The Heritage Designation of Oom Koos's Carport

The trouble began, as trouble in this country so reliably does, with a form.

Specifically, it was Form HER-7(b), Application for the Listing of a Structure of Historical or Cultural Significance, which Oom Koos Breytenbach submitted to the Stellenbosch Municipal Heritage Office on a Tuesday morning in March, accompanied by fourteen photographs, a sworn affidavit from his neighbour Danie Esterhuizen (who will sign anything if you bring rusks), and a covering letter describing his carport as, and I quote, "a living monument to the soul of Afrikaner perseverance."

The carport had been built in 1987 using corrugated iron, four fence posts of uncertain provenance, and a quantity of baling wire whose origin Oom Koos declined to specify under any circumstances. It listed slightly to the northeast. It had housed, across its thirty-seven-year career, two Datsuns, a riding lawnmower that never once started, and Oom Koos's daughter's boyfriend for six weeks in 2003 — a period the family referred to only as The Unpleasantness.

The reason for the application was straightforward: the municipality had written to inform Oom Koos that the structure violated six separate bylaws and would need to come down. Oom Koos, who had by that point been in correspondence with the municipality for eleven years about an unrelated matter involving a storm-water drain and had developed what his wife called "a methodology," understood immediately that the correct response was not to dismantle the carport but to make it impossible to dismantle.

The Heritage Office, which occupies three rooms in a building that itself probably qualifies for listing, received the application and did what heritage offices do: it convened a subcommittee. The subcommittee met twice, once in April and once in June, having spent the intervening weeks establishing whether a quorum required three members or four and whether one of the members, Mr. Hendricks, was actually on the subcommittee or merely thought he was. By July they had determined that a site visit was necessary.

Oom Koos prepared for the site visit with the seriousness of a man who has watched enough of this country's theatre to know that presentation is everything. He erected a small handwritten placard inside the carport reading: ERECTED 1987. ON THIS SITE, IN THIS STRUCTURE, WERE SHELTERED THE DREAMS AND THE VEHICLES OF AN ORDINARY FAMILY. He placed a single geranium in a pot on the concrete lip. He asked his wife Miemie to bake a koeksister, and when she asked for whom, he said "history."

The three officials arrived in a bakkie that smelled powerfully of air freshener. They walked around the carport once. One of them photographed the placard. Another photographed the geranium. The third, a young woman named Ms. Fourie who had a master's degree in heritage studies and the expression of someone who had made certain choices in life and was still processing them, stood for a long time in front of the baling wire and wrote something in her notebook.

The report, issued in September, ran to nineteen pages. It concluded, after sections on historical context, structural typology, community memory, and tangential material about similar structures in Paarl, that the carport was "of potential vernacular significance" and recommended further study. Further study would require another subcommittee. The subcommittee would need terms of reference. The terms of reference would be drafted by a working group.

The demolition order, pending this process, was suspended indefinitely.

Oom Koos received the news by letter, read it at his kitchen table, and said nothing for a moment. Then he told Miemie that he was thinking of nominating the storm-water drain as well.

The municipality, for its part, sent a follow-up letter in October inquiring whether Oom Koos had any documentary evidence linking the carport to events of broader cultural significance. He wrote back within the week. He enclosed Danie Esterhuizen's affidavit, a photograph from 1994 showing the carport in the background of a birthday party, and a personal testimonial in which he described, with considerable feeling, sheltering under the carport's roof during the rain on the night Nelson Mandela was elected president and thinking, as the water dripped through the corrugated iron onto his left shoulder, that something in this country was finally, slowly beginning.

Ms. Fourie, when this letter reached her desk, read it three times. She wrote "see attached" on a routing slip and forwarded it upward.

As of the date of writing, the working group has not yet been constituted. The carport stands. The geranium, unexpectedly, has thrived.

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