Promised Land. Karl Kemp
the idea that ‘land’ generally was stolen, and therefore ‘land’ generally must be taken back.
Activists tend to speak about ‘the land’ in symbolic terms. In contrast, framing these real issues in specific, workable terms makes them easier to try to ameliorate or solve, but doing so also makes it much harder to justify supremely invasive changes to the constitutional order.
One consequence of how the land debate has lately been framed occurred in 2019, when the story of a murdered landowner battling a land grab in the Western Cape Winelands came to be grossly misrepresented as a symbolic moment in the fight for land between black and white South Africans, when really it was something altogether more personal.
Much like the push for accelerated, broad-based ‘land reform’, in reality, it’s all about the money.
3
A Winelands Murder
ENKANINI IS AN informal settlement in the Western Cape town of Stellenbosch. The name translates to ‘the struggle’. It is, and will likely remain, unserviced, meaning that the local municipality cannot provide basic amenities, such as water and electricity. Until the site was cleared by squatters, it was dense bush abutting Stellenbosch’s industrial area – a hill of eroding soil that cannot safely hold structures or be paved. It is a lawless place, where the police rarely enter and people live largely by their own rules.
The man who tells me this is Mzwandile Ketse, a community leader in the neighbouring formal township of Kayamandi and a former ward councillor. In 2012, when I covered a service delivery protest in the area, he explained to me how Enkanini was formed, and why.
Mr Ketse, who is Xhosa, came to Kayamandi (which means ‘nice home’) in 1992 from the Eastern Cape, caught up in the huge waves of migration resulting from the abolition of influx control and the gradual move to democracy that coalesced after the 1985 state of emergency. Millions came to the Western Cape’s urban centres from the Eastern Cape in search of a better life. One of South Africa’s most famous townships, Khayelitsha, was founded at this time to accommodate this trickle-turned-flood and is now home to more than a million people.
Prior to that, it was difficult and illegal, though not impossible, for black people to settle in the area. The Western Cape had been declared a ‘coloured labour preference’ area in 1955, and Kayamandi was established under the framework of the Group Areas Act, part of wide-scale social engineering that saw large parts of the native Afrikaans-speaking coloured population forcibly moved to what is today Cloetesville and Idas Valley, suburbs on the outskirts of Stellenbosch.
The black township constructed as part of this plan, and which came to be called Kayamandi, was small and sat behind the Pappegaaiberg industrial zone. It was well planned, vastly outnumbered in scale by the white and coloured populations, and strongly regulated by law and local authority, until in-migration from the Eastern Cape began.
Mr Ketse settled in an informal section of Kayamandi known as O-Zone. He became an ANC ward councillor, joining and quitting various civic organisations in the area but always maintaining a finger on the pulse of the community, which was far more vocal in the new South Africa and clamouring for the benefits of state initiatives like the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) introduced in the mid-1990s.
By 2012, the area had been largely serviced, and there was a semblance of permanence and order. Though the shanty houses were still largely constructed from zinc, wood and plastic, many had been partially formalised and expanded, in sharp contrast to the tiny makeshift shacks in Enkanini.
Mr Ketse explained to me that the formal houses are usually inhabited by large families. Eventually, the children wish to move out and get married but have not accumulated any wealth to strike out on their own. Government seems to always be on the back foot when it comes to the provision of housing, and by now the RDP has been roundly declared a failure. As Mr Ketse says, ‘There are always promises after promises after promises.’
Enter the phenomenon of the backyard dwelling, the vehicle by which Enkanini emerged from the overcrowding of O-Zone.
A backyarder is someone who lives in a self-constructed shack in the backyard of a formal house, such as one of the original township dwellings or one built by government as part of its housing delivery. There are never enough houses to go around, and there is a lot of money to be made in the illicit rental market, so shacks are ‘farmed’ on any open property – generally just one but often far more. These are rented out to new arrivals and younger family members. As a result, the formally planned township becomes cramped, leading to hygiene and service delivery issues, which leads to dissatisfaction. Backyard shacks often spill onto the streets, and in particularly bad cases start to vastly outnumber formal houses, leading to small islands of brick and mortar in the middle of a sea of shacks.
The lack of housing provision by a centralised government that is constitutionally mandated to do so, and spent much of the early 1990s promising such, has led to people taking matters into their own hands. In 2019, Professor Ivan Turok of the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) noted that according to Gauteng province’s own statistics, backyard dwellings increased by 200 per cent between 2001 and 2016. No surprise then when stories of shacklords, who build up to sixteen shacks on a single government plot, make the news. It’s good income. In this situation lies the basic fact of a South African ‘land grab’.
Enkanini was born of such a land grab, when rioting for service delivery that quite literally cannot be granted led to an impasse, and a mass of backyarders and new arrivals settled on the slope behind the industrial area. Mr Ketse tells me that communication in this context is sorely lacking. The community isn’t informed by their leaders that what they seek from the municipality is difficult, if not impossible. The municipality will make promises and sometimes they will be fulfilled, but it is never enough. Provincial government is often hamstrung by budget constraints and regulated spatial planning. The township was never designed to accommodate so many people, because who among the original National Party planners saw the sun setting on apartheid? Meanwhile, backyarders have no legal recourse in cases of eviction. When they get the chance to speak out, they invariably complain of being unable to pay rent. Often, a landlord will jack up rent simply because someone else can afford a higher rate and the original backyarder is left homeless.
Kayamandi proper is planned and serviced, with named roads, electricity and plumbing, and is laid out according to a logical structure devised at a time when a large-scale influx of black people from outside the Western Cape seemed unthinkable. At its centre, O-Zone is partially serviced. Purely by virtue of having existed for almost three decades, it has established roads and has taken on its own shape, but it clearly falls far short of its older surroundings in terms of liveability. And then there is Enkanini, now officially on the outskirts of Kayamandi, edging into the suburbs of Stellenbosch – a cluster of shacks on a slope of eroding soil with no access to plumbing or any other kinds of service, uncovered electric cables criss-crossing above it like a net. There is no space left, but incomers arrive every day from Kraaifontein and Cape Town and Grabouw, all fleeing poverty, and those who have lived here for a while have given birth to a new generation. None of these people can afford to send their children away or pay rent in a more formal area, or even pay rent for a backyard shack to those old or lucky enough to have a formal house with a yard.
By 2018, the only space left into which the township could expand was the land behind Kayamandi, stretching along the industrial zone and culminating in a farm estate. This land belonged to Stefan Smit, a sixty-two-year-old Afrikaans farmer whose great-grandfather had bought Koopmanskloof in 1896, from which Louisenhof, Smit’s wine farm, was apportioned. Divorced with two daughters in their twenties, Smit lived with his partner, Zurenah.
A man called Midas Wanana is credited with launching the occupation of Stefan Smit’s land, along with an individual known only as ‘Madiba’, who Mr Ketse says is a devout EFF supporter, part of the new wave of black revolutionaries who arrived in the area with an explicit intention to cause disruption.
According to Mr Ketse, Wanana has been engaged in land struggles for twenty years. He is from the Eastern Cape, was part of a ratepayers association and was a ward councillor at some