STORY 56
The field is gone, but the ground it stood on did not sit empty for long.
Before Dorpsmeent, before the car park and the pharmacy and the Pick ‘n Pay, that open stretch opposite the Strand municipality had one more act to perform. In November 1990, the town raised a new town hall there and on it went from there. The precinct that now fills that ground, the municipal offices, the library, the shopping centre, all of it grew up, over a period of time, on the same flat piece of civic land that had spent decades hosting a circus and a merry-go-round. The sawdust gave way to foundations. The big top gave way to a building with a roof that stayed up all year.
On the evening of 15 November 1990, the town filed in to watch its new hall open. Nine months earlier, on the Grand Parade in Cape Town, a hundred thousand people had watched Nelson Mandela walk free after twenty-seven years. The ANC had been unbanned. Negotiations that would remake the country were already beginning.
Councillor D Vosloo, the mayor, welcomed the town in Afrikaans first, English trailing a faithful half-step behind. Then came two and a half hours of a town performing its own idea of culture back to itself. The Strandse Kamerkoor sang under Isa Hanekom. The Elizabeth Millington Ballet School danced to Delibes. The Pam Brinkkoor moved through a waltz, a tango, a quickstep. Bert Schoeman sang Schumann and Lehár while H Bressler worked the piano. Three different dance schools sent their pupils through cha-chas and czardases and Sevillianas, an entire evening built from borrowed European forms, performed with total sincerity by children who had never seen the countries any of it came from.
And then, tucked into the second half, something that sits less comfortably inside that picture. A group called The Young Styles, conducted by N Fredericks and A C Karaan, sang “Suid-Afrika, ons land,” and after it, two moppies, “Wat soek Abassie in die Kersiedorp” and “Die Moffie.” The moppie is not a general Afrikaans song form. It belongs to a specific inheritance, carried for generations by Cape Malay and Cape Coloured choirs, most visible each January in the klopse of District Six and the Bo-Kaap.
The evening closed the way these evenings always did. The Strandse Kamerkoor returned for “I Can Tell the World,” three Afrikaans volkswysies, a song called “Beestepote.” Then, printed on the programme with a formality that still makes me smile, “Verversings.” Refreshments. Tea and something sweet and the hall’s first public evening was over.
Between You and Me:
I have to be honest with you here. 1990 flew past me. I could not tell you, from memory, the day this building went up. I was living through the year the whole country changed and somewhere in the middle of that a new hall appeared on the field where I had once watched a merry-go-round turn and I simply did not clock it happening. That is not a comfortable thing to admit in a book about paying attention to this place. But I think it belongs here anyway. Some years are so loud on the national stage that the local ones go past you almost unnoticed and it is only afterwards, holding a programme someone kept in a drawer for thirty-six years, that you realise something was built.
Historian – Harmen Bockelenberg
PS: A word of thanks to my dear friend Cathy Uys for supplying me with the programme.
Next week: the road that stopped — why the N2 freeway ends at a set of traffic lights in Somerset West and the community that made it happen.
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