Cabo

One of the most cruel and nonsensical laws of the Apartheid system has to have been the Group Areas Act of 1950. It dislocated communities, robbed people of their homes, split up families and caused untold anger and hurt. There is a widely held perception that the Forced Removals only happened in District Six, because nowhere was the Act enforced with such brutality as it was here and, as a result, it has had the greatest attention showered on it. But in Cape Town the Forced Removals happened almost everywhere and in the southern suburbs nearly always along the Main Rd or the railway line. What many people are unaware of is that the Forced Removals also affected schools – many of which were either forced to relocate or to close. In Wynberg, where I work at the Education Museum based at the Centre for Conservation Education, two schools were evicted: one “coloured” and one “white”’.

Art nouveau (French “new art”) was a liberal international style that sought to raise the standards and status of visual art (where the emphasis was placed on natural plant and flower forms), craftsmanship and architecture. It became popular between 1890 and1914, and it inspired architects to design buildings with visible adornments, be it on balconies, balustrades, copings, steeples, domes or mouldings.

When the Union of South Africa was created in 1910 the country was in the charge of two Anglo-Boer War generals – General Louis Botha as prime minister and General Jan Christian Smuts as his deputy – and the common perception about these two men was that, while Smuts was the intellectual superior of the two, Botha was the man with the “warm heart”. In telling something of the story of my parents’ personal relationship with Smuts I hope, in this article, to show that he, too, was capable of great warmth.