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This article draws on excerpts from Chatsworth: The Making of a South African Township, edited by Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed. It won the UKZN book of the year 2013.
CHATSWORTH: Once you enter you never leave
CHATSWORTH was born at the height of apartheid’s madness, designed to fit a people into a frozen racial landscape. But as much as it hardened, life in Chatsworth thawed, and through the ebb and flow of everyday life and cultural and sporting tributaries, became a place both real and imagined.
By the mid-1970s, the seeming melancholia and sense of loss that gripped the first arrivals had been brushed off and the reality of making a life in the township embraced. Chatsworth soon rocked and rolled. Children were conceived, boundaries were breached, bridges were built and new generations of “Chatsworthians” were born, who swirled in and out of the township limits.
It was a landscape of possibilities, which in the late 1970s saw accelerated class mobility mingling with the dead-end of drugs and drudgery, “like poetry” Garcia Marquez would say, “dissolved into the soup of daily life”.
I was fortunate to go to Chatsworth High School in this seminal period of the township’s history. The truth, though, is I was hopeless at school. When it came to counting, my Gujarati blood did not kick in. When it came to biology, my Catholicism could not get around evolution.
The one high point of my life in school was to be bell boy. For a while I made the school debating team. But my mind would wander and I found it difficult to respond to opponents as I didn’t listen to what they had said in the first place.
Unable to make the football team (with the likes of Sugar Singh, Super Naidoo, Stanley Govender and Scampi Bissesor, already fabulous professional players), my lunchtimes were spent trying to sidle up to the only girl with freckles in the school yard, who simply adopted an attitude that I did not exist. Marcel Proust is right: “In love, there is permanent suffering.”
It was not surprising that the report under conduct for Standard 9 read: “Needs special attention.” Luckily for me, my parents were not paying attention.
But Chatsworth was an education and quickly started to compete with the Casbah of the city centre for my affections. In the 1970s, arguably the most infamous gang was the Karia gang, named after the leader, who was very dark in complexion.
Their base was Unit 2. As this was the first unit built in Chatsworth, the gang members could make a claim to be the “original” Chatsworthians. As I got to converse with the local hoods, so I got to know a whole new language.
Althaf: “What kind gazi?”
Colin: “Lekker what kind?”
Althaf: “Where’s the lahnee ek se?”
Colin: “He vyed to town on a move.”
Althaf: “Shit… I thought he was at the possie.”
Althaf: “Came for a wholesale ek se; Segs from the three’s still carrying on for himself ?”
Colin: “He carries on like an ndoda buts he’s nwota… we made him vip last week.”
Althaf: “Gazi skatties sheyler now… let me vye.”
Colin: “Korrek my bro… I’ll tune the lahnee to dala a something for you… come check me later.”
While the gangs might have defended their own turf and had origins in different areas of the city, the dress code followed a similar pattern.
This was known as the American look. Pringle shirts always hanging out of the 777 Nevada trousers; Lee Boss of The Road jeans; Medicus Royal and Crocket & Jones shoes; caps, the famous Town Talk range and the “welders” caps, were all essentials in the wardrobe.
Jackets ranged from “Barracuda” to Pointer leather jackets and the iconic London Fog. These jackets would be worn in the middle of Durban’s summer as badges of style, even as the armpits took a beating. Gangs have taken on many incarnations over the years in Chatsworth.
Guns
Today in one particular unit, a younger generation has taken the personal to a whole new level.
While carrying guns and fearless, they go for manicures and facials, and some use skinlightening creams. One older gangster told me how his younger brother gets deeply upset when he cannot find his moisturising creams.
Is this the beginning of the Chatsworth metro-sexual gangster? On weekends that I stayed over in Chatsworth, we would always make a stop at the Pelican. Brandy Ale, R1.10 cents.
Then I discovered Fowl Aunty’s shebeen. Once the cops raided, and I ran for my life instead of realising the cops were just coming for a bribe of chops chutney. I think it’s here that I got the nickname Running Fowl. Many decades later, I went to Bayview in Chatsworth to film a story about Diwali with Eastern Mosaic presenter Imraan Vagar.
Part of the story was to purchase a running fowl and present it to a pensioner in the area. As Imraan adjusted his trademark sunglasses and smoothed out his white linen pants, the fowl made a dash for freedom. The bird zigzagged up the hill, down Road 215. I followed.
As it doubled back, people came out of their flats, shouting “running fowl, running fowl”. Children joined in the chant. Were they cheering for me or the fowl?
Finally, the fowl climbed up some stairs and into one of the flats. People barricaded the stairs to keep it in and the cameras dutifully captured me scooping up the fowl and handing it to Imraan.
Till today, when I go and visit in Bayview, children shout “running fowl, running fowl”.
Running fowls can be purchased at the Bangladesh market in Chatsworth. No longer running, they are squashed into cages, awaiting their fate. The blow-torch burns off the last of the feathers and the bird is “dressed” to be taken home.
But, this wonderful timeless delicacy is under pressure from younger palates that prefer KFC and the ubiquitous Nando’s. Will the running fowl fight back, as it has through the years?
A young entrepreneur tells me he wants to turn running fowl into a chain of stores across the country. What do you want to call it, I ask? “Nanda’s,” he says, “Nanda’s, it will wipe Nando’s off the market, lahnee.”
There are places all over the world where the Indian diaspora has congealed – Southall in London, Jackson Heights in New York. I have been there and sampled their delights, but there is no place that can compare with Chatsworth.
There is poverty and fear and a whole generation addicted to drugs that eat into the body and hope. There are prematurely aged people who spent their whole lives in clothing factories, only to be made redundant as Chinese exports flooded the market.
There are women who have endured multiple oppressions. It is no wonder that one woman has a tattoo which reads “Born to Suffer”, and listening to her story one cannot but be reminded of Sartre: “Life begins the other side of despair.”
There are young men with names like Keegan who have to bite the indignity of their father’s Liverpool obsessions.
Deprivation
But there is also something beyond the stories of deprivation, humiliation and melancholy that surveys and statistics and quick-fire research can never capture. Chatsworth never stands still.
Ancient traditions still live here, contesting and accommodating the new. The iconic Hare Krishna temple shares a space with older, smaller, brightly hand-painted ones. Pentecostalism is all the rage among the young, while the candles of the traditional churches light up empty pews.
Zanzibaris, who by some apartheid quirk were classified Indian, remind us how ancient Islam s in Africa. And in the flat-lands and shack settlements, Indians and Africans seek to make everyday life. It’s not easy.
Still, while in the gated complexes of the North Coast, there is security, here there is life. Chatsworth. Remember that memorable song, Hotel California? “You can check in anytime you like/but you can never leave.”
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