Promised Land. Karl Kemp
“Jissis, hier’s kak” – it was machine-gun fire. A guy pokes his head out from his shack, he’s shot at. When the police came, the people from the squatter camp were hiding behind the police, [who were] protecting them from PAGAD! And they got such a fright from that story that the chief from the squatter camp wrote a column in the Plainsman saying that they’d stop burning the road if they’d stop sending PAGAD!’ He laughs uproariously.
‘No, the coloureds fucking hate the blacks,’ he says. ‘A coloured guy told me the other day, “Back then it was this way or that way, but now we’re still in the kak in the middle.”’
The stereotype is that because the coloured community doesn’t toyi-toyi and burn things to get what they want, they’ve been on housing waiting lists since the early ’90s, while incoming Eastern Cape migrants jump the queue by occupying and protesting. Given the fact that the coloured population’s forefathers were settled in the Cape long before black people arrived on the scene, naturally the community might feel that it has a far stronger claim to preferential treatment and redress in the province. Supporting this is the fact that there is a new strain of coloured nationalism brewing, and in the Western Cape it is most pertinently illustrated by individuals like Fadiel Adams, a community leader who has drawn both fierce criticism and support for his demands for an independent Cape.
Adams has made a powerful enemy of the City of Cape Town, which has attempted to sue him for damages arising from violent riots the city claimed he incited. He’s often accused of making incendiary demands, like ‘bussing the blacks back to the Eastern Cape’, but his official stance is that he is not a racist. ‘We have never shown hatred towards blacks,’ he was quoted in the Mail & Guardian in the wake of the 2018 stand-off across Jakes Gerwel Drive, in which he was involved. ‘This is about fairness, justice and equality. We have welcomed people from the Eastern Cape until we discovered they don’t want us here. They want our land. Sixty-five-year-old grandmothers are living in wendy houses while twenty-five-year-old black youth from the Eastern Cape have been here for six months and get title deeds.’
Schultz had talked almost non-stop for over an hour and seemed to have softened up a bit. He and his wife invited me in for lunch, and he told me a lot of stories off the record. None of them implicate him in any kind of crime, but many of them were far more personal than he was willing to share with a wider audience. Prior to that, he’d told me a few knee-slappers, as well as recounting a few more serious anecdotes, which he’d seemed to reveal with great reluctance. He’d almost been executed during a robbery once, in the early morning outside the farm stall just around the corner from where we were standing in the yard. The gun misfired, and the perpetrators fled. Friends of his are apparently great fans of quad bikes, and chasing down crop thieves on them.
‘Ja nee, nee.’ Schultz dances around the topic of whether the Philippi farmers have been driven to extremes by the ‘land’ crisis. He settles for another funny story, about a burglar who got stuck in the chimney and was only freed when the police broke him out with a pickaxe. The following week, Schultz caught the same guy on this property.
‘That was an interesting time in my life,’ he says, suddenly serious. ‘I caught that same guy six times. I kept giving him over to police, and he kept coming back. I’m not gonna talk about it further, though. I don’t actually know what happened to him. At that stage I was still a “Rambo”, carrying the firearm every day. At night, if there was a noise, I’d go out and investigate. But I don’t do that shit any more. You know what’s changed?’
I say that I don’t.
‘What’s changed is that all of them have guns now too. I don’t fucking leave the house now – I phone armed response and tell them to come. I don’t go out.’
The Philippi farmers are at odds as to what to do about the ever-worsening situation. Schultz might stick it out; he is, after all, a self-described optimist. But he’s a lone voice. Another Philippi farmer I met was Carl Gorgens. He’s got one foot out of the door already, having invested in other agricultural land, far from Cape Town but still in the Western Cape. Gunter Engelke was characteristically stoic, but I could sense a very deep sorrow in his gruff voice. Johan Terblanche was so agitated about the constant shoot-outs that we didn’t get a chance to discuss whether he considered packing up and moving out.
‘Don’t make a mistake – people still make money here in Philippi,’ Schultz had told me. The underground aquifer allowed the Philippi farmers to survive the national drought, and despite the pollution at its extreme edges, in the PHA it ‘recharges’, cleansing itself, largely due to the proliferation of sand.
‘What should actually happen here is to put up and close Philippi off with these big vibracrete walls, and block off the squatter camps,’ Schultz had said. ‘But we know that’s not gonna happen.’
Months later, I interviewed a prominent member of the City of Cape Town’s mayoral committee. We discussed the Fischer matter, and the cleavages in the city’s executive regarding policy on proactive land occupation intervention, and I eventually got around to asking him about the Philippi situation. This member, who has a reputation for being a bit of a hard-ass with little sympathy for land invaders, subtly changed his tone and told me that what was really going on in Philippi was shack farming.
‘By who?’ I asked.
‘By the farmers there,’ he replied. ‘The ones close to isiQalo and Jakes Gerwel Drive.’ I got the sense he felt he was leaking me a story. But after seeing the place for myself, the hopelessness, the overpopulation and the suffering of the farmers, I wasn’t surprised.
The foremost question on my mind when I left Philippi was how the situation had escalated to that point. The answer to this lies partially in the failure of the N2 Gateway project, launched in the mid-2000s – the state’s attempt to break the back of the Cape Flats housing crisis.
The project formed part of the broader executive policy known as ‘Breaking New Ground: A Comprehensive Plan for the Development of Sustainable Human Settlements’ that was approved by cabinet, which signalled a departure from the RDP plan. Speaking in Parliament at the yearly budget vote in May 2006, minister of housing Lindiwe Sisulu called it ‘the largest housing project ever undertaken by any government’. The preamble to the policy conceded that ‘despite service delivery’, the ‘number of households living in shacks in informal settlements and backyards increased from 1.45 million in 1996 to 1.84 million in 2001, an increase of 26 per cent, which is far greater than the 11 per cent increase in population over the same period’.
Critics immediately labelled the Gateway project a ‘beautification’ project for the 2010 FIFA World Cup, as the planned developments were situated along the N2 corridor off Cape Town International Airport, where the worst of the Flats’ squatting and housing crises are on permanent display to international visitors.
The project was intended to create 22 000 housing opportunities, both subsidised and bonded, to address the critical housing backlog in Cape Town. All three spheres of government were to cooperate, though the City of Cape Town was suspended from involvement in 2006 following newly elected mayor Helen Zille’s comments on cost overruns and poor implementation, claiming that the previous ANC majority had ‘left her with a poisoned chalice’. In the DA’s stead, national government appointed parastatal Thubelisha Homes to coordinate the implementation of the project at provincial level.
By 2007 the DA had called for a probe into housing allocation at the new development, claiming that the politically connected and wealthy were using the opportunity to move into the area.
The development was to take place in various areas across the city, but by far the largest section was to be built along a ten-kilometre stretch of the N2 highway on land occupied by the Joe Slovo informal settlement, which comprised over 20 000 residents. The settlement had mushroomed incredibly quickly in the early 1990s, largely due to its prime location close to work opportunities in the Cape Town CBD. Government informed the squatters that they were to be relocated to Delft, a comparatively recently established area fifteen kilometres further north-east, which was built and planned in 1989 as a ‘mixed-race’ area to accommodate both coloured and black people. Critics hit back that