Camp Lwandle: Rehabilitating a migrant labour hostel at the seaside

摘要

In southern African narratives of migrant labour, hostels and compounds arerepresented as typical examples of colonial and apartheid planning. Visual andspatial comparisons are consistently made between the regulatory power of hostelsand those of concentration camps. Several of these sites of violence andrepression are today being reconfigured as sites of conscience, their artefactualpresence on the landscape being constructed as places of remembrance. In thistrajectory, a space of seeming anonymity in Lwandle, some 40 km outside ofCape Town, was identified by the newly established museum, at the beginningof the twenty-first century, as a structure of significance. The migrant labourcompound in Lwandle, of which Hostel 33 is the last remnant, was designed byplanners and engineers and laid out as part of a labour camp for male migrantworkers in the 1950s. This article explores the ambitious project initiated in2008, by the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum (and funded largely by the USAmbassadors Cultural Restoration Fund), to restore Hostel 33. Although Hostel33 was not a very old structure, having been built in 1958/9, nor was it easilyconsidered to have conventional architectural significance, its material presencein present-day Lwandle represents a reminder of the conditions of life in thelabour camp. The article traces the work entailed in the restoration processthrough paying attention to both the built fabric and its materiality, and by givingan account of the explorations into finding ways to restore the hostel to themuseum through making it into a site of significance. In place of the centralityof the building as the object of restoration, the work shifted to considering howthe hostel could function most effectively as a stage and destination for theMuseum’s narrations of the past. Retaining and maintaining Hostel 33 was lessconcerned with the fabric as an empirical fact of the past, than with its projectioninto an envisaged future for museum purposes.