Promised Land. Karl Kemp
cauliflower, spinach and broccoli. There are farm stalls and signs advertising chickens for sale, and small roaming herds of cattle and goats, apparently untended. It is the same ground, the same flat, sandy land, that constitutes the Flats and lies beneath Nyanga and Philippi East, but what stands atop it is wholly different – a horticultural agricultural zone dubbed ‘the breadbasket of Cape Town’. Many reports estimate that the area produces up to 80 per cent of the vegetables sold in the metropole, both at informal markets and in big retailers. Before the construction of the Cape Flats took place from the 1950s onwards, it would have been described as the peri-urban edge of the Mother City. Now, the City of Cape Town has dubbed it ‘the urban edge’ – a misnomer, as the entire district is totally surrounded by dwellings.
This area, which encompasses most of Philippi, is peopled by a close-knit community of fourth-generation German farmers who find themselves surrounded by and at war with an ever-expanding slum. As a farming community, Philippi stands in marked, jaw-dropping contrast to the Winelands, and almost anywhere else in the country.
The forefathers of these Germans arrived at the Cape in three groups between 1860 and the 1880s, British rule having long been firmly entrenched, and the Cape’s European history stretching back more than two centuries. The colonial government had successfully tendered for and settled several groups of Germans elsewhere, including in the Eastern Cape and Natal.
Many of those that arrived had been specifically recruited from Lüneburg Heath in northern Germany, where the farmers had adapted to eking out produce from the ‘geest’ prevalent in that area – sandy, seemingly infertile land, much like that on the Cape Flats. And so, they were allocated land to till in the empty, unwelcoming dunes at Cape Town’s edges and told to sit tight and start farming, and that the government would eventually aid them in their endeavours.
By the 1880s South Africa was en route to becoming a union. The Boer Republics would fall by the turn of the century, and the remaining African kingdoms annexed or conquered by the British in their push for federalisation. The diamond fields of Kimberley and gold reefs of Johannesburg had flipped the country on its head, transforming it from an afterthought of European imperialism to a sought-after land of investment and opportunity.
The Cape was changing too. Class and societal structure had long been established. Afrikaans had started its march towards its classification as the language of the oppressor, and the rich Winelands of Paarl, Stellenbosch and other erstwhile homes of governors and lords had taken on a uniquely Capetonian character. The loot – land, gold and diamonds – had been divvied up, and such was the level of control that the First Boer War for independence in the far-flung northern republics had been lost by the British in 1881, laying the groundwork for the second, and infinitely more meaningful, war that would begin eighteen years later to end what had started with the discovery of diamonds.
The Germans were poor, with barely arable land and not much else. They arrived into an already stratified society split between the Europeans and what had become the ‘Coloured’ population – people of mixed ethnic background. The latter had found far more favour with the settlers than those peoples encountered in the Frontier Wars, and were an integral part of the uniquely Capetonian society that persisted until the twentieth century despite the discrimination often heaped upon them.
The arrival of the Germans also coincided with the first records of migration of black Africans from the eastern frontier. Approximately 8 000 were documented as living in the Cape at the time, predominantly from the Transkei and Ciskei, but also joined by various nomads and wanderers from across the country. In 1901 they were shunted into a prototype location – Ndabeni, in what is modern-day Pinelands. The removal was justified by the authorities in the wake of an outbreak of bubonic plague, which was attributed to the insanitary conditions in which the Africans allegedly lived.
Meanwhile, the promised aid from government never came to the Germans in Philippi. The colonial government had imported massive numbers of wattle from Australia to try to halt the expansion of the sandy dunes in the 1830s, which fulfilled its function but had become somewhat of a pest. Antelope still roamed freely in the bush and dunes, and the British elite used the Flats for sport hunting, causing much grief for the farmers when the horses trampled their produce and fields.
Despite the challenging terrain and unhelpful colonial regime, the Germans made the place their own. They founded a Lutheran church and a German school, both of which still stand today, and learnt Afrikaans. During the Boer and World Wars, the Germans were in an awkward position due to their affinity with the Afrikaner people, and many were interned by the British colonial government. In short, their lives were not easy. Gunter Engelke, a descendant, is fond of recalling how his great-grandfather lived in a home that very much resembled a modern shack, and routinely made the arduous trek across the dunes to the market in Long Street by ox-wagon to sell his produce for a pittance.
But the Germans had also hit upon a spot of luck that was to irrevocably change their fortunes: a vast underground aquifer stretching from False Bay to Milnerton, covering an area of more than 400 square kilometres. This unexpected source of unevaporable water, combined with ingenuity and a unique agricultural style of ‘no tilling’, helped them develop the oasis that is known today as the Philippi Horticultural Area (PHA). Many of the Germans became relatively wealthy and entrenched, and some even rich.
Meanwhile, the next township erected on the Flats was Langa, in 1927, following the passing of the 1923 Native Urban Areas Act. It was named after a famous chief of the Hlubi, a minor Nguni chiefdom that clashed with the Zulus in Natal and then with the colonial authorities for refusing to hand over their guns when asked.
Unlike Ndabeni, Langa was meticulously planned and constructed in terms of national legislation under what was now the unified Union government. Ndabeni, by most accounts, had by this time been deemed a failure in any case, and white residents in the surrounding areas wanted the ‘filthy’ blacks removed. Langa was subsequently constructed in full view of the authorities in Cape Town and surrounded by a buffer of empty land, apparently for the purposes of maximum control and observation. In-migration carried on steadily, and in 1946 Nyanga was established as a spillover for Langa.
In order to move black people to the fringes of white and coloured society, which was wrapped around Table Mountain, the authorities didn’t have to go far at first. But when the National Party came to power in 1948, the housing of ‘non-whites’ became bureaucratic science. The Group Areas Act was promulgated in 1950 and tinkered with for a decade afterwards, and the Cape Flats earned a reputation as ‘apartheid’s dumping ground’, the coloured population now also firmly subject to the state’s whims and suffering particularly hard as a result of forced removals.
Designated large-scale black areas like Crossroads and Khayelitsha came later, in the late ’70s and ’80s, as political unrest in the homelands sent refugees hurtling to the comparatively stable white areas and the older townships overflowed. Because most of these incomers were illegal immigrants under the influx-control laws, no official land or development was mooted to accommodate them. Most reports say that this period was one of ‘rapid’ expansion. Visiting the area makes this seem like a huge understatement. According to public benefit organisation the South African Education and Environment Project, the formal boundaries, population figures and demographics of places like Khayelitsha are now mostly unknown. Locals told researchers that official census figures were gross underestimates.
Piet Koornhof, the minister of cooperation and development between 1978 and 1984, addressed the overpopulation emergency in Crossroads following an order by the Cape High Court and a protracted campaign by the liberal Black Sash. He agreed to provide basic services to part of Crossroads, and then rolled out housing in phases. This was before Khayelitsha was formulated as the official living space of all ‘legal’ incoming black people in 1983. By then, political infighting in the community had evolved out of power blocs created to communicate with government. The notoriously violent and government-aligned Witdoeke, described as a vigilante organisation, clashed heavily with the pro-resistance UDF as part of a countrywide struggle in the townships between blacks who worked with the Nats and those who sought to end apartheid.
The population kept growing, and the few farms situated in the area that became modern-day Mitchells Plain (just east of Philippi)