Promised Land. Karl Kemp
released, but Rapport’s senior reporters were confident that the police had shifted the official line of inquiry from a home invasion to a premeditated assassination, with Smit’s wife Zurenah suspected as the mastermind of an elaborate scheme.
It took a few months for all the details to come out. In December, it emerged that Zurenah had allegedly falsified Stefan Smit’s will in January 2019, six months before his murder and around four months after the first attempted evictions. This information emerged from pleadings handed in at the Cape High Court by Smit’s two surviving daughters, who had roped in handwriting specialists. A week before that, a judge had ordered that Zurenah be barred from acting as executor of Smit’s will. And long before that, smatterings of rumour had emerged in the press that Smit’s daughters from his first marriage had actually stood to inherit millions, and that there were suspicions about the latest will, in which Zurenah was the chief beneficiary, as well as standing to take ownership of Louisenhof.
This rubbished the idea, hinted at by the New York Times, that Smit’s murder was linked to land conflict stemming from the fact that ‘Mr. Smit and his friends hold vast tracts of land brutally snatched from African inhabitants generations ago and deliberately kept in white hands for decades to come’.
On the day that Mr Ketse and I drove to Azania after Smit’s murder, we spoke with an old friend of his whom we found walking purposefully along the first row of the settlement. It was a slow day in Azania. Dark, spent clouds hung in the air, having disgorged desperately needed rain onto the Winelands the previous day. Half of the shacks were empty shells. Some industrious younger men were erecting or renovating. Azania is far less clustered than Marikana and Enkanini, where we’d just braved washed-out dirt roads to rise above the smog. Several times we got stuck and Mr Ketse had to climb out and help me navigate the ravines that the rain and streams had lashed out of the earth. Inevitably, a crowd would form. The children especially loved chanting ‘umlungu’ (white person) at me as if they were from deepest rural Eastern Cape, despite this being an urban township less than a kilometre from the umlungu part of town.
Mr Ketse’s friend made it clear to me through Mr Ketse’s translation that Wanana and Madiba were not the only powers in Azania: that he and others like him were older residents of Kayamandi, and that they were the most deserving of the occupied land. I realised that not only were there two or more power blocs in the occupation itself, but all of this was steadily riling up residents from Kayamandi – those who’d been there longest and whose lives had been severely disrupted by the constant fuss the newcomers caused. The housing waiting list, an apparently sacred document kept under lock and key in the municipal offices, had been all but torn to shreds by the occupation.
News reports on the initial invasion in 2018 stated that the housing list comprised 22 000 people. Some who had been on the list for over a decade were forced out of the queue as the municipality panicked and pacified those who shouted loudest.
‘There are people who come here for three years and they get a house,’ Mr Ketse said. ‘My daughter is twenty-two years. I am still living in a shack. How corrupt is this municipality? If you are not the right person, you become an enemy to them, the officials of the housing department. How can someone who comes in 2010 get a house before somebody who is actually a founder of O-Zone?’
I constantly badgered Mr Ketse about EWC. Why fight for land when EWC was on the cards? He shook his head and intimated that many people did not believe that the ANC would deliver on that promise; not that this excused the behaviour of the occupiers.
‘When you do things, you must do them legal,’ he preached to me in the car as we wound our way through the mud and shacks. ‘Whatever you do, if you do it by force, in the form of grabbing, someone will suffer. When two bulls are fighting, which bull will suffer? It is the grass.’
Wanana paid the ultimate price for his involvement in the conflict. On 15 August 2019, two months after Smit was murdered, and almost exactly a year after the saga began, Wanana was shot and killed. Rumours were that local taxi bosses, the real players of any township economy and notorious for their influence and criminality, were involved. To my mind, the real culprits are most likely those who’d seen the housing list thrown to the wind in the wake of the occupations. Perhaps they had sought the help of the taxi bosses. No one can say for sure.
The media weren’t as enamoured with the story as they had been with Stefan Smit’s, and it received little coverage. Wanana’s brother made a statement the day after the killing: ‘He was supposed to participate in the march today. In the early hours, maybe after 4 a.m., he received a call to move his car in the road, as it was blocking someone. When he got to his car the two tyres on the right were flat, it looks like they were slashed. When he went to check them, someone opened fire on him.’
A friend who had been with him had apparently ducked for cover as ‘multiple shots were fired’. Wanana’s widow added that her husband was killed ‘for being at the forefront of addressing land issues in Stellenbosch’. The police noted only that it appeared that the suspects were three men, and that the motive had yet to be established.
Stefan Smit’s murder made international news for all the wrong reasons. For the New York Times and many others, the land occupation was a poetic representation of black dispossession and historical injustice, and Smit’s death an inevitable sentence passed on a history of blood and conquest. For those who had been apprehensively following the talk of EWC and the radical rhetoric of black leaders who believed that farm murders were intrinsically caught up in the struggle for land and at the behest of a shadowy black force, it was the inevitable first shot across the bow of a coming uhuru.
Neither of these theories hold water. The black occupiers of Louisenhof had zero ties to the land in Stellenbosch. In fact, Louisenhof had been founded as a winery in 1701, some seventy-odd years before the Dutch burghers first made contact with the Xhosa over the Fish River, 900 kilometres away. Perhaps the occupiers were infused with the spirit of land reclamation, but their presence in the area dates back less than half a century, and in substantial numbers only since the early 1990s. This in contrast with coloured people, who certainly suffered dispossession here, first as the Khoikhoi were displaced by the Dutch and then when coloured families were evicted under the Group Areas Act.
The most important question Smit’s death raised was how exactly the murder of a landowner would ensure victory for occupiers, because the fact remains that the tried-and-tested method of protesting and stubbornly refusing to move until services are delivered, no matter the waiting time, has worked far more effectively, ever since James Sofasonke Mpanza expanded Orlando in Johannesburg in this fashion in the first half of the twentieth century, which we’ll come to later in this story.
4
Trench Warfare
A KILOMETRE OF dirt road connects Alfred and Anzette Borcherds’s farm Avondrust to the paved roads of urban Kraaifontein on the fringes of Cape Town. One side of the road is bordered by farmland, the other by shacks. As Alfred and I drive this stretch, he starts saying something but goes mute when he notices a young man with his pants down, squatting next to one of the Borcherdses’ fallow orchards.
The story of the Borcherdses’ land travails begins in the informal settlement of Wallacedene, and it starts with a woman called Irene Grootboom. She was one of a group of people who’d been left in the lurch in the wake of the abolition of influx control in 1986. Wallacedene was a result of the subsequent in-migration, and most sources point to 1989 as the date of its establishment. According to Alfred, the area in which it now stands was first expropriated by the National Party around 1980 in order to build a double-lane highway that would connect to the N7, placing the land under government ownership.
Alfred likes to say that he knows the exact site of the smallholding that was first squatted. Academics have pinpointed it as being a small farm known as Uitkyk, where several coloured families made their home, rebuilding the crumbling farmhouse after the old farmer sold up and left.
This area consisted of fields at the start of the Winelands and on the periphery of Cape Town, with a small number of people owning large tracts of land. The view west to Cape Town and all the way to Lion’s Head was completely unobscured