Promised Land. Karl Kemp
across the provincial border and displacement from throughout the Western Cape.
In 2011, ten years after the Grootboom case and two years before the formation of the revolutionary EFF and the start of the new land debate, violent protests erupted to the north of Bloekombos. The protesters demanded service delivery and housing, setting fire to tyres and blockading Old Paarl Road. They were swiftly dispersed by the city, which owns large tracts of land on that side of the highway. The Borcherdses maintain that the city acts far more decisively when their own land is invaded, and that squatters know that private land is a different matter altogether, although events in the rest of the Western Cape point to a different reality.
On a Thursday afternoon in 2013, the Borcherdses’ son Tiaan was accosted in the farmhouse by a group of six black men. He was tied up and held at gunpoint while the robbers systemically looted the house and went on to relieve the staff in the office of their cellphones and jewellery before escaping to the north over the neighbouring wine farm and into Bloekombos, where a shoot-out with police ensued. A female police officer was shot dead. Anzette came home that evening to find several Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (Hawks) officials sitting with Tiaan, going through the weapons that had been seized from two of the intruders who had been captured. A third intruder was later apprehended in the Eastern Cape after witnesses on a bus noticed the wounded man sitting in a pool of blood.
In 2016, a mere week after the trial of the three intruders concluded, Alfred was stabbed by three coloured youths after he caught them in the process of raiding his fields for vegetables. He spent ten days in intensive care. ‘We broke our own rules trying to play vigilante,’ he tells me.
According to the Borcherdses, they had seen all of these troubles coming. By 2004, local residents had seemingly given in to the inevitable. The owner of the smallholding on the edge of land between Wallacedene and Avondrust sold up and shipped out, and his land was bought by the municipality. It had acted as a buffer zone between Avondrust and the encroaching Wallacedene. The Borcherdses showed me the old farmhouse in which this man had lived, barely visible between a forest of washing lines and shacks across the dam. He was apparently fond of firing off his shotgun at night as a pre-emptive warning to the residents of Wallacedene.
It was this small strip of property at the bottom of Avondrust, and eventually right up against the vibracrete wall bordering Wallacedene, that was settled by shack dwellers in the years following the man’s sale to the state, and which would eventually spill over onto Avondrust.
In February 2017, the occupation comprised a group of ten people. This, Alfred said, he was capable of handling. But like so many other landowners, he points to 2018 as the year things escalated. This was the year when the new land debate and, crucially, EWC entered the public discourse.
The squatter camp grew, and the city cleared the shacks as best it could. A day later, they had been erected again, plus more. From March, Anzette became an obsessive chronicler, waking in the mornings and making notes from her living room of the increase of shacks – which ones were new, which people were seen living there and which people were helping with the construction – knowing that it was only a matter of time before the occupation spilt over onto their land.
In the afternoons, as she drove home from work, she again took notes as she passed the settlement, and registered complaints with the city with almost daily frequency, keeping all the correspondence, communication and case numbers in a file, having been advised to ‘keep a paper trail’ by other farmers. For many days, she says, she logged two complaints, producing two reference numbers – one in the morning and one in the afternoon, during which as many as six shacks were built while she was at work.
Theft of the Borcherdses’ vegetable stocks increased exponentially. Rubbish piles became mountains that poisoned the dam, hampering their irrigation systems. The land closest to the dam went unseeded and still lies fallow. Neighbours started making excuses not to visit, refusing to drive the road to the farm, preferring to meet the Borcherdses in nearby Durbanville. Days without electricity became a common occurrence as power substations were vandalised and stripped of copper wire. Alfred says that the vitriol hurled at them by children when they drove past in the bakkie became progressively worse. Because the kids are migrants and local schools simply don’t have space to accommodate them, they have nothing to do all day, he says.
The next thing they had to do was add fencing and metal coverings to prevent petrol bombs coming through the farmhouse windows. On 2 October 2018, the city made a clean sweep of the buffer zone, demolishing all structures in the area. That evening someone retaliated. Anzette recalls being at home at around 7 p.m. when a strange glow caught her eye. Then came the call from the farmworkers on the property – petrol bombs had been thrown and the fields were alight. Anzette fled the farm in her nightclothes, while Alfred and Tiaan went out to combat the flames. The entire farming community pitched in – Alfred’s brother, who farms on the neighbouring property, brought his team, and the farm watch from Joostenberg across the highway showed up as well.
Alfred does not believe that the culprits were the people who had lived in the demolished shacks. Whenever there is action by the city, he says, a ‘criminal element awakens’, one that has violent intent and which he believes is ‘from outside’ and has a political motive.
Two weeks later, the Borcherdses were watching the news and a story popped up regarding the city’s conflict with the squatters in the buffer zone. The city had applied for an interdict that allowed the occupiers to stay on the land as long as they didn’t expand further. The Borcherdses had never been approached or kept in the loop about the court proceedings regarding the piece of land verging on their property.
Anzette phoned the lawyers involved and obtained copies of the interdicts that were intended to regulate subsequent proceedings, according to which further construction of shacks was prohibited and signs advising of the interdict were to be placed at strategic intervals along the farm road. According to Anzette, this was never done. Expansion and construction continued throughout the year.
On 5 December, a community leader purporting to be the chairperson of the local branch of the South African National Civic Organisation (SANCO), which is aligned with the ANC, approached the Borcherdses and begged them not to evict a certain section of the squatters, which had expanded onto Avondrust, as they were in the process of being relocated by the city to alternative accommodation as part of the deal struck earlier. He gave his name as Chippa and claimed to represent sixty-two households that the Borcherdses subsequently agreed not to evict should it come to that.
The Borcherdses’ farmhouse became a rotating cast of characters. ‘Teams’, as Alfred calls them, would come knocking; they would be received at the gate and Alfred would take them to the break room to discuss demands regarding the land. He’d long ago started carrying his firearm at all times. Chippa, an ANC ward councillor called Siphiwe, representatives from the Ses’khona People’s Rights Movement, City of Cape Town officials, a politically connected pastor from Wallacedene named Jeffrey (who eventually arranged for mayor Dan Plato to visit) and AfriForum all made an appearance. Of these, Chippa and Mamma Florence, another squatter leader, had the ear of the Borcherdses.
Pastor Jeffrey told them that plot farming was taking place, that Cyril Ramaphosa was his friend and that people were making money from this occupation; that early on, a black lawyer visited the community and walked away with thousands of rands for promised legal help.
The EFF also turned up in the area, but intermittently, promising to assist all land occupiers and invaders in their cause, but ultimately did not carry the matter through.
In April 2019 things came to a head.
On 18 April, Chippa again knocked on the Borcherdses’ door. He was leaving, going home to the Eastern Cape for the Easter weekend. He’d heard strange rumblings in the camp, he said, and pleaded with the Borcherdses to ‘keep an eye out’.
On 22 April, Easter Monday, there was a flurry of construction on the land. Anzette asked Mamma Florence to find out what was going on. Mamma Florence reported back that these new arrivals were ‘strangers’ who would not listen to her, and that they’d told her that many more were en route from the Eastern Cape. Anzette called the various City of Cape Town officials