The Chatsworth of my heart had soul

Growing up in Chatsworth, we did a lot with nothing. Our lives were about simple pleasures.

A chunk of wood could be whittled into a goolie ganda. A wooden bread box quickly transformed into a cricket bat and stumps. The match that followed was worthy of a dedicated sports channel. Neither rain nor bad light ever interrupted play, just the odd car that needed to pass through the pitch. There was no Duckworth-Lewis. We batted until the last lad or lass.

Weekends were consumed by amateur football.  The Unit 3 football ground had an aura to put Old Trafford in the shade as the legends of Bluff Rangers, Zulu Royals and Argus Power did battle.  We never had need for a satellite TV subscription or a FIFA videogame.  The soccer was mostly free and where there was the odd ticket charge, we just jumped the fence.  The soccer was a major political statement with its non-racial, anti-apartheid flavor as SACOS affiliates.

A lot of our lives also revolved around food.  Five cents of dried fish flavoured two kilos of tomatoes and was a chutney feast for twenty.  We sometimes ate out.  That involved rocking up uninvited at a wedding and just sitting down to eat the biryani.  No-one who behaved respectfully was ever turned away.  Poor people the world over are just that way in their generosity of heart and spirit.

Let’s not romanticize poverty.  Perhaps we did not notice the things we lacked.  We had limited wants, limited needs but we had enough.  To use Neville Alexander’s words, enough is a feast. 

The real feast in Chatsworth was life.  There was an energy and a vibrancy in everything.  We were a battered and wounded community.  Colonialism, indenture, apartheid and forced removals had done their beastly best.  Yet we survived.  Nay, we thrived. 

Chatsworth was about self-sufficiency.   People grew bananas, herbs and chillies in their backyards.  They sold what they didn’t eat on the pavement around the shopping centre often to eke out a living or for a little something extra.  The iconic Bangladesh Market has its origins in that survival entrepreneurship.  My grandmother sold eggs and cigarettes from home.  Her margins were small but she saved enough to strut her dignity.

Self-sufficiency also extended to schooling.  In the post-indenture days, the Indian community built its own schools.  Later, Chatsworth was to have several state-aided schools co-funded by the government. 

My father was among the legions that worked in the school committees.  They set up extra-mural classes, hosted 16mm film shows to raise funds and just got busy with making sure we got the best quality education.  After my time at Cavendish and Glenover under the tutelage of the finest teachers of the day, no Eton or Harrow schoolboy could hold a candle to me.

My enduring memory of Chatsworth is the birthdays we celebrated.  Often a little sponge cake with a candle was enough. At first, 16^th or 21^st birthdays, families saved for something a little more elaborate.  We had little crates of fizzy drinks and tinned fruit with cream.  Nowadays we get birthday greetings on Facebook.  The Chatsworth of my heart had soul.

Caption:  The author on his first birthday at House 51 Road 320, Westcliff with his grandmother, Kanniamma Govindrajulu and his father Swaminathan.

Caption: The home I was born in - House 51 Road 320, Unit 3 Chatsworth. Stopped by after Kavady on 19 January 2014.

Peace

Where the mind is quiet and the heart is at peace into that serenity my Lord, let my hands go to work for those who have less than I

Chatsworth

Chatsworth is my ancestral village.  I know no other emotional home.  

My father’s family was moved there from the Magazine Barracks in Durban in 1965.  The Group Areas Act meant that they had to move to a township that matched their apartheid race classification.  

Our gene pool originates in the deep South of the Indian subcontinent.  The ethnic chauvinist in me claims my Tamil lineage, a Dravidian people with a written history dating over 5000 years.  In truth, my bloodline has been colourfully tinted with the joys and jeopardies of human existence.  Apartheid classified my family “Indian”.  We were even known as “Asiatic” at some point.  This was in spite of the fact that by then at least five generations of my family were born in Africa. 

Our return to the cradle of humankind was (no) thanks to the British policy of indenture.  My family was shipped to colonial Natal from the Madras Presidency from around 1860 to work the sugar plantations.  Indenture also extended to the tea and coffee plantations, the coal mines, the railways and domestic service.  That is a longer story for another time.  

The fact is that we were shipped again.  This time on the backs of trucks rather than the slave ship paddle steamers of a hundred years before.  My parents were married in 1966.  I was their first born arriving on 2 January 1968. I suspect I disappointed my mother.  It would have been quite something being a New Year baby.  I think I waited for the coast to be clear before popping out onto an unsuspecting world.  

1968 was the year of the student and worker revolts in Europe.  The year Paris burned. It was when Black Consciousness was on the rise.  It was the year before Woodstock. But the hippie in me still reigns.  All my fondest memories are of Chatsworth.  We had a decent house by the standards of the day.  Two bedrooms, a living room and kitchen. A double-storey semi-detached cottage with a garden.  We had running water, electricity and a flushing toilet. 

I don’t think my mother would have tolerated any less.  She had an aristocracy about her that pranced and puffed until she took her last breath.  She epitomized the royalists of the colonies.  The only difference was that we were the oppressed and the colonized.  She shaped her hair in the style of the English queen and measured her tones in the same way.  In spite of all my Bolshie pretensions, I am my mother’s son. 

My father was a well-read man.  He wore a suit and tie to work and carried a Parker pen.  He was a clerk at Sun Alliance of London which eventually became the Protea Assurance Company on Smith Street, Durban.  To my father I owe my love of the written word, the news, carnatic music and stamp collecting.  To him I also credit my political being, learning at his feet about Bram Fischer, Jomo Kenyatta, King Sobhuza, Mao and Biko. 

My sister arrived in July 1969, the month of the moon landing.  My brother was born in 1970 to share his birthday with the Mahatma.  

Having been shipped from one place to another, we had no real roots. Chatsworth was our entire universe. Until the Nationalist Party granted my family citizenship, we were stateless.  That has to be the greatest irony.  It was the party that crafted apartheid and wanted us gone that was eventually to recognise our birthright.  It was also the party that gave us a settled existence in Chatsworth.  

When freedom was won in 1994 and some Chatsworth people clamoured for land restitution and the like, my father has a rather sober attitude.  He believed that Chatsworth gave us a better life than the tenuous existence of the Barracks.  Again an irony.  Besides, we had never owned land to claim any back.