The type of museum I most enjoy visiting is a specialised, quirky one with an owner or guide who is passionate about it. The South African Police Service (SAPS) museum in Muizenberg, south of Cape Town, was spot on. I came across it while googling unusual museums in the area and found that it had a remarkably low profile - no web site, only 4 reviews on Trip Advisor (one of which said it was closed), and no information on opening hours. There was, however, a phone number and when I rang the next morning, I was told it was open from 7.30am until 3.30pm Mon-Fri, which sounded encouragingly odd.
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As an adult, Andrew managed to get a job at the police station in Muizenberg, tending the garden and doing odd jobs. The station captain was so racist that rather than address Andrew by name, he would throw a stone at him to get his attention. Getting to and from work was also a constant reminder of apartheid oppression. The railway station had two bridges, one for whites only. The bridge for black and coloured people was always jam-packed, as they relied on the trains for transport and had to cross to the other platform to get a connecting train to the townships. The bridge for whites usually had only 3 or 4 people on it - plus a policeman to ensure that no non-white person tried to use it.
Muizenberg itself is an unusual place. It was established in 1743 and has a population now of about 37,000, with a wide racial mix - 39% black African, 28% white, 26% coloured, 1% Indian/Asian and 6% other. (Within the Cape, unlike in western countries where it is considered derogatory, the term “coloured” is regarded as a neutral description of people of mixed race ancestry. The Cape Coloureds are a subset within the coloured population, whose ancestry may include European colonisers, indigenous Khoisan and Xhosa people, and slaves imported from the Dutch East Indies, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Madagascar and Mozambique. The Cape Coloureds are now in a position somewhat akin to the Anglo-Indians after Indian independence. While black South Africans have been the main beneficiaries of South African social policy initiatives, the Cape Coloureds have been further marginalised.)
The beach at Muizenberg is long and impressive. The sea is usually a wonderful greenish colour and the waves are spectacular, with white horses whipped up by the fairly constant wind. It is apparently considered to be the birthplace of surfing in South Africa and Agatha Christie learned to surf there in 1922, when she and her first husband spent a few months in Cape Town. The water is markedly warmer than in Cape Town which makes swimming more enjoyable, though it also brings with it the hazard of sharks - especially great whites.
The original post office - Het Posthuys - is one of the oldest buildings in the country, dating from about 1743. It was built by the Dutch East India Company as a toll-house to levy taxes on farmers passing by to sell their produce to ships in Simon’s Bay. According to Wikipedia, Muizenberg gets its name from one of the earliest post holders, Sergeant Muys (meaning “Mouse”) - rather an appealing thought. In its time the building was used for a wide variety of purposes, including a police station and a brothel. The cannons in front of Het Posthuys date from the period of the Muizenberg Battle of 1795, when the British took over control of the Cape from the Dutch.
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Cecil Rhodes had a holiday cottage in the town, on the seafront, where he died in 1902. It is now a museum, which Peter and I visited a few years ago.
Many of the buildings in Muizenberg date from its heyday as a beach resort in the Art Deco period, when it was particularly popular with Jewish holidaymakers, a significant number of whom settled there. When Peter and I first started coming to South Africa in 1998, the town looked run down and rather seedy, although the colourful beach huts and the fantastic views across the Bay did give it some appeal. Now it is better maintained and looks as though it could turn the corner again.
The SAPS Museum is next to the new Post Office and opened in 1990. It consists of the police station and the adjoining old magistrate’s court, with the cells underneath. We spent 2-3 hours wandering around and as we were the only visitors, we had the pleasure of being given a personal tour by Andrew, who works there as a guide and educator. His full name is Andrew Ernest Marshall, which is very unusual in most of the Cape for a non-white person. The reason is that the British were popular in Muizenberg in the nineteenth century, as they created a pragmatic and effective police force that brought peace and therefore greater prosperity after the lawlessness of the earlier Dutch rule. Some local people chose to adopt British names as a result.
Andrew lived through the apartheid era and his accounts of what life was like then for a coloured person were fascinating - and shocking, particularly bearing in mind that things were far worse for black people. His first memorable experience of it was when, aged about eleven, he had to carry a heavy load a long way and decided to take a short cut along the beach. At that time, the entire beach was reserved for whites only, apart from a small area further along the coast which had dangerous currents and plenty of sharks. A mounted white police officer saw him and rode after him, intent on bringing him down. None of the people on the beach intervened, though some did whisper encouragement to Andrew as he ran past. A mounted coloured police officer moved to cut off his escape but deliberately didn’t catch him and told him to run faster. Unfortunately he couldn’t, as he was exhausted. He was caught by the white officer and taken to the police station. The police went to his home where his father was listening to an All Blacks match on the radio, and brought him back to the station, where they gave him a cane and told him to give Andrew a thrashing - which he did, with a vengeance.
During that period, the police would go round with a large van, looking for any black person who appeared to be “loitering”. They would be herded into the van and taken to the local “cadet camp” - without their families being informed - which was rather like an extremely tough Borstal. They would be kept there for months and if they survived, they would often be offered a job and/or training - but at the price of becoming informers in their townships. There was nowhere they could escape to and if they went back home, they would automatically be regarded as suspect by the community and were likely to be beaten with bicycle chain whips to make them “confess” and would then be necklaced.
Every municipal building dating from this period has two separate entrances and staircases - one for whites and a smaller one for non-whites. The courtroom in Muizenberg had simple benches for the black and coloured people, and - as you can just about see in the right of the photograph at the back, next to the magistrate’s chair - a much more comfortable one for the whites:
The judge would come only once a week, on Wednesdays, from Cape Town or Simon’s Town, and would hear a maximum of 9 cases a day. If for some reason he didn’t come, the numbers in the cells would pile up. Conditions there were very basic, with one communal toilet bucket for up to two dozen people. Sentences for even minor offences were harsh - up to 20 lashes of the cane, which was kept in salt water, followed by 6 months’ hard labour, helping to build the road tunnels through the mountains. A doctor would always be present at the caning, to strap a cushion over the kidneys before the station sergeant started administering the punishment to the prisoner who was lying on his front, on the bench:
Meanwhile resistance was mounting. Non-whites were not allowed to have firearms, so they made their own, using whatever they could lay their hands on. Judging from the display in the museum, some would be more dangerous to the user than to the intended target:
South Africa was on the brink of civil war when Nelson Mandela was released and it was only avoided because of his insistence on peace and reconciliation. Many white people whose behaviour had been particularly racist, including Andrew’s station captain, were afraid of what might happen to them and started stockpiling huge quantities of tinned food. They also took out their entire pensions as lump sums and in some cases invested all their money in schemes run by fraudsters. The captain lost his entire savings this way, as did many others. Occasionally Andrew sees him in the town and has no qualms in shaking his hand. He feels that as a Christian and for his own sake, he must forgive him. Also, as he says, he has a job he loves, a wife and two children who now have opportunities he never had. He saved hard and was able to pay for his daughter to take a college course in business management, which led to a promising career, and his son is now following the same path. By contrast, the ex-captain is widowed and destitute.
The most satisfying part of Andrew’s job now is to talk to groups of schoolchildren visiting the museum about the risks of alcohol, drug abuse and gangs. Drug abuse is a major and growing problem in the Cape, especially the use of TIK (crystal meth), which is cheap, easily available and highly addictive. It fuels violence, including child abuse and rape. This includes young boys raping their own grandmothers, as well as primary age children themselves being at risk. The gangs thrive in this environment and encourage children to get their mothers addicted to TIK too.
The display of drug-related items is in the basement and while Peter nipped off to the loo, Andrew took me downstairs to view the pipes, hookahs, hair sprays etc. Rather than walk down, he explained that "once at an age, better not to use stairs", so he put me in the lift for the disabled and escorted me down. Peter, meanwhile, had to walk. I tried to console myself with the thought that he probably just wanted to show off the lift, but there was no way round the fact that he considered me in need of assistance. Humph....
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