Promised Land. Karl Kemp
then picks up our conversation at the exact syllable he left off.
‘There’s a family here,’ he tells me, launching into a story without preamble, ‘a husband and wife and the husband’s brother. They’ve lived off this farm for eight years. Druggies. They steal my vegetables. Every day, every night. If we wait ten minutes now and walk around the corner there,’ he points to his fields, ‘then we’ll see them stealing. Like clockwork. Every day, every time we leave. If we catch him, he runs across the road’ – meaning Jakes Gerwel Drive – ‘and jumps across the fence at the mall, and he stands behind that fence pulling faces at you. By the time we’ve taken the road around the mall, he’s gone. I know where they live, I’ve chased him there. But when he’s in the flat block, he doesn’t come out and you don’t go in.’
I try to imagine the strange maths a Philippi farmer has to do: plant 5 000 heads of cauliflower, harvest 300; employ two serious security guards, and maybe harvest more cauliflower, but deduct per-day expenses of expensive security, and so on.
‘How do you farm like this?’ I ask.
He laughs and launches into another story.
‘A while ago we were away for the long weekend … My dad phones and says they just caught some guys stealing. You see these sprinklers?’
He points out the copper heads poking up between the rows of cabbage.
‘That’s just a little steel pipe with a brass sprinkler on top. So, the guys steal all the brass sprinklers. Now we’ve replaced them with plastic sprinklers. Then they started stealing the whole thing for the steel pipe to take to the scrapyard. When they steal, they break off the pipe going into the ground. And that is a whole fucking day’s work to fix. Three guys have to come in to fix that.’
He pauses to curse.
‘So, my dad calls and says they’ve stolen eight or ten of these things and the pipes are broken again. So, I said to him, “Jissis, just eight? That’s okay, we’ll fix them tomorrow, not a problem.” My friend who’s with us, who’s not from Philippi, he asks me what happened. I told him. And he said that we’ve become complacent – “It’s just fucking eight? It should be fucking none!”’
Schultz roars with laughter as he mimes his friend’s tone of voice. It’s lunchtime, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He’s become engrossed in telling me about the Wild West of Philippi farming.
‘We haven’t had landlines here for nine years,’ he says. ‘On weekends they steal the wires.’
The farmers now bury electricity cables and phone wires where possible.
‘Our biggest problem in Philippi is the police service,’ says Schultz, ‘but I understand why it’s a problem. They check the crime statistics and say, “Oh there’s only six cases here, let’s redeploy more police.” But there are only six cases because nobody makes cases. You go [to the police station] and you wait for at least an hour or two, and sometimes nobody speaks Afrikaans or English, just Xhosa. With me, there is theft every day and I don’t waste my time. Back in the day, I didn’t have a folder at the police, I had a whole drawer! And everyone feels like this.’
When Schultz says everyone, he really means everyone, not just the farmers. A lack of policing resources is at the heart of complaints from the communities in the neighbouring informal areas as well, from Nyanga residents to the Marikana squatters.
The police don’t enter places like isiQalo. It’s too dark and too easy to get ambushed. The city tried to put up towers with floodlights, but the wiring and cables were stolen the same evening.
‘A detective once told me that Sqalo is the best place for the organised criminals to hide,’ Schultz says. ‘No one will bother them there.’
Six officers from the recently established Anti-Gang Unit were shot in June 2019 in these exact circumstances. Squatter camps are cramped, with no spatial planning to speak of. There is no way to plan a police operation in them. At the same time, the conditions make it nearly impossible for emergency services to enter. Shack fires are an all too common occurrence that routinely leave dozens without even a shack to sleep in because firefighters are unable to reach them in time. And of course, ambulances can’t enter either. If someone falls or has a heart attack, they stand a far lower chance of survival than someone living in a formal area.
‘Some of my people live there,’ says Schultz. ‘They tell me that they see my stolen produce being sold. But they can’t say anything because they live there. And the police won’t go there. I understand it to an extent – they have their own laws in there. Police laws don’t work there. If [someone] steals within Sqalo, he gets the tyre, klaar.’ He’s referring to the practice of necklacing.
‘I will add, though,’ he continues, ‘that not everyone that lives in Sqalo is bad. It’s a handful of people. They also try to sort out those elements, but they can’t do it all. I asked my workers to ask the chief to come see me about the theft – because, you know, we pay hundreds of thousands of rands to the security companies – just so they will steal less. Not stop stealing,’ he adds, ‘just less.’
It didn’t work.
Schultz says that if something of his is stolen, he waits ‘about two hours’ then goes to the illegal scrapyard and looks around. Often, he will find his stuff. ‘And I take it back. It doesn’t help to bring the police in,’ he adds.
‘I honestly don’t know how they can fix this,’ he says. ‘I’ll tell you one thing that I feel very strongly about. We are a Third World country, not First World. If they were to take away all these unions, I tell you now, I could employ eighty people on this farm. Now I have thirty. If I didn’t have to pay a minimum wage …’ He trails off.
‘If there are 20 000 people in the squatter camp, how many people are actually employed?’ Schultz asks me. He doesn’t wait for an answer. ‘Every morning there are people asking for jobs [at the farm], and I feel terrible because I have to turn them away. I can’t afford to pay them R180. The women ask for enough money to buy food, that’s it. There by Johan [Terblanche], 450 people worked. When the minimum wage came in, 200 had to go. Now they’ll go steal, and they won’t get work from another farmer because no one can afford it!’ Schultz is enraged by this.
‘There are people that take advantage and pay people R30 a day, for example, and that’s not gonna work, obviously, but if I could just pay R100 a day …’ He trails off again.
‘If you’re hungry, what you going to do? You’re gonna make a plan, my friend.’ He lights another cigarette and I join him. By now we’re sitting on a pile of planks just outside the main storehouse. Most of the workers have knocked off for lunch.
‘If they take away that shit,’ he says, referring to the minimum wage, ‘so many more people will have work. The farmers here won’t be able to keep up. The squatter camps will run empty from people coming to work.’
The Cape Flats are certainly fuller than they have ever been. In-migration to the Western Cape has never been higher. Nationwide unemployment has never been higher. Discontent has never been higher. The cost of violent protest has never been higher. In Philippi, the pressure is felt more acutely than in areas further away from the Flats.
Schultz says that when squatter camps explode with people and there are violent protests, they almost always take place on the ‘big roads’, like Jakes Gerwel Drive, that can easily be barricaded. Often, protests happen within days of one another and overlap. When this happens, the people of Mitchells Plain can’t go to work. The latest and most violent round of protests was in May 2018, when isiQalo residents protesting for service delivery burnt down fruit and vegetable stalls around Jakes Gerwel Drive.
‘You’ve heard of PAGAD, right?’ Schultz is grinning when he asks this. His mood has swung again. I nod in the affirmative. You’d be hard-pressed to find a Capetonian who doesn’t know about People Against Gangsterism and Drugs, a vigilante group originating in the early ’90s that famously took out Cape Flats gangster Rashaad Staggie in 1996.
‘So,