Neil Fraser
Citichat 23 August 2002
This edition was supposed to be part 3 of my mid-year update of Inner City Regeneration Projects but that can wait a week! I must tell you instead of something that can't wait, something that you really mustn't miss.
Thursday morning witnessed the opening of a variety of exhibitions at Constitution Hill in a meaningful and moving gathering that took place in the courtyard of the historic Women's Gaol.
Constitution Hill comprises a large site with high density Hillbrow residential on its east, the Metropolitan Centre and commercial Braamfontein on its west and the CBD to its south. The inner city site incorporates the historic Women's Gaol and The Fort and our new Constitutional Court currently under construction.
About the gathering itself. Two focal groups. At one end of the scale, young people, high-school history students and their teachers from a number of city schools. At the other end of the scale, a group of mature women bound together through shared hardships and indomitable spirit.
The school children have spent the last seven years of their lives in the freedom of our developing democracy, the women had spent various periods incarcerated in the buildings that surrounded the courtyard in which we were assembled.
Their 'crime' generally was that they were either black and had not been carrying the required identity documents or, whatever colour, that they had taken part in, instigated or led other women in demonstrations against the oppression of the apartheid regime.
Apart from those who were arrested and jailed for theft, fraud, prostitution and illegal beer brewing, they actually represented the many thousands of women who were picked up off the streets "for not producing passes, for breaking the Immorality Act or simply because it was feared that they might do something subversive. They were dragged into trucks and packed into the gaol's tiny cells, unable to contact their families."
A third group. The rest of us, were inconsequential by comparison but mostly imbued with the passion that both our history and our future has the ability to fire up.
Constitutional Court Judge, Justice Albie Sachs, expressed the dichotomy that the occasion represented as he challenged the third group. What right did we have to be there? he asked. What right to sip tea and coffee, sit in comfortable chairs and walk over the paving that had witnessed the tears, the anguish and the indignities of countless women torn away from their families often for no more a crime than the colour of their skin?
In the light of the terrible past that this place represented, what right did we have to be celebrating with the other two groups? Yet, he countered, what joy and exultation this cruel and callous place now represented as we looked towards the future.
To know that through the struggle of so many who had been associated with this place, the future of the youth who were present and all children throughout the county was assured. That gave us the right to come together today, acutely aware of the failures of the past and looking to the promises of the future. Past, present, future. Such mixed emotions!
This Women's Gaol, built in 1909 has a magnificent central space, oval-shaped and double-storeyed. One of the inmates recorded that when she was arrested and brought there it was so graceful a hall that she expected to see beautifully gowned ladies being whirled about in waltzes - instead she found naked bodies being strip searched before being committed to the adjoining cells.
Now it is hung with large format screens of see-through mesh on which are printed the images of some of those who were confined in this place, common criminals side by side with activists.
Daisy de Melker, sentenced to death in 1932 for the murder of her son and two husbands.
Nomathemba Funani arrested with her baby daughter on her back because she had taken part in anti-pass protests and Jeanie Noel, a Durban librarian and political activist arrested in 1976 among a group of women that included Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.
The exhibition shares these three women's stories, through photographs, documents, and recordings. Visitors to the memory room are invited to listen to recordings of ex-prisoner's memories and to record their own experiences.
The Woman's Gaol is today the Women's Centre, home to the Commission on Gender Equality - its function is to promote gender equality and to advise Parliament or any other legislature about laws or proposed legislation which affect gender equality and the status of women.
For the next few weeks it will host World Summit delegates but is open to all to view the 'Three Women Exhibition', The Memory Room, various other activities including a film festival and then to move 'next door' to experience 'The History of our Future: the Rampart Walk'.
So, from here out into Kotze Street which is being totally reconfigured and resurfaced and into the obliquely angled entrance to The Fort. This entrance is also hung with large see-through mesh screens carrying the images of previous inmates: from common murderers and Boer generals to Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.
The press pack provides an excellent overview: "At the centre of Constitution Hill is The Fort, surrounded by its ramparts. These were originally built between 1896 and 1899 by the Boer president, Paul Kruger, as an act of defiance against the might of Imperial Britain, and a way to keep watch over the uitlanders (foreigners) in the mining village of Johannesburg below, who were plotting an overthrow of the Boers.
It was linked by telephone to Pretoria's two forts, Klapperkop and Schanskop. In 1900, during the Anglo-Boer War, the British took Johannesburg, and imprisoned Boer soldiers in the Fort. A group of Cape Afrikaners who had fought on the side of the Boers was executed at the Fort.
These killings marked the long history of The Fort as a place of punishment, confinement and abuse. Once the war was over, in 1902, The Fort reverted to being a prison again, and was Johannesburg's main place of incarceration for eight decades."
The entrance opens into a long courtyard where those arrested, males this time, were stripped, hosed and body-searched and then sub-divided into cells according to race. Whites within The Fort, others in the Section 4 & 5 "Natives" gaol.
Just off the entrance is the 'delousing room' which now contains a model of Constitution Hill and other information relating to the city. From here a quick walk leads you to the northern rampart which separates The Fort from the Constitutional Court which is under construction.
This "Rampart Walk" again provides a marvellous exhibition of images on see-through mesh screens allowing one to both look at them and through them - lenses to view the site.
The rampart provides the link or the bridge between the past - represented by the old prison buildings - and the future - as represented by the Constitutional Court. From the notes provided - "But the past remains misunderstood and the future under construction. Using South Africa's Constitution and Bill of Rights, this exhibition looks at where we are today, standing on the ramparts of a society in transition, looking back at the difficulties of the past and the possibilities of the future..."
Probably one of the most unusual aspects of developing the strategy that will ultimately transform the site into the city's top heritage tourism facility is that we are not being handed a 'fait accompli' to like or dislike as is usually the case. The public are in fact being asked to share their responses to what they see and experience in order to guide the development of the strategy.
The team that produced the current exhibitions, Clear & Effect Media, are the team entrusted with the development of the overall strategy over the next year. They are a highly talented and respected group including Mark Gevisser, Terry Kurgan, Nina Cohen and Lauren Segal.
Go and visit the exhibitions, take your family and friends and provide your input, this is a great experience in the making. The site is open every day from 9am to 5pm except Tuesdays, parking is in Kotze Street with sufficient security.
