She came in through the bedroom window
By far the best part of my trip so far has been living with a family in the township of Cato Manor. It’s on the outskirts of Durban and has a long and quirky history in the city. In the early days of apartheid, owing to a variety of factors, it was one of a very few truly mixed race communities in South Africa (along with the much more famous District 6 in Cape Town and Sophiatown in Johannesburg). When the apartheid government decided to crack down on racial integration in the late ’50s and early ’60s, they razed the entire neighborhood, scattering its former residents among newly-created segregated communities. The four major racial groups in South Africa—Africans, Indians, whites, and coloreds (a term that here refers to a mixed-race community of European, African, and Asian descent)—were separated, their houses in Cato destroyed. For the rest of the apartheid period, the area was technically white, but it was never again settled.
In the late 1980s, the government began to revive the township as a residential area for Indians. They built blocks and blocks of new houses along the uninhabited hills. But before Indian families could populate the neighborhood, something happened. African families, packed into overcrowded, shoddy housing elsewhere in the city, began to complain—they had been waiting years for government housing; the Indians in Cato had cut in line. With the support of the ANC, hundreds took action. They broke into the unfinished houses in Cato Manor and began to live there.
Among those who did this was my host mother. She showed me the window in her grandchildren’s bedroom that she shattered and entered through twelve years ago. She has been there ever since. Eventually the ANC government gave her the title for the house, so now it’s officially hers.
This country is bursting at the seams with history and historical monuments, but as usual and as always, this is the kind that interests me the most, stories about individual communities and people and the things they do to get by.
