Magister Artium - MA / Much has been researched in South Africa about the trauma of losing one's home, one's community and rebuilding one's life in a new environment. Several books have been published tracking the lives of the forcibly removed and their responses to leaving District Six. My research focuses on a different group namely those who had been forcibly removed from the centre of Stellenbosch, called Die Vlakte during that time. Living and working with and among people who have experienced this removal, I was keen to research whether the impact of the trauma is currently manifesting in this specific community and if so, what the symptoms would be. This qualitative inquiry focuses on one particular individual, Mr. Hilton Biscombe. I selected him because he, who experienced the removal as a teenager, spent most of his later life determinedly collecting stories and documents relating to this incident. Mr. Biscombe is also the only person of whom I am aware who responded personally through compiling a book, making a DVD, writing poetry as well as an autobiography relating to this event. My inquiry into the ways trauma manifests in a narrative, will be based on two interviews: one conducted by a white man from the University of Stellenbosch thirty years after the event; and another interview, six years later, conducted by myself.Our understanding of trauma is usually associated with a death or injury or the possibility thereof, but it could also include the victims response to extreme fear, serious harm or threat to family members. According to van der Merwe and Vienings, people also become traumatized when witnessing harm, physical violence or death or the sudden loss or destruction of a victim's home (van der Merwe Vienings, 2001). So the issue of trauma is not in question, nor the fact that forced removals cause trauma. I am exploring testimony in the form of interviews for possible current manifestations of this trauma thirty-six years down the line. / South Africa

Magister Artium - MA / Much has been researched in South Africa about the trauma of losing one’s home, one’s community and rebuilding one’s life in a new environment. Several books have been published tracking the lives of the forcibly removed and their responses to leaving District Six. My research focuses on a different group namely those who had been forcibly removed from the centre of Stellenbosch, called “Die Vlakte” during that time.Living and working with and among people who have experienced this removal, I was keen to research whether the impact of the trauma is currently manifesting in this specific community and if so, what the symptoms would be. This qualitative inquiry focuses on one particular individual, Mr. Hilton Biscombe. I selected him because he, who experienced the removal as a teenager, spent most of his later life determinedly collecting stories and documents relating to this incident. Mr.Biscombe is also the only person of whom I am aware who responded personally through compiling a book, making a DVD, writing poetry as well as an autobiography relating to this event. My inquiry into the ways trauma manifests in a narrative, will be based on two interviews: one conducted by a white man from the University of Stellenbosch thirty years after the event; and another interview, six years later, conducted by myself.Our understanding of trauma is usually associated with a death or injury or the possibility thereof, but it could also include the victim’s response to extreme fear, serious harm or threat to family members. According to van der Merwe and Vienings, people also become traumatized when witnessing harm, physical violence or death or the sudden loss or destruction of a victim’s home (van der Merwe & Vienings, 2001).So the issue of trauma is not in question, nor the fact that forced removals cause trauma. I am exploring testimony in the form of interviews for possible current manifestations of this trauma thirty-six years down the line. / South Africa

The existence of the Lesotho Evangelical Church in Southern Africa (LECSA) or Paris Evangelical Missionary Society (PEMS) in the Western Areas of Johannesburg, South Western Township (Soweto) and more poignantly, Meadowlands and their forced removals experience is succinctly captured. The struggle of the LECSA/PEMS Meadowlands Parish in becoming a missional ecclesia in a sea of missional challenges in her context are vividly spelt out. They, inter alia, include constitutional matters, language policy, finances, ministerial preparation, lay-ministry development, institutionalisation of ministry, unity issues, prophetic ministry, mission and evangelism. The researcher, then, proposes an intervention – of course not a perfect one – that perhaps will galvanise the LECSA/PEMS Meadowlands Parish members to improve on what they have been doing and become a missional ecclesia in her context, Meadowlands. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2016. / tm2016 / Science of Religion and Missiology / MA / Unrestricted

Thesis (DPhil (History))—University of Stellenbosch, 2008. / This thesis presents, from the perspective of socio-environmental history, a case study in forced removals and their ramifications from 1905 to 1977. The focus area is a township called Lady Selborne in South Africa, near Pretoria, and Ga-Rankuwa, where some of those displaced were relocated. The thesis demonstrates that forced removals did not only result in people losing their historical land, properties and material possessions but also their sense of being and connectedness. The focus is thus on the changing perceptions of people in the midst of their land loss, an area of study that is generally under-examined in academia. The research provides a complex picture of the ramifications of forced removals on the former inhabitants of Lady Selborne. Lady Selborne was a “home”, a place for being human where the residents managed to engage in food production and owned properties in a multiracial area. Forced removals emanated from the National Party government’s desire to control African land ownership, and the manner in which land dispossession took place resulted in environmental injustice. This thesis applies theories of environment, power and injustice to explore how the people related to their environment and how that relationship was defined by class, gender and race. In Lady Selborne, black Africans were displaced from an area that was fertile, close to the city centre of Pretoria and relocated to infertile Ga-Rankuwa on the outskirts of the city. This resettlement resulted in many of those relocated being prevented from engaging in food production which was in turn an affront to Sotho-Tswana culture and religion with its emphasis on land as lefa: a bequest that has to feed its inhabitants. This thesis thus argues that successive governments (and many scholars) have downplayed black African environmental ethics, dismissing them as ‘superstition’. This mindset once resulted in forced removals and they in turn led blacks to disregard environmental issues. Ga-Rankuwa became degraded with litter, soil erosion and dongas, especially in the 1970’s, as people realised that there was no hope of returning to Lady Selborne. Environmental apathy emerged unconsciously as a response to forced removals. The thesis concludes by considering the idea of a ‘usable past’ and proposes that socio-environmental history can play a role in realising environmental justice.

In South Africa, racial discrimination was witnessed through renowned segregationist acts including the Group Areas Act (No:41) of 1950, which forcibly displaced families from their homes and triggered significant social upheavals and the callous disintegration of long-established communities such as Sophiatown. The removals were a political strategy to relocate so-called “non-white” people from the inner city to townships such as Meadowlands explicitly chosen for their hazardous impure land known as mine dumps (Rodgers 1980:76). These displacements had a paradox of intergenerational homelessness triggered by instrumental racism that influenced politics of space and in effect, the disarticulation of the lives of black South Africans (Milgroom and Ribotc 2019:184). Therefore, it is important to undertake a study investigating the circumstances that gave rise to these forced removals, the subsequent breakdown of social order, a typical consequence of population relocation, which merits an examination of the contemporary implications and ramifications of disarticulation and highlights, in this regard, some significant shortcomings in post-Apartheid governance. / Anthropology and Archaeology / M.A. (Anthropology)