Human Rights Violation Hearings — Worcester — 1996-06-25

FATHER WEEDER: Thank you,  Mr Chairperson and members of the Commission.  I must express  a certain amount of awkwardness in presenting my statement because as I mentioned  I have lived for a very brief period within the region and  having  spent that time I realised that as a township and city born person I do have certain amount of privilege when having been exposed to the reality of rural life.
My exposure has also been somehow also sustained by the protection of the church in  whatever limited form it was sanctioned in the apartheid years.  And so it is also with that preface that I would like to introduce the statement.
As my stay  staying in Boland was a short one lasting from January 1989 to the autumn of 1991.  In that time I  had served as a parish priest of St. Joseph's and St. Mildred's in the towns of Ashton and Montagu at the Eastern end of Boland.
I only been a priest for three  years as had also assumed pastoral responsibility to the parish of Zolani in October 1989.  At that time I was 30 years old, married and still am married to Bonita a school teacher by profession.
When we arrived here we had a daughter who was two years and four months, Giarra and a son, Andile would be born later that year. 
I had been ordained to the priesthood at the end of 1985  and after three  years of ministry,  I was fairly inexperienced as a young priest coming to a rural town.  And it was an immense and daunting challenge of that loomed ahead of me.
Within 48 hours of our arrival  in Ashton the then acting Commanding Officer of Ashton Police Station  Warrant Officer Hanson welcomed us with an inquiry about whether we had a permit to live in white area.
I informed  him that it was not the custom of our church to accommodate racism and that it found the group areas act particularly offensive.
Being a gentle priest I noted that he was apparently  uncomfortable with my position and I assured him that I recognised that he stood under orders and called upon him to appreciate that in a similar way I was also compelled to be obedient  to my Bishop  and to go where the church sent me and serve  under whatever conditions they place me.
Me and the good officer then  parted on that note and with the matter then referred to the attorney general and that was my introduction to rural life within 48 hours.
Ashton, seemingly unaware of our presence, went about their business but at the same time we gradually became  aware that  we were subject of their collective scrutiny.  Our race identity  the  identity of my wife Bonita and myself were a popular topic of both black and white citizens of the area.  And they seemed to  deliberate   whether  Bonita was an American Negro, to use that term,  and as been referred to her they enquired as to whether I was  a recent convert to the Christian faith.  And I was identified as the koelie - boesman dominee.
This concern was related to me by one of my own parishioners and he seemed unaware and oblivious to the racism inherent in the town.  The first six months as a Capetonian as an urban person was a very lonely period for us. Greetings were cold and handshakes were formal as we sought our place within the rural social hierarchy.
In the hope of facilitating  my ministry I sought to conform to the established norms of that community and sadly I discovered that conformity required of me to surrender the integrity of the gospel.
I found myself easily moved to public expressions of anger, at the way young clerks at the bank, at the Post Office or even shop assistants treated me and or some other black person.
Looking back at that I found my  latter role of  patronising and to an extent  offensive in assuming that I could speak out in the defence of others who had not called upon my defence or had neither given me the authority to be their champion.  And in this silence I sensed a rebuke.
It took me a while to realise why, when the Boland exploded in popular protest a year later and to agree on a scale never witnessed before in the region.   I would look back on those first few months and realise how wrong I had been about the people especially the Coloured community.
What I had mistook  for apathy and  submissiveness  was just another means  of coping of surviving and what have been said in another time people leading lives of quiet desperation.
I present this background because it needs to be understood that what happened in 1989, the uprisings of 1987 and earlier 1960's should not be seen in isolation from broader the social political and economic context of the region.
The towns of Montagu and Ashton are located in Breede River Valley.  Montagu on the Eastern side of the Langeberg and what is known as the Klein Karoo.
Each town has it's  unique feature relative to its geography and specific local features.
Montagu for instance thrives on tourism because of the locality of the spa and the springs farm in the area.
Ashton on the other hand owes its existence early in 40's to the railway that came there and the station master was Mr Ashton. And later the canning factories none of which was one of the largest in the southern hemisphere and employs most of the people from not only in Ashton but from Bonnievale,  McGregor and so  on and so forth.
These towns have developed unequally both socially and economically and yet to a degree  it shared the following features
1.

<UNKNOWN>: Clerks were all  white.  Xhosa speaking people in terms of the language were not catered for.  They had to endure the insolence of not being understood or having to struggle to communicate in Afrikaans.

HOSPITALS WERE SEGREGATED IN PRACTISE: Hospitals were segregated in practice and Montagu and Robertson people were admitted and cared for on the basis of colour.
At Montagu Hospital there were no black, that is Coloured and African sisters.  The Coloured women who employed there were nurse aides and during the events of 1990 people  who were hospitalised as a result of police action,  were often released into police custody.
Even while in hospital they were vulnerable to police harassment and intimidation.  People as result were afraid when wounded to go to hospital we often  had to smuggle people all the way to Cape Town.  On the whole  the attitude of the hospital staff towards patients and their  visitors left much room for improvement.

<UNKNOWN>: At the police stations all the senior officers were white and here racism was experienced in its most violent form both in terms of verbal abuse and physical force.  Most of the rural towns are under the local commanding officer whose  individual characteristic being either authoritarian or benevolent would  determine the kind of policing that town would receive.

MUNICIPALITIES: The municipalities  except for account payment facilities existed for black people and they were usually at the back of municipal offices.