Towards an Archive of Freedom

Siona O’Connell is on a mission to tell the stories of growing up in Cape Town and to that end has directed and produced a number of documentaries that have emerged out of her research as a faculty member at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art and the Centre for Curating the Archive. Siona and I grew up opposite each other on the edge of District Six and share a similar background. Her work is centred on issues of identity, memory and belonging in post-apartheid SA, which all resonate with me. In the past few years she has inspired and cajoled me into exploring similar issues.

I was fortunate to be at the premiere of her latest offerings which screened at the Baxter Theatre on Thursday evening. The first documentary, An Impossible Return, deals with the forced removals from the Cape Town suburb of Harfield during the apartheid-era.

Capetonians in general seem to be unaware of the extent of the forced removals, tending to focus on District Six, but removals occurred across most suburbs subsequently declared “for whites only”. These include Woodstock, Newlands, Kenilworth, Plumstead and Simonstown. Something that had never occurred to me before was that people had to chop up furniture to make it fit into the matchbox dwellings the government moved them into. 

What I remember most about my grandmother’s removal to Mitchell’s Plain in the 1970s, was her loss of independence. Suddenly, the fiercely-independent woman who had survived two husbands, was exiled to a suburb without any infrastructure and had to ask for help to fetch her pension from the Cape Town Post Office as she could no longer get there via public transport.

The second documentary, The Wynberg 7: An Intolerable Amnesia, is a deeply moving account of the lives of the group of teenagers who became known as the Wynberg 7, after being detained during a protest march on the same day as the Trojan horse massacre in Athlone. They were sentenced for public violence, a criminalisation of the public protest.

The documentary includes original footage from the march, court case and detention. It includes interviews with a lawyer, student activist and photographers plus the family of the 7. The trauma is fresh in the minds of the family, especially for the aged mother of one of the young men, who was subsequently diagnosed with schizophrenia. She is concerned about who will look after him when she dies.

I was shocked to hear that those who hadn’t testified at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission still have criminal records. Listening to their stories and the lack of acknowledgement 30 years later, I don’t blame them for wondering whether the sacrifices they made were worth it.

The admission to the screening of the documentaries was free and open to all. The theatre was packed with more than a few who were in the theatre for the first time in their lives. The emotion was palpable and the audience rose in a spontaneous standing ovation after Siona’s powerful speech.

                                

The title of the blog is borrowed from the title of the symposium hosted by the Centre for Curating the Archive I attended last week. 

For more, see
Centre for Curating the Archive 
Story of Wynberg 7