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.