MY DEADLINE AND THE GREEN POINT BURIAL GROUNDS

Excavation of human remains in Green Point, Cape Town ahead of building development raised controversy. Grave Encounters provides insight into the history, controversy and a complex backstory. Last year the book won the SA Independent Publishers Award for the best historical book. One of the judges went so far as to say, “Who knew that a book about graves could be so uplifting?” But that wasn’t the case to begin with. First, I had to negotiate my relationship with the dead who had been buried in Green Point. (This article was first published in Die Burger, 18 January, 2020. Afrikaans translation by Eben Human).

From the Malay Quarter the walk along Somerset Road, up Chiappini Street and through the Bo-Kaap to Tanu Baru is no easy stroll but it has its compensations. As the road climbs higher the views of Table Mountain are magnificent and the impression of the city keeps changing as the narrow streets zigzag up the Eastern slope of Signal Hill. Arriving at my destination on this clear day I looked out across Green Point and beyond the Waterfront to where the sea sparkled in the bay.

Five months prior to my walk to Tanu Baru I’d been commissioned to design and produce a book. The title of the book was Grave Encounters. The content was written and the title was decided but everything else was in flux. I’d spent months researching the topic, and consequently I knew too much. The scene that spread out below me carried the burden of the material I’d been investigating. There were files, and files within files, containing an unimaginable wealth of information about Cape Town’s early history. What should be left out? What could not be left out? The photographs I took earlier that day on my walk to Tanu Baru were useful and informative but they were haunted. How could a book adequately represent the lives of the people, now dead, who had been buried in Green Point? The question required an answer. I had a deadline!

I hung onto the only anchor I had. Someone I knew, Hannes, the partner of a friend had taken his own life. His decision was a desperate release after years of depression. That much we could understand but it didn’t stop the endless questions and the conversations that arose after the suicide. Many months went by without any closure but then something changed. On a road trip to the Northern Cape I decided that I would perform a ritual for Hannes. I would sprinkle buchu near Williston, his hometown, and this I did. Driving back from Kenhardt, near Williston, I pulled over and stopped. Walking into the veld towards a koppie I carried with me a bottle of buchu oil in my hand. The dolerite boulders were oven-hot and when I dripped the oil onto the rocks it vaporized immediately. The smell of buchu meandered into the veld on currents of unseen air. This ritual performed at the koppie put the questions to rest. In an inexplicable way it provided release for us and Hannes and it silenced the troubled conversation.

With Grave Encounters I was hoping for a similar solution, some clue on how to act. I was waiting; had been waiting months for an answer that would not come. Looking down from Signal Hill I could see the Truth Centre, on Somerset Road where the remains of between 2000 and 3000 people were laid in the ossuary there. Perhaps it was naive to be searching for an answer to this complex history that far exceeded me?

There was controversy around the exhumations. This much I knew, and I was aware of the tribunal set up to arbitrate contesting voices. The press devoted many pages to the issues and dissension. What is our debt to the dead? I had no answer, strictly speaking, except a conviction that this should be about remembering and bearing witness, and asking what sort of acts best accomplish these tasks?

Among the many photographs that I’d looked at there was one that particularly attracted my attention. When the cardboard caskets with human remains were moved to the ossuary some were draped with the South African flag but there were others with no flags. Instead an olive branch was placed on the casket lid. With closer inspection it turned out that this was not Olea europaea but the indigenous wild olive Olea europeae subspecies africana. This detail is important. The wild olive, like buchu, has ritual and medicinal significance that is recognised across cultures. In some way this had to be included, I thought, but how?

Author Antonia Malan made a perceptive observation, saying that the Somerset Road precinct used to be known as District One. “It has as powerful and emotive a history of community life and dispossession as District Six. […]The district has been gentrified: traces of gallows, cemeteries, prisons, hospital for paupers, tenements, migrant labour and the bustling commercial and red-light district of the port are gone.” I knew this to be true, having done my own research, but how to convey these features presented a problem. The present and the past, the old and the new in some way had to be intercalated in the pages of the book. A few of the old facades still stand. For example E.K. Green & Co. and the Dias Tavern which provide portals linking present and past.

If the architectural elements were included in the book it might then, in Malan’s words; “join the call to reclaim and mark our city’s layered history.” Not insignificant to the discourse, particularly in Green Point, is the veracious urban development that sprawls over what stood there before. Comparing 19th century photographs against the pictures that I’d just taken made the stark contrast palpable. Street names, such as Coburn, Chiappini, Prestwich and others, survive on old and current maps. These names are a link that connects the layers of history, human displacement and transience over a period of two centuries, at least.  

The book had to include several facets: historical, socio-political, anthropological, graphic. There were challenges but also opportunities. One being that written description requires words, often many, but the same concept and ideas can be put across graphically, quiet succinctly. How could this be achieved? I knew, having read the text that “Several old church cemeteries along Somerset Road, Green Point, were deconsecrated and exhumed at the end of the 19th century, but unmarked graves and burial grounds were not. Human remains are still being found beneath buildings and pavements”. I made a point of locating the early exhumations, with some help, now at the Maitland Cemetery. What remains and gives testimony to the relocation are the gravestones, leaning upright against the wall of the cemetery but by far the majority have been used as pavers, laid flat, between more recent graves. I felt that the book should recognize this displacement, and if possible, reunite the dead albeit in the pages of the book, even if the bodies, once buried in the Somerset Road precinct, are today separated.

I felt that out of respect the book could perform a small act of restitution by visually re-uniting the two – people and their material culture.

Another aspect of the excavation history that the book could set right was officialdom’s decision to remove the grave goods and place them in a separate repository to that of the human remains. Meticulous record keeping ensures that the two can be connected in an academic, abstract way. This is fine in so far as it goes, but I felt that out of respect the book could perform a small act of restitution by visually re-uniting the two – people and their material culture. There was one set of items, that in particular for me, suggested this possibility. A necklace, created by colouring and stringing snoek vertebra was buried in a grave alongside the body together with a knife, now rusted, plus two shells. Who was this person? Likewise, there were buttons, coins, tinderboxes, clay pipes, beads, grind stones, thimbles, needles, which all begged the question; who were these people? If the book depicted the grave goods it would evoke much more than burial and human remains; it could be a book about the ‘living’ dead, the City of Cape Town’s ancestors. Why were people buried with slave tags and manacles on their legs? The woman with the copper bangle on her arm, who was she?

Another remarkable thing contained in the photographic material but not obvious were the conditions in which archaeologists had to operate. Was it possible to convey the scope of this; working with construction trucks thundering by open graves? As yet, I had no form on which I could hang any of this, only images. For example those illustrating the meticulous recording required. And a photograph that captures what appears to be a moment of reverence. In the process of excavation, an archaeologist rests on his knees beside two skeletons. The angle of the shadows indicates that the picture was taken in the late afternoon, lending an element of grace to the scene. Some images like this one captured a lot in one shot. Others like those showing the transfer of human remains, in their caskets, from the holding container into the waiting truck most certainly capture an act of respect but it would require a dozen photographs, at least, to fully convey this gesture of “bearing witness.” Was it possible to accommodate such visual extravagance in a publication restricted to 128 pages?

I lay on the grass among the gravestones, listening to the Sunday sounds drifting up to the cemetery from the city. The sounds were distant and not intrusive in any way like the questions going through my head. I was waiting for the sun. If the sunlight fell at the correct angle it would allow me to take the picture I wanted; crescent moon on a tombstone with red geraniums, and in the background a mass of tall buildings in the city centre. Later the light would create shadows and reveal the Arabic script on a slate tombstone, and I could capture that picture as well. The wait would be worth it. I estimated three to four hours. A fiscal shrike kept me company, swooping into the grass to catch insects and then returned to perch on a star, located above the kramat.

Strictly speaking there is no answer for what happened next. Perhaps it was an auspicious conjunction of sun, moon and stars? Everything came together. After months of waiting the book suddenly fell into place. Could this be explained by suggesting that it was the culmination of a typical creative process? I believe it was more than that. I remain convinced that the experience was about me negotiating my relationship with the dead, and seeking permission. I am confident that the book, in its final form, embodies elements of this relatedness, although how one relates with the dead will always be subjective and personal. Finer details of the book still had to be worked out but the overall form took shape at Tanu Baru. In many ways the event in the cemetery was similar to what happened at the koppie near Williston. Both experiences I remember and associate with the smell of buchu drifting in the air.