Chatsworth, South Africa’s largest inner-city Indian township outside mainland India, is celebrating and commemorating 60 years since it was founded in the 1960s.
This iconic Durban township borrows its name from a British dynasty spanning 17 generations and five centuries, a landmark town, once a farm, called Chatsworth, which became globally-renowned for its stunning sweep of art, landscape and hospitality, evolving across the colonial centuries that reflected the community, tastes, passions and interests of successive generations of the Devonshire family.
In 1848, Samuel Bennington named the township Chatsworth, located on the outskirts of Chesterfield in Derbyshire.
In the 1950s, Indians from across settled communities in Durban were forcibly relocated to Chatsworth under the ruling National Party’s stringent Group Areas Act legislation.
Tabloid Newspapers, KZN’s largest independently owned group of community-based newspapers, since the 1990s, and publishers of the Merebank & Chatsworth Tabloid will publish a special commemorative feature to chronicle the founding residents of this renowned town, with many of its children and grandchildren now spreading their wings throughout SA and globally.
“We have served the resilient community of Chatsworth, particularly focused on the readers, advertisers and a plethora of diverse community-oriented organisations, including the scores of businesses and schools. We staunchly believe that we are not going to let this epic piece of history be forgotten in a rapidly changing South African landscape,” said Rishaad Mahomed, group publisher and managing director.
“The historical perspective of Chatsworth, its humble birth spanning its phenomenal development and growth and its current image as a cacophony of sights and sounds, mirrors a rich history, legend and legacy of a community that was uprooted under the apartheid Group Areas Act in the 1960s.
“This community picked itself up by its bootstraps and made good of life and its economic survival under very trying conditions on all the frontlines of housing, community, education, business, sports and social welfare and self-help organisations that gave birth to a unique culture of volunteerism and the habit of giving back to the community.
“The sons of the soil are established footprints mainly in the economic hub of Johannesburg and children of the founding fathers have spread their wings across the world. We aim to recapture this pivotal era in history and these fascinating stories will be retold,” Mahomed said.
Our own Chatsworth is Little India revisited, as manifested by the colourful array of businesses, cottage industries and a tight-knit community of over 200 000.
In the 1950s, the city council of the Durban City Corporation became the architects of Chatsworth under the Spatial Housing Planning Act.
Chatsworth was earmarked and farms were balkanised into a dozen inter-leading suburbs that created a new landscape as white-washed dormitory, single and double-storey houses began taking shape and mushrooming on hectares of rolling green lands where Indians once farmed on banana and sugarcane plantations.
This grand architect took root and shape in 1964, a mass exodus when droves of Indian families were resettled across this wide expanse of a new town located on Durban’s south-western flanks that took on a new social, economic and political life of its own.
To mark this commemorative event, the Merebank & Chatsworth Tabloid is publishing a special feature and we invite advertisers and well-wishers to contact Nancy Naidoo on 083-776-0171, 031-581-1800 or sales3@tabloidmedia.co.za to feature their business in this supplement.
For all editorial content, stories and photographs from down the memory lane, contact Marlan Padayachee via WhatsApp on 083-759-1944 or email marlan.padayachee@gmail.com.
