Page 114 - KBHA BULLETIN 4

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Concluding remarks

For most people, the term ‘forced removals’ conjures up images of brutal physical evictions,

of bulldozers demolishing houses and of large-scale mass removals. In Kalk Bay, the effects
of the Group Areas proclamation were very different. While the Kalk Bay proclamation had

none of the brutality and drama associated with the evictions in places such as District Six
and Sophiatown, it had consequences of a different, but equally insidious nature. In District

Six, everyone had to leave. In Kalk Bay, the majority of families managed to stay, while

others experienced the full force of the law and had to move out. Although the
implementation of the GAA did follow a ‘rationale’ in terms of the prevailing legislation, this

is not how it appeared to most people. For them, the effects of the proclamation seemed

selective, arbitrary and confusing. Some attempted to make sense of the situation by
suggesting that only those who were not fishermen had to leave. Others propose that only the

house-owners could stay, or perhaps only the boat-owners. Yet others have internalised
feelings of guilt, asking themselves if they might have done more to avoid leaving Kalk Bay.

On the whole, the GAA proclamation is interpreted as more than simply a law, applied

according to strict geographic principles. Some of those who moved see their experience as a

test of faith, and similarly, many who stayed in Kalk Bay regard the fact that they were not
forced to move as an act of God. In this way the GAA is tangled up in the imagination with

notions of personal conduct, morality, religion and identity. Such subtle but crucial aspects of
the GAA are relatively little studied, but are important for our understanding of how the Act

shaped and influenced people’s experiences on many levels.

So, why have so many people forgotten that the GAA did affect people in Kalk Bay?

Although this is a research topic in itself, I will briefly mention a few aspects that might play
a role in the shaping of this forgetting.

One factor is that the memory of the GAA is dominated by the government’s decision to
rescind the proclamation, while other experiences of the proclamation are downplayed or

omitted. Because of its unusual nature, the rescinding of the proclamation received intensive
coverage in the media, and subsequently is singled out as the defining feature of this part of

the history. The landscape of Kalk Bay, furthermore, underpins the idea of Kalk Bay as a
village that was untouched by the GAA. The fishermen’s flats and the harbour are both

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