Blurred borders of belonging Hammanskraal histories 1942 - 2002

Abstract

Hammanskraal, an area located 40 kilometers north of South Africa’s capital Pretoria, can be considered a microcosm for many of the broader concerns of South African history and historiography. This study engages the different strands of history held together in Hammanskraal. It addresses the way diverse historical trajectories have impacted on how people (residents, administrators, outsiders) have imagined - and inhabited - the space. The lived and administered spaces crafted through these imaginings have constructed different borders, both physical and non-physical. But, the borders are fluid, synchronic, and prone towards complex crumbling. They cannot be constructed as one linear historical narrative. Hammanskraal borders include trajectories of chieftaincies and pre-apartheid town planning; of forced removals, urban resistance and unrest; of linguistic diversity and the repression thereof; of the bantustans and decentralisation; of Black Consciousness and apartheid policing; the difficulties in transition, and land claims. The research was conducted through time spent in Hammanskraal, ethnographic work, oral history and archival research. The study works with both oral memory narratives, and the administrative imaginations, expressed in apartheid propaganda and found in state or bantustan archives, to examine how the spaces of Hammanskraal were constituted. Some peculiarities arise from the way the area was projected and developed: from the townplanning project of the early 1940s to decentralization programs in the early 1970s, these initiatives gave the space an urban inflection. Layered into this, intertwined but contradictory narratives of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ are starkly visible in the separate development propaganda. This study focuses in particular on Temba: the first declared town of the bantustan Bophuthatswana. Temba exists on the then border of Bophuthatswana. It was constructed as both a romanticized ‘village’ and a labour pool for the Industrial Growth Point Babelegi. Temba displays the contested and constant construction of space. Esther Kekana, the popular ruler of the AmaNdebele-a-Moletlane traditional authority, embodies the complexities of linguistic and gendered power and belonging. Hammanskraal was repeatedly reconstructed: through apartheid propaganda, through the way in which it was lived in, and in the development of the physical space. Borders of belonging shifted through various processes: ways of belonging, naming, understanding s of ‘home’, or various strategies around ‘ethnic identities’. These ways of belonging are also not chronological: they occur in ‘pools’ of time, associated through memory and feeling, rather than linear narrative. In exploring these histories, this study examines how the space(s) of Hammanskraal have been continuously reconstituted, shifted, blurred, inhabited, imagined, written and remembered.