Stellarton – When Halifax Regional Municipality officially apologized for razing Africville this week, Irvine Carvery couldn’t help but cry.
He wasn’t alone. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house after decades of struggle finally came to an end.
“When the mayor read the apology….I used to hear my grandmother crying all the time. It stopped,” Carvery said.
Carvery was born in Africville and was 13 when it was razed to make way for the MacKay Bridge.
Although written history dates the origins of Africville back to 1798, oral history has people residing in the tiny community on the Bedford Basin decades before, when people began arriving in the area.
Residents who lived in the area were poor. It took a full century for the people who lived there to scrape together the money to purchase the land they’d lived on for years. The first land purchase was done by three families who pooled their money to buy a plot of land in 1848.
“It was a struggle to survive,” says Carvery. “Nobody would give us a mortgage, nobody would give us a loan. You had to have all of the money, up front, and it took 100 years of savings to get that in some cases.”
But still, the community prospered and grew.
“We needed each other to survive,” says Carvery.
Work was scarce for the men of Africville – one of the few jobs they could find on the waterfront was a task the white stevedores refused: emptying the coal and salt from the ships.
It was back-breaking work, the salt and coal packed in to the roof of the storage rooms, requiring the men to swing a pickaxe to loosen it. But it was work, and meant putting bread on not only their table, but also their neighbour’s.
“When my father found work, my mom would go to the store and buy two loaves of bread and give one to the neighbour who wasn’t working,” Carvery said. “That’s just what we did. There were no doors locked in Africville, because nobody stole. Why would you steal from someone in the same situation as you?”
Africville had its own church, its own hall and its own post office. But even though the people who lived there paid the same taxes on their land as other Halifax residents, they were routinely denied the same services. There were no streets that were paved, no garbage pickup, no water or sewer. If a fire occurred, the home would be nothing but ash by the time the fire department arrived.
“The only services we got was the service no one else wanted,” said Carvery. “The railroad went right through our community, splitting it in half. There were no warning signs, no lights. We’d have to go across three railroad crossings to go across. There was no regard for our safety. People lost limbs, lost animals. It was nothing to see someone’s dog severed in half in the tracks on your way to school.”
