Sydney Thomas Petersen — a special man from a special family who lived through a special time

He had a way about him, wise, knowledgeable, with an ironic – at times wicked – sense of humour. His father was Sydney Vernon Petersen, the well-known Riversdale-born educationist and exceptional and searingly melancholic poet of the Afrikaans language, and principal of the remarkable Athlone High School located in Silvertown, Cape Town.

Sydney Jnr was five years my senior and matriculated before I joined Athlone High in 1966. I hadn’t really known him, but over the past decade I saw him on and off. Sydney died recently at the age of 76. I write this as a tribute to a special man from a special family having lived through a special time. 

A year ago, Sydney Jnr asked me to prepare a preface to a book he was writing. The draft I read was a record of his life and times in a corner of a Cape Town suburb called Black River.

At first glance it appeared to be a parochial story about a sliver of Cape history. Not so: instead, we learn about how Black River was part of a precolonial history of cattle grazing in a setting stretching under the shadow of the majestic Table Mountain; how it bordered on the great wetlands of what became known as the Mowbray Golf Club, and by the Rondebosch Common bequeathed in perpetuity by Cecil John Rhodes to Cape Town’s citizens.

Black River was the passage between the earliest colonial settlements and the sandy expanses of what became known as the Cape Flats, the place where Cape Town’s people classified as “coloured” ended up living in largely dormitory suburbs.

I recognised so many of Petersen’s Black River references because for about two years – 1963 and 1964 – I lived there as a 10-year-old in-migrant from rural Paarl, first as a boarder with my father’s sister, Hester Kiewitz, followed by my entire family of six to live in Borden Road, about 10 houses down from where the Petersens resided.

Our move to Cape Town was prompted by the application of South Africa’s Group Areas Act of 1950, a cruel piece of legislation that created residential areas along strict racial lines (and where the state defined which “race” one belonged to).

Rural areas were hit first. Our Paarl neighbourhood was declared “white” as early as 1958 because the apartheid government anticipated less resistance there. Urban areas were within their menacing sights for mass evictions down the line in the mid-1960s, District Six and Black River included.

Group areas removals as they affected Black River are at the heart of Sydney Petersen Jnr’s memories. He records the moment his dad received a notice to vacate the family home.

Petersen Senior was a celebrated poet of the Afrikaans language, respected by many locally and internationally. He carried such a measure of respect among Afrikaans intellectuals that he could potentially have caused great embarrassment had the government decided to forcibly remove his family from the neighbourhood.

Sydney Vernon Petersen. (Photo: Supplied)