street every morning are nearly all raw Kafirs, and they make a great noise. Up-country the raw aboriginal Kafir is never under any condition put amongst civilized people or allowed near to houses.’23 There was also concern over Natives ‘walking about (with exception of a blanket) in a perfectly nude condition,’24 whilst the City Engineer admitted receiving complaints of ‘the passing to and fro in the streets of natives.’25

The Mayor of Cape Town, Thomas O’Reilly, wasn’t sold on a Native location for the city since ‘there would be a procession of natives through the streets to and from their work two or three times a day’ suggesting more sporadic, less dense movement was more acceptable. He preferred a location at Maitland so ‘you would be able to take the men direct from there to the Docks and back again,’ presumably by train.26 For the middle class, who were starting to display their identity in the commercial precincts of Adderley and St. George’s Streets, and the pier at the harbour, and the Company Gardens,27 such obvious signs of Otherness would have made their pretences to respectability and Englishness more transparent.

The Commission reached a draft agreement on the 17 October 1900, which set out some basic principles for the new location at the periphery of the city (Figure 7.1).28

Three classes of Natives were defined, namely, ‘the temporary or migratory, the permanent or settled and the educated or superior natives,’ but only two kinds of accommodation were suggested, namely, ‘a few small cottages for some stable natives especially those with families [and] a few larger rooms or barrack rooms for accommodation of migratory natives’. This draft agreement suggests that had the plague not hit Cape Town in 1901, bringing about the rapid removal of Natives to the area that eventually became known as Ndabeni, then the accommodation of Cape Town’s first location would have been more in keeping with European standards than the stripped-down dwellings that were hastily erected. The dwellings were to have been constructed of brick, with a minimum airspace of 400 cu ft per adult – the standard minimum in England. It was, however, not ‘feasible’ to provide gardens (Figure 7.2).

7.1 Map locating Maitland Garden Village, Ndabeni, Pinelands, Langa, and Bokmakirie

Here, then, was the first instance in Cape Town of Empire attempting to classify and differentiate colonial subjects into spatial conditions matching their position on the roster of ‘civilization.’ Socio-spatial types were starting to gain fixity and definition. However, the unbuilt accommodation that the City Engineer had designed for 480 men was suddenly increased to that for 4,000 men with the arrival of the plague.29 Lewis Mansergh, as Secretary of the Public Works Department, even allowed, in the emergency conditions, 12 families to erect wattle huts, contravening the draft agreement of the CNL that had explicitly intended to exclude Natives from building their own homes.30 Furthermore, the floors of some dwellings were constructed of mud.31

A few months after Ndabeni was hurriedly put together, efforts were made to make the environment more attractive and differentiated, with churches, a hospital, and a recreation hall planned. The ambivalence with which Ndabeni was approached comes through in the provision of the recreation hall, with Mansergh suggesting that the ‘design already framed might be slightly altered from its present severity of outline in order to make the Hall somewhat more of a feature in the Location.’32 The clerk of works suggested a year later that ‘a market place should be established with stalls erected something similar to those used on the market places in English Country Towns.’33 The Public Works Department was even intent on building some ‘model cottages’ in 1902.34 These are important observations; they suggest that even before Garden City ideas came to dominate Cape Town’s housing concerns, there was an impulse on the part of the administrators of the city to fashion an environment they were familiar with, one which may have come to pass were it not for the plague of 1901. They illustrate the tension Empire manifests for its administrators: unsettling recognition of the inadequacy of its housing projects in relation to the richness of the motherland ‘model’ and the mismatch of that model in relation to Other subjects. The anxiety is present in how Mansergh fussed over decoration in an attempt to overcome the severity of the architecture being manifested.

7.2 Ndabeni, ‘Better Class Houses’ 30 September 1902

7.3 Ndabeni Native Location ‘CT Black People 2 and 3,’ date unknown

Ultimately, though, Ndabeni resembled the architecture of the concentration and military camps of the South African War (Figures 7.3–7.4). Furthermore, the seven-inch numbers35 attached to the dwellings were a sign, not for postal services, but for the more efficient management and control of an urban workforce, and an index that routed Natives back to a magisterial district in the tribal areas from where they came. The Acting Superintendent of Natives at Ndabeni, W. Power Leary suggested:

That the huts be numbered in blocks of 25 huts each, less or more according to situation, thus – A1/M and so on; even numbers on the one side, and odd numbers on the other. Each man registered has his hut number in the register, and particulars relating to his home address. The ‘M’ under ‘A/1’ indicates a Municipal hut. The above particulars are also entered on the identification card given to each individual on registration.36

Consequently, Ndabeni did not enact planned or imagined social hierarchies of ‘civilized Natives’ in ‘cottages’ versus tradition-oriented migrant labourers in compounds. The constant removal of signs of Otherness – such as wattle-and-daub wind screens – as well as the relentless rigour of Ndabeni’s layout suggest it was, even at its initiation, considered a potentially problematic Native space that had to be ordered and managed because of its proximity to ‘civilization.’ The later establishment of temporary round huts or tents to the east of the settlement points to the ambivalence of the conception of the location; here Ndabeni is both a ‘location’ or Native space as well as a highly-ordered and regularized White space. The circle as the ‘archetypal’ signifier of ‘Africa’ ironically returns here, but proclaims the territory as a neutered Native space and its inhabitants temporary visitors to the city from another place.

7.4 Ndabeni, layout 1902 (left) and aerial photograph, 1926 (right).

GOING ROUND IN CIRCLES OR SQUARES: HOW TO HOUSE ‘THE NATIVE’

The 1914 report of the Tuberculosis Commission was one of the first major investigations into the way people lived in different parts of the country, signalling the beginnings of a comprehensive mapping of the lived domestic space of South Africa. The report tends to idealize the life of rural Natives and their relationship to their dwellings which is not to say that the Commission did not find aspects of Native dwellings problematic. Nevertheless, it has many such rosily patronizing descriptions: ‘The raw native in his kraal lives in the main an easy, healthy open-air life. Much time is passed idling in the sun. The hut is usually occupied only at night and when shelter from the weather is required.’37 Although they were concerned about the perceived lack of ventilation and the comparatively large amounts of dust from dirt floors and their possible effects on the health of lungs, the Commission found that there was generally a healthy symbiosis between Native, dwelling and environment. Ideally then, Native space could be located adjacent to the city: ‘If means could be devised by which native women could resort to the labour centres in proportionate numbers to the men, and when there live without deterioration, as native families and under native conditions, it would be an advantage, as well on health grounds as for other reasons.’38 These ‘other reasons’ would have included savings to the local municipalities spared having to invest in housing per se. Yet this cut-and-paste of different worlds suggests an even stronger desire for homeostasis, of retaining the static, unthreatening, and distant world of rural Natives – a key and failed ambition of apartheid’s future ‘homeland’ project. Colonial society felt least threatened by the Other in the figure of extreme Other. It was when the Native began to resemble the colonial master –Homi Bhabha’s ‘mimic man’39 – that the tenuous construct of the Self was under pressure in the uncomfortable recognition of the reflective proximity of the Other to Self. To have a White city and a native village side-by-side, their boundaries clearly demarcated, would have been the ideal ‘solution’ to one of the undesired ‘side-effects’ of colonialism.

Yet the reforming impulses of the English presented them with a paradox of their own making. There had been a longstanding desire on the part of missionaries to remove the circle as a structuring device from Native dwellings and buildings, as a way of continuing the ‘civilizing’ mission – the instrumentalist programme par excellence.40 The Natal government had even offered tax incentives to those Natives who lived in orthogonal dwellings filled with Western furniture.41

Both these moves were part of an attempt to inculcate Western values, especially privacy and individuality, through the compartmentalization of use-spaces in specifically orthogonal rooms. It is clear that those writing the Tuberculosis Commission report in 1914 were happy to promote the development of dwellings with multiple separate spaces as typified in the recent growth of orthogonal homes, largely as this would give ‘greater space and privacy to the individual occupants.’42

Yet they also presented these dwellings as problematic, incomplete places of either the Self or the Other. It was particularly in the use of space that the mismatch was exposed. The Report identified dirt as the main problem: ‘For the square hut is generally much dirtier, its corners do not get cleaned out, its windows are frequently closed up, the materials of which it is constructed are less pervious to natural ventilation, and European furniture more often than not means the collecting of all sorts of rubbish of not the slightest utility, which is never shifted and is the harbourer of dirt.’43 A condition in-between that of the ‘pure’ Native dwelling and the ‘desired’ detached Western dwelling, was basically intolerable. Not only was this in-betweeness considered dangerous, in its social and health dimensions, for the potential ‘damage’ to Natives in this colonial dystopia, but also because such hybridity pointed, in a psychological sense, to the potential breakdown of the Self. In other words, the hybrid hut made a mockery of the niceties and foibles of standards and practices dear to the agents of Empire, the aesthetics of cleanliness and utility. The Other needed to be maintained in a simulacra of the Self and that simulacra of the Self would later appear in the form of a supremely socializing housing phenomenon, the Garden City Movement.

The example of the Tuberculosis Commission is not to suggest that the structural unity of the Native and his dwelling was thoroughly and consistently idealized. The Comaroffs have shown, through an analysis of earlier colonial times in South Africa44 that the dominant idea in missionary representations was that Natives and the Native hut were part of the natural world and consequently lacked cultural sophistication to mark their being human. To understand the depth of this sentiment it is worth exploring two quotes. The first, from an Architect, Builder & Engineer article titled ‘Native Housing. Physical and Social Conditions’ (at the beginning of this chapter) partly concerns the Native hut in its rural setting. Here the representation of Native dwellings allows the reader to associate Natives with the natural or animal world, if not animals themselves. Not only is ‘the Native home’ seen to lack cultural sophistication, it lacks characteristics and qualities basic and necessary to any human dwelling. It should be noted that this article was published right at the time Cape Town’s new Native location of Langa was being imagined and could therefore be read as part of the process in the legitimizing of the building of simple dwellings for Natives based on their ‘naturally lesser’ needs. Clearly the complexities of African urban settlement were lost on a conventional architectural discourse used to appraise a home through its single family inhabitants and vice versa; other kinds of cultural practices get blurred in such a focused lens. The Native’s hut was a ‘bird’s nest’ and part of the natural world. A phrase like ‘every reasonably human habitation’ and the list of defining requirements suggests that both the hut and the Native are not part of the human world at all. These associational qualities also reinforced the notion that Natives were animal-like and of the ‘natural’ world. That being so, they had no legitimate right to the sophisticated cosmopolitan space of the city.

This article was also written when debate was raging on the soon to be passed Native (Urban Areas) Act – an Act that effectively limited black peoples’ access to South Africa’s cities through registration, work passes, and residential segregation.

Consider the second example of the rural dwelling used as an associational device defining the identity of Natives as Other: ‘The native likes everything in circles: they think in circles. After all, this is the type of hut that you find universally all over South Africa. It is as natural for a native to live in a round hut as a snake to live in a hole.’45