I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that local resident, Angela Barberton, is the reason why Grey Dam isn’t a landfill for carelessly discarded beer bottles or why the Albany Road Cemetery remains respectably intact after being pillaged for its iron and stone.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that local resident, Angela Barberton, is the reason why Grey Dam isn’t a landfill for carelessly discarded beer bottles or why the Albany Road Cemetery remains respectably intact after being pillaged for its iron and stone.
Barberton, who answers her telephone, “Hello, how can I help?”, supports her old-fashioned sense of community pride and duty with an timeless facility to care for it.
I met Angela Barberton after nearly a year of living in Grahamstown. I had heard the local lore about a long-skirted woman who cleans and maintains some of the town’s historical sites and recreational areas including the toposcope, the Bible Monument and the garden around the statue at the 1820 Settler’s Monument – to name just a few. I wanted to know if this woman was for real, or if the fantastic tales of her local heroism were just small-town fables.
After photographing Barberton for more than a month as she went about her committed five-day-a-week routine, I understood that this was no folk tale. At 72, Barberton has the energy of few half her age with a capacity for thankless jobs like no one I have ever encountered. Needless to say, I was even more eluded by her undeterred ethic.
How, in the face of so much negligence – the careless tossing of rubbish and polluting of streams, the abuse and neglect of the very places reserved for the public’s enjoyment of the environment – could someone’s sense of purpose still remain so intact?
“I like to see things beautiful,” Barberton once told me, offering an inadequate explanation for what motivates her meaningful work. I realized that the values driving Barberton are so imbedded in her nature that they evade even her own conscious awareness.
Barberton’s impact on Grahamstown goes well beyond what meets the eye. She was instrumental in increasing the abundance of water flowing through the local spring by clearing the invasive trees and alien black wattle surrounding it.
As the Eastern Cape continues to endure drought and the safety of municipal water seems to be under constant debate, this is an especially valuable resource for residents of both Grahamstown East and West alike. She has paved and repaved the pathway from the road to the spring and only asks that its users act respectfully, reminding them of their humble status with a sign that reads: “God’s Property”.
Whatever the call Barberton is responding to – whether she sees her work as civil duty or spiritual discipline – she earnestly regards her task of maintaining Grahamstown’s public spaces and remains a vigilant advocate of their proper management. She goes about her daily work with the quiet diligence of a weaver, without a whisper of a begrudging word for this mission that has become such a part of who she is.
