Promised Land. Karl Kemp
was taking place on Avondrust – private property outside the municipality-owned buffer zone. She then called Siphiwe, the ANC ward councillor, who promised to come by but did not.
Anzette finally called city law enforcement again and requested an anti-land-invasion vehicle. While she waited, the construction increased exponentially. The buffer zone had filled up and expansion onto Avondrust was escalating. Two police vehicles eventually arrived but needed Public Order Policing (POP) personnel to be present in order for any action they took to be appropriate and legal. They made the request, but a POP unit never showed up. Anzette then called up the lawyers and asked them to get the papers ready for an interdict. She went to bed with the sound of construction ringing through the night.
Alfred opened a case of trespassing the following day. Anzette called the presidential hotline, which was over-logged. ‘Didn’t President Ramaphosa say there would be no land grabs?’ she later lamented. The Borcherdses’ advocate, Laurie Wilkes, called to say that the interdict was granted. Anzette was told that because the structures were on the Borcherdses’ private property, they were responsible for all the costs involved in the eviction, despite the fact that they had diligently reported every incident of trespass from out of the buffer zone, playing their part while the city failed to address the crisis on the strip it owned. Once again, Anzette went to bed to the sound of construction.
The next day necessitated the deployment of Capital Security Services, a private security firm Anzette had enlisted when the situation first started getting ugly. Ten armed men arrived, and one of them was sent to spy on the occupiers. He told Anzette that he overheard the occupiers threatening to burn down the farm if the shacks were removed. Alfred opened a case of intimidation. By now, the Borcherdses were desperate; they managed to claw out a meeting with Werner Bezuidenhout from the premier’s office and met him at the local police station. Alfred invited him to see the occupation. Bezuidenhout was dumbfounded by its scale. He called the premier’s office and advised them to bring forward the date of the eviction to Friday, as waiting until after the weekend would render the situation unresolvable.
The Borcherdses considered packing their bags and leaving everything behind that evening. The next morning, Thursday 25 April, the sheriff showed up to erect the ‘pending eviction’ signs necessitated by law. Again, one of the Capital Security staff walked among the occupiers incognito. He reported to Anzette that a local ‘pastor’ was selling off the plots. The Red Ants, a well-known private eviction services company, called to ask for the balance of their R160 000 fee, and Anzette duly paid up. By this time, the situation had escalated to the point where Anzette, her daughter, who was visiting from abroad, and her granddaughter evacuated the property.
On Friday morning, the various groups involved in the eviction gathered at the Brackenfell sports field. These included the city’s Anti-Land Invasion Unit, law enforcement, the Red Ants, a POP unit, and SAPS officials from Kraaifontein. The eviction proceeded, and the shacks that had spilt over onto the Borcherdses’ property were broken down without much fuss. The Red Ants called Anzette and asked her whether there was somewhere they could store the remains of the shacks, as there wasn’t enough space along the N1. Arrangements were made with a neighbouring farmer, and the materials were dumped there. The Red Ants promised to return on Monday to remove the heaps of tin sheeting and wood. By evening, reports had come in from the private security that the occupiers had started taking the materials from the heap. Anzette left the house again, leaving Alfred behind to safeguard their property.
By the next morning shacks had started reappearing. Construction continued, in Anzette’s opinion ‘more vigorously’ than ever before. By the afternoon, a man was spotted orating boldly amid a large crowd of occupiers on a guava patch. Tiaan sent up a drone to see the situation from above. Private security officers were again sent to infiltrate the squatter camp, and the man was identified as one Loyiso Nkohla, a man we’ll come to know a lot about in due course. He was telling the squatters that they had been illegally evicted, and that they must carry on the fight. This they did. From the drone footage, Anzette counted around 200 newly erected structures. They stretched across the Borcherdses’ property up to the farmworkers’ houses and beyond to their orchards. The sheriff’s signs had been stolen. The Red Ants quoted the Borcherdses another R160 000 for a new eviction. The family turned instead to a cheaper service provider, MS Adams Construction (Pty) Ltd. The building continued throughout Sunday.
On Monday 29 April, the various groups again conferred at the sports field. This time, they were slower in arriving, and the eviction started late. Again, the squatters appeared to let it go. Again, there was too much building material to remove from the area before nightfall, and the eviction was to be continued the following day. This time, the Borcherdses posted Capital Security officials to guard the piles of scrap. They made three citizen’s arrests as squatters attempted to take back the materials.
At 9.30 the next morning, the pump house at the dam was petrol-bombed. The SAPS reported to Anzette that their vehicles in the area had been similarly assaulted the previous night. It became clear that the occupiers would rebuild as necessary. The Borcherdses ultimately decided to take a stand; a neighbouring farmer agreed to bring in a bulldozer.
On 30 April 2019, the Borcherdses dug a long, deep trench in a perimeter around the occupation. In the process, they hit a water pipe that burst and flooded the area, but the sheriff was present and attested to the fact that it was an accident. Community leaders arrived to enquire about the trench. The neighbouring farmer in charge of the operation informed them that this was a border; this was where the occupation ended. It appeared that a stalemate had been reached.
The following day, a few interlopers could be seen picking up wood and sheet metal from the Borcherdses’ property, which was now protected by the trench. Anzette noted that the scene was ‘almost peaceful’. A day later, construction started on new shacks, from the buffer zone right up to the trench. Someone even built support struts on the trench’s bank to hold up shacks that were right on the edge. The space slowly filled up, but no shacks were built in the trench itself. Over the next few days, Anzette kept watch. The trench appeared to have worked, and the Borcherdses eventually dismissed the costly private security.
By the time I arrived months later, the trench was filled with rubbish. The shacks within the buffer zone were so congested that they had cut off the settlement’s access route. In June, a fire broke out and many shacks burnt down as fire services were unable to penetrate the forest. The situation was nasty, but the trench appeared to have created a reprieve for the Borcherdses. The week during the evictions cost the family in excess of R1 million. Anzette told me that Avondrust was now the ‘buffer farm’; if they were to sell up, or give up and leave, the ‘entire Bottelary district would be at risk’ of occupation. Even so, by 7 May, days after the national election, the family were in touch with the city about having Avondrust taken off their hands. On 8 May it started raining heavily, and the trench began filling up with water.
The Borcherdses have a decades-long history of trying to pre-empt this crisis. In 2008, they submitted a plan of action in terms of the city’s Spatial Development Framework, proposing that the land in the buffer zone be used as a starting point for development into an industrial zone. They’ve suggested to government the construction of a venture-farming project, zoning the twenty hectares or so of occupied land for a dual agri-residential area with the involvement of the national Department of Agriculture and Land Reform, as it was then known. Alfred concedes that getting money from government for such a venture is an incredibly bureaucratic process, and that in any case any small-scale farming here would probably be impossible now due to crop theft and pollution from Wallacedene.
Farmers like Alfred are necessarily long-term strategists because their livelihood relies on circulation, crop cycling, breeding terms and the sustainability of it all. Town planning, you would think, operates along the same lines. But nothing in South Africa is ever straightforward. Months later, there was news that squatters at the Klein Akker informal settlement in Kraaifontein, which Alfred had pointed out to me on our drive, had been evicted. The city, as in every other case of eviction, was forced to provide alternative emergency accommodation to the evictees, at least half of whom were white. It would appear that crises such as the Wallacedene housing issue are becoming increasingly non-racial.
The Borcherdses