HERITAGE AND RESTITUTION OP-ED: We walk to remember what apartheid erased of Newlands and Claremont

There is a temptation, on Heritage Day, to reduce our history to braais and bunting, a comfortable, sanitised celebration that costs us nothing and demands nothing. But for the families dispersed from Newlands and Claremont across the wind-blown expanse of the Cape Flats, heritage is neither comfortable nor abstract. It is the memory of a home from which they were torn, an ancestral landscape closer to the mountain that was declared, by the stroke of an apartheid bureaucrat’s pen, to be no longer theirs.

On Thursday, 24 September, the Newlands/Claremont Heritage, Environmental Justice and Restitution Society (NCHERS) will convene its fifth annual Walk of Remembrance through these streets. We walk because remembering is itself a form of resistance. The dispossession of Newlands and Claremont did not begin with the Group Areas Act; it reaches back to the 17th century, to the very foundations of colonial conquest at the Cape. But it was the apartheid forced removals of the 1960s that completed the work, emptying vibrant, mixed neighbourhoods of their people and scattering them to the periphery, out of sight of the leafy suburbs that rose in their place.

What was lost was not merely property. It was a way of living together. NCHERS was founded by two neighbouring houses of worship, St Saviour’s Anglican Church and the Claremont Main Road Masjid, precisely because they stand as living testimony to a community in which Christian and Muslim, and many others besides, lived in mutual coexistence. These sacred spaces are among the few remaining threads connecting the exiled to the homes they were forced to abandon. To this day, many who can no longer live in the area still travel back to worship here, drawn to the last tangible fragment of a stolen belonging.

In the Qur’an we are taught that God made us into nations and tribes that we might come to recognise and know one another (49:13), that diversity is a divine intention, not a problem to be engineered away. Apartheid’s spatial planning was, at its core, a theological heresy as much as a political crime: it declared that people created to know one another must instead be separated, ranked and removed. Our walk is a quiet repudiation of that lie.

This year we begin at the Newlands Cricket Ground and follow a route marked by three stops, each a wound and each a testimony. At Draper Square, off Main Road, former residents will recall the families and institutions that once filled that space, Talfalah Primary School, the Orpheum Bioscope, the ordinary infrastructure of a community that dared to flourish. Passing under the subway, we will pause outside the Stegman Road Masjid to honour the towering witness of Imam Abdullah Haron, who resisted the forced removals and the wider machinery of apartheid, and who was killed in an apartheid detention cell on 27 September 1969. 

Our walk falls within days of that date, which this year marks the 57th anniversary of his martyrdom, and that his youngest daughter, Fatima Haron-Masoet, walks with us is a reminder that this history is not distant: it lives and breathes among us still.

Our third stop, at the Cape Town Athenaeum in Mariendahl Lane, honours the life of the mind. This was an intellectual hub, a meeting place for the Teachers’ League of South Africa and the broader Non-European Unity Movement, who understood that liberation begins in the mind long before it is won in the streets. Here teachers turned the instrument of their own subjugation against the regime, refusing to collaborate with tyranny and forging in their pupils a political consciousness that would accept nothing less than full liberation. The Unity Movement’s disciplined philosophy of non-collaboration and boycott, and its refusal of the very racial categories apartheid sought to impose, were among the most rigorous intellectual challenges the system ever faced. Among its foremost teachers was RO Dudley, a towering figure of the Teachers’ League; it is fitting that his son, Russell Dudley, today chairs NCHERS, with Fatima Haron-Masoet as his deputy, standing together to reclaim what was taken. 

That this tradition has been all but written out of the popular story of our liberation is itself a form of erasure, a reminder that history is not only made in the places we destroy but in the memories we are permitted to keep. To stand here is to restore the Unity Movement to its rightful place in that history. Then we return, along the railway line and under the bridge, to where we began.

Make the invisible visible again

There is a deliberate lesson in walking these streets on foot. Injustice, when it is spatial, is designed to be invisible to those who benefit from it. One drives past Draper Street without a thought for the school that once stood there; one passes the mosque without knowing an imam was martyred defending his people. To walk slowly, to stop and to name what was taken, is to make the invisible visible again. It is to insist that these places have not always been what they are now, and need not remain so.

This is why NCHERS speaks not only of remembrance, but of restitution. Memory that does not reach towards justice is sentimentality. The families on the Cape Flats remain disconnected from their ancestral land, and the areas from which they were removed retain almost no markers of the lives that once thrived there. The slow, incremental erasure of this history is not accidental; it serves those who would prefer that the moral debt of dispossession quietly expire. Our task is to refuse that expiry, to keep the account open until it is honourably settled.

After the walk, we will gather at the Newlands Cricket Experience Museum to hear the journalist and author Dougie Oakes reflect on the history of anti-apartheid resistance through sport, and on the extraordinary role played by the non-racial South African Council on Sport and its founder, Hassan Howa, whose principle, “no normal sport in an abnormal society”, captured a moral clarity we would do well to recover. That we hold this gathering at a cricket ground, a place where the politics of race and belonging were once fiercely contested, is fitting. It reminds us that the struggle for a just society was waged on every terrain, including the playing field.

We invite Capetonians of every faith and none to join us. Come and walk. Come and remember the sons and daughters of Claremont and Newlands. Come and honour the legacy of Imam Abdullah Haron. And come to affirm, with your feet, a simple and stubborn conviction: that what was unjustly taken must be remembered, named, and one day, God willing, restored.

Heritage, rightly understood, is not a monument to the past. It is a demand upon the present.

The Walk of Remembrance takes place on Thursday, 24 September 2026. The NCHERS AGM begins at 9am at the Newlands Cricket Experience Museum (the Snakepit Building), with the walk departing the Newlands Cricket Ground at 9.30am, followed by Dougie Oakes at 11am. Refreshments and exhibitions will be available. DM

Dr A Rashied Omar is Imam of the Claremont Main Road Masjid and a steering committee member of the Newlands/Claremont Heritage, Environmental Justice and Restitution Society (NCHERS), and teaching professor of Islamic studies and peacebuilding at the Keough School of Global Affairs, University of Notre Dame.