Page 228 - Bulletin 9 2005

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It was a country of White suburbs, Coloured suburbs, Indian suburbs and Black suburbs
and Camps Bay was very definitely a white suburb. No longer were cottages belonging

to so-called “Coloured” citizens, like the one city councillors Dr. Abdurahman and his
daughter Cissy Gool had lived in, allowed to darken the streets alongside Camps Bay’s

white sands, although “non-white” visitors were still allowed to sun at Sunset Beach,

long a popular site for the December 1st celebrations, the anniversary of the
emancipation of slaves. The Cape Argus, 2 December 1862, had hoped in vain that the

newly opened railway would persuade the celebrants “to forgo their midnight march
round the Kloof and their midday revels at Camps Bay ... their music, their dancing,

their frivolities and their feasts.”

Race groups were now segregated into separate elevators, separate post offices, separate

park benches, separate cinemas, separate parking areas for drive-in cinemas (with the
separated audience sitting in separate cars but watching the same film), separate

pedestrian bridges, separate schools, separate hospitals, separate churches, separate

graveyards, separate everything and that included separate beaches and Camps Bay with
its white sands was very definitely a white beach.

The trouble was that the beach had never been segregated. A family holidaying in 1861

in Camps Bay House, the boarding house that had previously been Somerset’s delight,
called it a great resort for Cape Cockneys on high days and holidays and described a

picnic on the beach of a party of about fifty Malays who caught fish which they braaied,

and who danced to music on fiddles, drums and violoncellos. They were even presented
with some of the fish that had been caught. (Fig. 5.9).

Maud Walton in 1903 described a picnic by Malays on Camps Bay beach where there

was dancing to concertinas in which everyone joined in - even the little children: “So
colourful were their picnics and their merry-making that the Europeans took as much

pleasure in watching them as they made pleasure themselves.....Never was there

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disturbance of any kind, and man, woman and child, all enjoyed the day." They
obviously did not play rounders.