Reconciliation Day reflections 2024/2025

“It’s a day when we don’t have to go to school,” said Lennox, a boy in my grade 8 class at Livingstone High School back in 2005. It’s Arts and Culture period. Mrs Wynguaard just asked us what Heritage Day is about. Eek! What did she think we were gonna say? You are just shy of 14 years old. Your just borrowed Tipp-Ex from your friend to write on your Karrimor. You’re waiting with bated breath to see if you’ve got last period free so you can read the latest FREE 4 ALL and log onto MXit on your friend’s Motorola V360. You don’t have time for these questions!  

Thankfully Reconciliation Day took place during the December school holidays – because the public holiday calendar maker uncle knew that Mrs Wynguaard was going to corner us again, so he saved us by the bell. But the other reason why I was not ready to answer that question: I was still busy experiencing the events which I am now still reconciling with.  

I finished Mrs Wynguaard’s class at the end of 2005. A year later, on 16 December 2006, Taliep Petersen was tragically murdered. His death was devastating. After watching Kat and the Kings, a show he created with David Kramer, shaking his hand in the foyer of the Baxter Theatre was still a fresh memory in my mind, the dream of someday becoming like him. Taliep was in the middle of a joke with someone: “I told him I’ll hit him with that washlappie!” Almost immediately he noticed me standing there and asked me what my name was: “Tasneem! A mashallah name!” Soon after this moment, in another Arts and Culture assignment on our festive season highlights, I cut out photos from the Kat and the Kings playbill and put it in my collage for Mrs Wynguaard to mark.   

Less than two years after submitting this collage, the street poles in Cape Town bore posters with the words “Totsiens Taliep” printed on them. That’s a whole other thing to reconcile with altogether – how an entire culture was robbed of this man, how I was robbed of a role model that I was still learning to emulate. We celebrate and dote on the talent we have in this city, but we all know that Cape Town’s heart has a Taliep-shaped hole. When Emo Adams sang “Jantjie” on VIA-tv: “Taliep, die Kaap is leeg sonner jou.”  

20 years after I left Mrs Wynguaard’s class, I called my uncle, my mother’s brother, and asked him to take me to the kaberstaan (gravesite) of his mother, my late grandmother, Salegga Jacobs (née Jaffer) – Aumie – and then to the plot of land where their house used to be in District Six.  

Aumie maningal’d (passed away) three days before my 32nd birthday. She was just short of 100 years old. Lately I felt called to visit her kaberstaan and to stand with my own two feet in what used to be her house in Horstley Street. It occurred to me that one reason why she got traumatisingly sick prior to her death was because she couldn’t die peacefully in her own house of origin in this road. I can only imagine the pain of this kind after she survived the forced removals of the Group Areas Act of apartheid South Africa, and had to leave District Six to take up residence in Walmer Estate, and then later Surrey Estate, where she lived until she maningal’d.   

I called my uncle and we missioned to both sites. With enthusiasm he told me that Mr White’s Dairy Shop and Tafelberg Hotel (my favourite song in the Kat and the Kings musical!) were landmarks at the top of Horstley Street, just below the Devil’s Peak mountain. This same uncle, a superstar of a rugby player whose career was severely limited by the apartheid government, also shared with me how close Blythe Street was to their back and front door. Blythe Street was where my dad’s family stayed – mommy daddy het mos innie District gebôk, djy weet mos! 

In the years following Mrs Wynguaard’s class I have also been to Indonesia twice, the land of my ancestral origins. I have spent lots of time uncovering my Cape Malay / Indonesian roots, learning Bahasa Indonesia and trying to uncover the pre-colonial identities of my people before colonialism and apartheid became the only indicators of who we are and where it is we come from. It has always felt like my purpose to do so, being the offspring of the apartheid surviving generation who was also born to break intergenerational curses, starting with my own life. But in following through with this purpose, I was also called to cast my eyes a little closer to home and visit Aumie’s kaberstaan and where she used to live in District Six. We must stand in observance of all the parts of us. We must make peace with what happened, whatever happened and whenever it may have happened. This is the lesson of Reconciliation Day – carving out a sense of personal reconciliation out of a painful, political narrative.   

So ja, Mrs Wynguaard, if you’re reading this, consider this a late entry to the final collage in my Arts and Culture journal, you know that nightmare of a A5 hardcover book you made me ask Daddy to stay up late to cover with green paper. At least I’m not like Lennox; I know 16 December is not just a day to stay at home at watch cartoons on YoTV. Give me an A for my effort, don’t be so!