‘Hutchinson: SHUNTED’: A story from both sides of the railway track

Mayor of Ubuntu Municipality, John Lolwana speaks at the premiere of the Hutchinson: SHUNTED on Tuesday, 24 September 2019. Photo by Mark Wessels

By Karin Schimke

27 Sep 2019

South African documentary photographer Eric Miller once passed through a tiny dot on the map of Northern Cape, a railway junction called Hutchinson, and felt compelled to tell the place’s story. Heritage Day in Victoria West saw the screening of Hutchinson: SHUNTED.

Church Street, Victoria West, is a fragment of the R63 which runs from east to west across the Bo Karoo. In the weak warmth that has emerged from the morning’s near freeze, it has the appearance of the main street in a one-horse town in a John Wayne flick. If there were hanging shop signs here, they would be squeaking in the thin wind. Any minute now, two characters will emerge, squaring up warily for a fast-draw, and long-held rivalries will be settled with a bullet.

The moon sets over Hutchinson Station. (Photo: Eric Miller)

It’s Heritage Day. Street children on the steps of the municipal building eat something out of a yellow plastic bag and then release it to blow and settle a few metres away. Across the way, one of the few buildings in town that doesn’t need a new lick of paint, starts to flicker into life. By the time the church bell rings two faint bells, there are more than 150 people sitting inside the Apollo Theatre.

It’s not as dramatic and camped-up as a Western shoot-out, but the tension inside the beautifully renovated old movie house cannot be denied. The audience is here for a screening of Hutchinson: SHUNTED, a documentary movie by Eric Miller and Laurine Platzky. Miller and Platzky, uitlanders from the big city of Cape Town, have worked in the area for more than a year, steadily gaining the locals’ trust in order to make this film, but there’s a wariness, still, about their intentions and their agenda, as evidenced by a rash of invective and vitriol on the town’s WhatsApp group before the screening.

Small town politics can be merciless and it doesn’t take much to activate suspicions. Hutchinson – or “Hakkieson” as it is often pronounced by locals – is a railway stop about 12km south east of Victoria West. It owes its existence to the first industrial revolution and the appearance of trains on the South African landscape, trains that were required to shuttle people, goods and diamonds between Kimberley and Cape Town. It was a junction where steam trains could fill up on water and coal and was a crucial link in the Northern Cape section of the great railway project of the early 20th century, devised by the apartheid government to lift poor Afrikaners out of poverty.

Hutchinson was never a major hub. At the height of its usefulness, around 200 trains a week would pass through and probably about 1,000 people lived there. Work and housing were provided by the railways: big, smart multi-room houses on one side of the tracks for the whites; little boxes for coloureds and blacks on the other side of the tracks and further away from the platforms. Apartheid town planning always contrived to make the commute to work for white people quick and easy, even here, where getting to work meant a two-minute walk for whites and a five-minute walk for everyone else.

To get to Victoria West, the people of Hutchinson used the “Koffiepot”, a little train that ran on a narrow track beside the R63 between the two places. But then steam trains were replaced by diesel and then electric engines. Jobs dwindled and faded into extinction. The whites left. Buildings were neglected, then plundered. About 400 people are left in the ruins of Hutchinson now.

They do not own title deeds for their homes – not for a lack of trying – and most of them are unemployed. There is a spaza shop run from someone’s kitchen, a crèche in the old post office building and a primary school.

“I have often photographed post-conflict scenes in war-ravaged countries,” Miller says, as he walks around the old station, crunching through the debris of fallen roofs, “and I’d think, ‘Imagine if this happened to communities in South Africa?’ And look,” he waves his arm around, “you no longer need to imagine. Except there’s been no war.”

The people of Hutchinson and Victoria West watch the documentary film Hutchinson: SHUNTED on the screen of the historic Apollo Theatre in Church Street, Victoria West. (Photo: Mark Wessels)

The Apollo seats 215 people and it is more than half full. Two taxis shuttled some residents of Hutchinson to Victoria West. The Koffiepot has long stopped chugging into town and the people of “Hakkies” are mostly marooned there because a one-way ticket to Victoria West costs R40, a hefty chunk if your income is subsistence level.

People have dressed up for today’s show, and it’s a mixed crowd: shweshe dresses, Pep-Stores chic and twin-sets and slacks. There is popcorn. There are apricot ball sweets. The lights dim. The chatter settles. A child cries and is taken out. The movie begins.

The sun comes up behind some blue gums. In the foreground, railway tracks. A cock crows and there’s a shot of two boys walking over the railway bridge as the words “Ek bly hier in die dorp” (“I live here in this town”), sung by Gert Vlok Nel, are overlaid on the opening scenes.

The silence in the Apollo is almost reverential. It’s a gripping film even if you didn’t grow up there: moody and melancholic, brilliantly edited to tell a story that is deeply affecting because of the sensitive interviews set against its dystopian scenes of ruin. Most moving of these is a scene in which a child plays house in the crumbling remains of the old white primary school, where twirls of human shit have petrified in the icy wind in every corner that still stands.

An audience member watches the film Hutchinson: SHUNTED (Photo: Mark Wessels)

As the closing credits roll, the audience claps enthusiastically and a few people get up to comment that they were deeply moved, that the movie had made them nostalgic and sad. Then the mayor of the Ubuntu municipality, John Lolwana, gets up to speak. He, too, seems moved by the film, so much so that he interrupts his own off-the-cuff speech for a heartfelt digression.

MC-Hutchinson-Schimke Mayor of Ubuntu Municipality, John Lolwana speaks at the premiere of the Hutchinson: SHUNTED on Tuesday, 24 September 2019. Photo by Mark Wessels

“There is a thing that bothers me, here in Victoria West itself,” he says. “There are people here that hate one another with a passion.” Backs stiffen. This is unexpectedly frank. It feels like we’re back in the street in a Western now, watching metaphorical cowboys facing off. Everyone here knows what he means. It’s about race, about ownership, entitlement, resistance to change – every possible South African tension you can name is swirling through the Apollo in Victoria West on Heritage Day 2019.

But here is one of the power men, the regional head honcho, and he seems to be kneeling down and laying a weapon in the dusty street.

I do not know enough about the town’s politics to know whether this analogy works, but the tone and urgency of the speech renders it at least a close approximation of what appears to be going on here.

“We fight too much,” Lolwana says, breezing easily between Afrikaans and English. “We blame one another too much and don’t get on with the work that needs to be done.”

He makes a plea for egos to be set aside so that development can take place. The speech is conciliatory and the applause is more than polite. It’s enthusiastic. In the foyer, over snacks and drinks, there is excited talk. Miller and Platzky are praised. The film is lauded. “Brilliant,” says Marlene Hendricks. She grew up in Hutchinson and proved to be the lynchpin of the documentary project.

“It is so democratic, so fair. It’s the most beautiful movie I have seen in years, all the pieces wonderfully laid out like a puzzle that comes together.”

Ezzard Alexander, son of the former principal of the Hutchinson Primary school, said in the documentary: “No one claims Hutchinson anymore.”

This is a community that has fallen through the cracks, that has been shafted and shunted. But today they have been seen and they have seen themselves. Miller and Platzky were careful to check with everyone who appeared in the film that they felt they had been fairly represented.

Louis Kruger, who supports the directors of the Apollo Development Association (ADA) in executing their strategic recover plan to use the Apollo Theatre as a hub for talent development, training and economic development, says: “Today was remarkable. The ADA has always wanted everyone from the region to feel welcome in the Apollo.”

Earlier, Kruger had shown me the tiny balconies at the back of the theatre where three hard benches, like pews, on either side of the projector room had been installed for coloured people to sit on during apartheid.

“What better way to feel welcomed into the theatre than to see yourself reflected on the big screen.”

Platzky said the residents of Hutchinson who appeared in the documentary had responded openly to her and Miller’s questions about their home:

“Listening was key to making this film. It seems no one has ever asked the people of Hutchinson for their views or their memories before. It was such a privilege for us to hear these stories and try to piece the big picture together.”

Since Miller shot many of the scenes last year, more walls have come down as people drive in from Victoria West to keep plundering the ruins for bricks. More of the signs in the station signal house have disappeared. And there’s not a drop of water left in the dam. The natural aridity of the Karoo is gnawing relentlessly and worryingly at the edges of every community here.

What can be done to preserve what is still there in Hakkies, the mayor had asked into the gallery. And would anything ever get done while the haters kept hating and the egos kept jostling?

“We’re not going to get rain,” Lolwana had told the audience, which, if it is united at all, is surely united in this one fear: that Northern Cape is running out of water, “because we live us-and-them. We are all reliant on rain. We need to walk this road together.”

It’s a bit of a long shot: invoking unity as a way to get the clouds to release rain over the semi-desert. But you can see where he’s coming from. And you can’t help thinking what powerful magic simple storytelling can release, how mollifying it can be to see and be seen, to listen and to be heard. DM

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