Lansdowne (A 17)

Name: Lansdowne



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The campaign conducted at the beginning of the 1950s to organise a mass boycott of the 1952 Jan van Riebeeck Tercentenary Festival was perhaps the high point of these educational endeavours. The campaign saw meeting halls turned into mass classrooms on colonial history, citizenship and the nation. Meetings were characterised by ritualised forms of expression and communicative behaviour.65 During 1951 and 1952, and especially in the final weeks before April 1952, nightly meetings of the campaign were held in every corner of Cape Town. Speakers addressed large gatherings and promoted the campaign to boycott the festival. In many of these speeches, the importance of a principled and programmatic struggle and the necessity of unity was stressed. Amid the criticisms of all aspects of the festival, slogans were used to warn people of the dangers of collaboration with the ‘Herrenvolk’. I.B. Tabata was one of the speakers whose history lessons hundreds gathered to hear. In a rousing speech in the municipal hall in Lansdowne, in which metaphorical imagery was used to explain the nature of the festival and its organisation, Tabata ended off by suggesting: ‘Let the masters celebrate … for they will never again be able to celebrate. This is their last supper.’66
In Langa, Kalk Bay, Lansdowne and elsewhere in Cape Town, speakers cited case studies to assist them in providing lessons of history as a means of advocating the boycott of the festival. AC Jordan referred to the inevitable results of instances of collaboration, while others used the examples of local experiences of dispossession both of land and of the right to fish. I.B. Tatata made reference to the history of slavery in Haiti. The rituals of speeches were met with attentive listening and vociferous agreement as audiences were inculcated into the rites of assembly and citizenship in meeting halls. The classroom of public history was 20
simultaneously a domain in which an alternative citizenship was performed of those united in boycott, who drew on the appropriate knowledge of history, a shared moral code and discursive grid.
This was a citizenship based on speakers, writers and knowledge-creators on the one hand, and attentive listeners on the other. The process of nationing contained an inherent ambiguity of those who gave their words and those who lent their ears. Leslie Witz and I have referred to the occasions when, after having listened to the lessons in public history, members of audiences were encouraged to participate, almost to demonstrate what they had learnt. ‘Van Riebeeck regarded Africans as stinking dogs', asserted one learner-citizen in a Langa meeting. ‘The invitation [to partake in the Van Riebeeck festivities] was an insult. It was like a guest taking a dog with him to a wedding party', declared another.

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