Did you know? Obs housed Apartheid pass office

By: Talia Meer

Despite the widespread view that Observatory has always been a "grey area" in terms of racialised social and spatial segregation, it was home to an Apartheid pass office.

The Black River Park complex was once home to one of the most significant sites of Cape Town's apartheid administration - the Bantu Administration Office.

This office, located at Standard House, Fir Street, included the pass office and the Bantu Commissioner's court.

Together with its sister office in Langa, Standard House organised and governed black peoples' lives within the city.

According to Sindiwe Magona's memoir, at the age of sixteen black children applied for their passbooks in Langa. Weeks or months later the passbooks were collected in Observatory.

Passbooks then had to be regularly updated.

Sealed letters were issued to passbook holders in Observatory, accounting for their employment status, and were taken to the Langa office.

This is where the letter was then read and the passbook validated for the approved time period.

Should a black person be caught within the white city without an updated passbook, their case was heard at the Langa or Observatory Commissioner's Courts, which were theatres of extreme racialised degradation as recorded by the Black Sash.

Marriages were also officiated at Standard House.

It seems counter-intuitive that the administration of black life under apartheid took place from Observatory, a white area.

But maybe this was the perfect location, on the periphery of the white suburb and the white city itself.

From here white officials could control black people's movement and employment without having to be in townships themselves.

The Salt River station and the N2, highway were major conduits to the townships of the Cape Flats.

The presence of compliant pass-seekers could be limited to the margins of the white city, and transgressors could be summarily prosecuted and removed.

All the while the peripheral location meant that the white residents of Observatory would not have had to witness the daily implementation of apartheid, if they did not want to.

Whatever the case, the history of Standard House, although removed from the physical landscape of Observatory, disrupts the popular idea of the space as a ※grey area§, outside of the logic of apartheid.

It calls into question the ways that we imagine the neighbourhood, and its place in the past and present of the city.