Feature image: Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum
The name is beautiful. Lwandle. In Xhosa it means the sea. You can hear the ocean in it.
The place it named was not beautiful. Not at first. Not by design.
Lwandle was established by the apartheid government in 1958 as a site for dormitories to house black male migrant workers. Rows and rows of identical hostel blocks, subdivided into units, each consisting of several small rooms. The workers who lived in those rooms had come mostly from the Eastern Cape, from rural communities hundreds of kilometres away, to work in the Helderberg’s fruit farms and canning factories. The fruit and canning industry that packed the apples and pears and peaches from the Helderberg’s farms for the world’s supermarkets ran on their labour.
The Gants Canning Company, situated between Strand and Somerset West at a junction simply known as Halfway, served as an income for many households, mothers and fathers working at the factory, children left in the care of grandparents in distant villages. For generations of Helderberg residents, the Halfway House was a familiar landmark standing between the two towns. Around it stretched open fields and farmland belonging to the old Gants Farm, a name that survives today in Gants Centre, Gants Plaza and Gant Park. As the Helderberg expanded during the 1960s and 1970s, the farmland gradually gave way to factories, workshops and businesses, transforming what had once been open countryside into one of the region’s most important commercial and industrial districts.
But the families of the workers at Gants and elsewhere were not allowed to join them in Lwandle. The hostel blocks had separate communal kitchens, ablution blocks and washhouses. The only recreational facility was the beer hall.
Think about what that meant in practice. A man leaves his wife and children in a village in the Transkei. He travels to the Helderberg. He works. He sends money home. He lives in a shared room with five other men. He cannot bring his family. He cannot build a home. He is a unit of labour, temporarily present, expected eventually to return to a homeland he is being deliberately kept connected to so the government does not have to acknowledge him as a permanent resident of the town he is keeping running.
This went on for decades.
There are still many people living like this today, only in their own dwellings now, working in the cities to provide for families living in the rural areas, going home once a year at Christmas. The structure has changed. The distance has not.
Construction of the hostels was completed by 1960, initially featuring overcrowded shared rooms with stacked bunks and strict security raids against unauthorised occupants. The security raids were to catch the wives, girlfriends and children who came anyway, because people will be people and no law has ever successfully stopped a man from wanting to see his family.
The AECI explosives factory between Somerset West and The Strand, at one point in the 1960s the second biggest dynamite factory in the world, employed many of Lwandle’s residents alongside the fruit and canning workers.
But here is what the architects of Lwandle did not anticipate. They built a place to store labour. What grew instead was a community. People are stubborn that way. Lwandle was once inhabited by hunter-gatherer groups who secured their food from the nearby seashore, the same ground that the San had walked, the same coastline. Different people, different circumstances, the same instinct to make a home from what they had.
With the onset of democracy after 1994, the hostels of Lwandle were converted into family accommodation. Residents felt that at least one original hostel should be kept exactly as it was, not demolished, not prettified, but preserved as a record of what had been. On Workers’ Day, 1 May 2000, the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum was officially opened by the poet and former Lwandle resident Sandile Dikeni.
It is one of the few township-based museums in South Africa. It sits on the N2 just outside Somerset West. You can walk through an original hostel room and stand in the communal kitchen. The space is small. The silence is large.
The Helderberg built Lwandle to serve its needs. Lwandle built itself into something the Helderberg now acknowledges with a museum and a measure of hard-won respect.
The sea, in the end, found its own level.
Between You and Me:
The Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum sits on the N2 just outside Somerset West and most people who drive past it every day have never been inside. I understand why, it is not an easy place to visit. Standing in the original hostel room, looking at the bunks, understanding how many men shared that space and what they gave up to be there, is not comfortable. But discomfort is not a reason to stay away. It is, in fact, the reason to go. The museum exists because the residents decided that their experience deserved a record. Going in is the least we can do to honour that decision.
Historian – Harmen Bockelenberg
Next week: the good years — the particular comfortable prosperity that settled over the Helderberg in the 1950s and 60s and the dynamite factory that was quietly paying for all of it.
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