Memories of marbles and playing postman
IT WAS the kind of neighbourhood where you played marbles and hopscotch in the street, and the neighbour could give you a scolding if you misbehaved.
That’s the memory of Clairwood, as the home where Dr Rajie Tudge grew up and which is featured in her book, Teaching The Canna Bush, which she described as “my journey through apartheid and beyond”.
She started writing the book when she was at the Buddhist Retreat Centre in Ixopo. It is an autobiography, with the backdrop providing a historical record of the time.
“It started as a freewriting exercise and I started writing to my son, Sarushen, about his birth and it just evolved into this book.”
Growing up in Clairwood – in a mix of Indian, black, coloured and white families – Tudge said: “It was a vibrant community, we were one big happy family”.
She recalled the shack town of Bayside, for displaced Indians, being close to their home in Ganesh Road. “Bayside didn’t have a postal service, so everyone used our house as the postal service. As kids, we would wait for people to get off the bus to hand out the letters, we loved playing postman.”
Her father was a market gardener: “In the evenings, all of us children worked in the gardens – bunching carrots and radishes. He had a stall in Warwick Avenue and I remember my mother used to walk behind him with the baskets”.
Also in their property was a canna bush, which she would stand in front of and where the title of her book originated. “I was a bookworm and when I was left on my own I would stand in front of the canna bush and teach. By doing this, I was also revising my school work with the bush, such as my spelling and, as a result, I excelled at school because I had excellent recall.”
When she was 6 years old, she attended the local temple school for two years, before going to HS Done Primary.
“At the temple school, we spent half the day under the trees, where we did our bonds and knitting,” she said.
At Tagore High School, she was a top student, also enjoying gymnastics and drum majorettes.
“But in Standard nine (Grade 11), I left school because I was ashamed of my poverty and that I was the only girl who didn’t have a uniform,” she said.
But her friends and teachers continued to support her and sent her homework.
“It was a caring community, there were teachers who helped me after school, such as my maths teacher, the late Dr Bhoola, and I had a friend who would take my homework to school.”
Tudge said many in the Clairwood community ran businesses from home. “From ice blocks to popcorn and there was a lady who used to sell ‘veda’ (savoury cake) from her home in Sirdar Road. Those were happy days.”
Tudge finished her matric and applied to the Department of Indian Affairs for a bursary to attend Springfield College of Education.
She qualified and was sent to teach at Rylands High in the Cape, in 1977, which was also her initiation into politics. “It was the first Indian school in the Cape and coloured kids were not allowed to attend. Only Indian, Cape Malay and Asian kids were allowed. I was too politically naive to realise what was going on and I was posted into that turmoil. When I got to the airport, there were people holding placards saying ‘Durban teachers go home’. It hit me that there was this thing called apartheid and we were being kept separate.”
During her time in Cape Town, she met her future husband, Alan Tudge. “He told me he was teaching at my alma mater, Clairwood High. I decided I would meet this man again and applied to transfer to Clairwood High.
“As a mixed-race couple, there were difficult times and we struggled to find a place together. There are some traumatic recollections in the book of our life together. It took two-and-a-half to three years to write and there were some chapters which were difficult to write, and I had to find the strength to write them.”
In 1985, the Mixed Marriages Act was repealed and they married in 1986.
She went on to lecture at the University of Durban-Westville, and served as an assistant academic registrar and as director of university planning. The book’s narrative includes the 1980s school boycott, the stirrings of the United Democratic Front, the release of Nelson Mandela and the subsequent transformation of tertiary institutions.
In the prelude to the book, UKZN professor of history Donal McCracken writes: “But change, even when for the betterment of society, brings with it tensions and stresses unique to such a generation. That is why the recording of their thoughts and memories is so important, and why others should follow Rajie’s example and put pen to paper.”,