Book cover: https://www.nb.co.za/en/view-book/?id=9780795709807; Bronwyn Davids: https://jgf.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Bronwyn-Davids-skrywer-van-Lansdowne-Dearest.jpg
Lansdowne dearest: My family’s story of forced removals
Bronwyn Davids
Kwela Books: Cape Town, 2020
ISBN 978-0-7957-0980-7
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The air continues to be thick with South African autobiographies, biographies and personal memoirs. This is to be welcomed, especially when the individual life experiences and histories being crafted include those which recover the emotional texture and social fabric of the lives of ordinary or common people, as well as the success stories of the famous, the fat and the vain.
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The air continues to be thick with South African autobiographies, biographies and personal memoirs. This is to be welcomed, especially when the individual life experiences and histories being crafted include those which recover the emotional texture and social fabric of the lives of ordinary or common people, as well as the success stories of the famous, the fat and the vain.
As such, these essentially family stories amount to what might be termed humane portraits, inspired by Abraham Lincoln’s famous 1863 Gettysburg Address – of the people, by the people and for the people. Written by non-elitist authors who were deeply immersed in the tightly knit communities whose worlds they evoke, they promise vivid, compassionate and readable records of real-life experience.
Inevitably, childhood and early youth predominate. The recall of those early years are invariably both the most captivating and the most convincing of any autobiographical writing, whether imaginatively vivid or dryly factual in tone. Why? Firstly, an author needn’t be too concerned about being caught out over too many little errors or fabrications. Secondly, as a general rule, the richness of memory is preserved in the bright light of first experience. And thirdly, hanging over everything is the sense of a time, sometimes almost magical, that will not come again. After all, don’t readers love to be reminded of how different things once were?
Some South African childhoods deliver more, as in the present example of Bronwyn Davids’s Lansdowne dearest: My family’s story of forced removals. Its back cover promises an “authentically South African family story” over which hovers the teeth of apartheid’s Group Areas forced removals and its infliction of a “gut-wrenching loss” that was “physical, mental and spiritual”. The portrayal of growing up encapsulates two adjacent and interdependent social levels, one evoking classic childhood comforts such as “very lekker bredies”, the other a dimming of the light in the early 1970s as “bulldozers demolished and builders constructed … neat boxy houses were built for white people”.
In an illuminating LitNet interview with Naomi Meyer in April 2022, Bronwyn Davids disclosed that she was slightly unsure of her book’s “My family” subtitle, because what she depicts in Lansdowne dearest “was every family’s story at the time”. Elsewhere, also fleetingly, the author hints at ways in which a manoeuvred memory – which need not mean skewed or false – can serve as an intimate form of “social commentary”.
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In a way, then, Lansdowne dearest is autobiography which is brushed with the fibres of everyday social history.
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In a way, then, Lansdowne dearest is autobiography which is brushed with the fibres of everyday social history. Readers will encounter not only a snapshot of what would now be termed old-style social history, as defined by the British historian, GM Trevelyan – the history of “the people” with the politics left out. They will also encounter a snapshot of contemporary social history – the history of “the people” with the politics emphatically left in.
Thus, in a sparkling section on starting high school in the earlier 1970s, Bronwyn Davids portrays the shock of emerging from the Catholicism that had blanketed her primary school years into a hothouse of dissent and critical thinking, where she “soon discovered that attending Livingstone High was a lot like taking a flying leap from St Peter’s in the Vatican to the Kremlin in Moscow when Leon Trotsky was still in the politburo”.
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Having matriculated from that selfsame school at the end of the preceding decade, I can confirm that the author’s experience was not too wide of the mark – or, perhaps, to be more exact – not too wide of the Marx.
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Having matriculated from that selfsame school at the end of the preceding decade, I can confirm that the author’s experience was not too wide of the mark – or, perhaps, to be more exact – not too wide of the Marx. As Lansdowne dearest reveals, Livingstone High was a singing nest of “critical thinking”, of never taking “the news at face value” and of an emphatically internationalist literary culture. The school’s “nice library” included such classics as The diary of Anne Frank, Harper Lee’s To kill a mockingbird and JD Salinger’s The catcher in the rye.
Through the high tide of apartheid, the author’s school also preached a humanist philosophy of pure non-racialism, a diet of principled idealism on which its pupils were fed – the only recognised “race” was the human race, or otherwise an activity involving horses or athletes. Then, as now, in a country stuck with having traded in one kind of crude nationalism for another, such high- minded emancipatory utopianism was always fated to be up against the instinctive tribal reflexes of everyday human “nature”.
On that issue, the author is crystal-clear about where she stood, recording that “at high school, we switched from being the common garden variety term ‘coloured’ to using the infinitely more acceptable and hugely pretentious term ‘so-called coloureds’. And when the latter term was uttered, it had to be accompanied by air quotes. I didn’t get what was wrong with just being coloured. A coloured is a coloured is a coloured.”
Bronwyn Davids devotes a keenly observed and reflective latter chunk of her story to capturing a sense of what she characterises as the distinctive “voice of non-white politics in Cape Town”, one that “was always multi-dimensional, full of hard-to-follow nuance and meaning”, and which stubbornly eluded ruling Nationalist attempts at “cloning an entity” that would fulfil a neat chequerboard political fantasy. A stark and deeply moving strand of her story evokes the gnawing fear, misery and loss experienced by vulnerable households of the mixed neighbourhoods which dotted Cape Town’s southern suburbs as pushy officials of “The Group” had come knocking to enforce the Group Areas Act.
Even here, as elsewhere in Lansdowne dearest, the author is good at capturing the mundane detail through which the atmosphere, the essence and even the taste of local dissident politics can be grasped. Sceptical of the left-wing socialist politics of Cape Town’s Unity Movement as the preserve of “teachers and the intelligentsia”, she conjures up their heated discussions over “tea in fine English porcelain cups and Tennis biscuits or Eet-Sum-Mors, homemade shortbread or buttered ginger loaf served on paper doily-covered plates”.
This Cape Town story has some striking thematic similarities with the Johannesburg chronicle of another recent family autobiography, Razina Theba’s 2021 A home on Vorster Street: A memoir. Although their respective urban environments are very different, these autobiographies are similarly revealing in what younger pasts they have excavated.
There are numerous vignettes touching on such universal chords as the links that bind growing children to adults, the dynamics of family and identity, the bonds of community culture, and the stories which people – in real life as well as on a page – have absorbed and created about their own lives. Characters’ voices and reminiscences shine through the book’s subplots of daily existence, involving tricky personal hurdles, the dilemmas of moral choice, and varying sorts of shame, evasion, escape and – especially – the heaviness of silence. Right to the end, where she returns to her Lansdowne birthplace in 2018 to find it blighted, leaving her “coughing from the ash of memory”, the author does an able job of charting the flow of her interesting personal life while continuously weaving in the bigger picture of politics and society.
In that sense, to return to an earlier point in this review, one can’t help thinking of Lansdowne dearest as an autobiographical excursion across the ground of a personal brand of social history. As a new-style version, it is an intimate and engaging account of “the people’s” past with the politics prominently in view. Yet, ultimately, the fascination and vivid immediacy of Bronwyn Davids’s life story lies not in her witnessing the riot police beating and chasing protesters during South Africa’s state of emergency. Repeatedly retold, that landscape is by now surely all-too-familiar.
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The more novel attraction of Lansdowne dearest lies in its affecting embodiment of the nuts and bolts of old-style family social history. Amplifying the common realities of ordinary life should, after all, be a prime purpose of any biographical literature.
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The more novel attraction of Lansdowne dearest lies in its affecting embodiment of the nuts and bolts of old-style family social history. Amplifying the common realities of ordinary life should, after all, be a prime purpose of any biographical literature. What makes Bronwyn Davids’s story so interesting and engaging a read is the vigour and vividness with which she recreates the ups and downs of life within the circle of her nearest and dearest in and around her Lansdowne family home.
Here we have gardening, painting, food, language-switching with a free use of Afrikaans for “colour, emphasis and exclamation”, reading, primary schooling, churchgoing, health, births and deaths, music, games, road trips, picnics, Saint Patrick’s Day, shopping and an interestingly eclectic cast of people like Ivan, who “had a Holy Bible, a Quran, a Bhagavad Gita and a Dictionary of the Occult. To cover all bases.” As some would say today, what’s not to like?
Also read:
Lansdowne dearest: My family’s story of forced removals – an interview with Bronwyn Davids
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