Promised Land. Karl Kemp
The two clashed when Wanana tried to whip up support for occupation of open spaces in O-Zone.
I could never quite pluck up the courage to ask Mr Ketse why he feels that these new arrivals and occupiers are any different from the group with which he arrived decades earlier. Probably he has an answer.
‘There are people in favour of Stefan Smit,’ Mr Ketse told me when I was in the area in early 2019. ‘Not every black person in Kayamandi is in favour of [Wanana and Madiba]. And I am one of those [supporting Smit],’ he said. ‘You cannot correct wrong by wrong. If someone throw you with a stone, and you take your own huge stone and throw him, you are starting war.’
Mr Ketse took me on a drive through Enkanini towards a new settlement called Azania. We drove until the formally planned roads of Kayamandi turned into dust and gravel, and then beyond that, cresting a hill of lush green grass that was completely covered in neat rows of corrugated iron shacks. This was Stefan Smit’s land. Just behind Azania was a fence guarding another stretch of bright-green grassland. The fence was black and impenetrable, with thick support beams and topped with razor wire. An ominous crack of voltage snapped every few seconds. Apparently, the fence was intended to safeguard Smit, his wife and his property, at least that which hadn’t yet been occupied.
The Azania squatters had made their first move in mid-2018. It is unclear if this initial occupation was led by a backyarder or whether it was kick-started by an industrious, politically minded individual like Wanana. Quotes in the media were haphazard at best, with one occupier telling the New York Times, ‘We see that land, we take that land.’
If the occupied land had belonged to the state, perhaps the outcome would have been another Enkanini. But as fate would have it, the administrative space around Kayamandi had run out. In the heightened political atmosphere dominated by the rhetoric of the EFF and an ANC struggling to keep pace, a recent exponential increase in land invasions and service delivery protests, and the fact that eviction proceedings in South Africa are fraught with legislative regulation, Smit must have been wary from the start. The eyes of the world, already slowly turning to South Africa’s land tribulations, were to fall upon him.
The first sign that the occupation was no organic Enkanini-style offshoot was the arrangement of the shacks: they were neat and planned. In fact, they were set up on demarcated plots or ‘stands’, dozens of rows of them, stretching up to the crest of the hill, from where Smit’s farmhouse is visible. Smit said as much to the New York Times in 2019. He was partially invested in the idea that the occupation was politically motivated but wouldn’t explicitly say so. Many people believe that such occupiers are bussed in to initiate land grabs in the Democratic Alliance (DA)–run Western Cape in order to create a voting bloc for the ANC. These sentiments are shared by many senior opposition officials in the Western Cape provincial government.
Mr Ketse’s concerns were more grassroots and to do with community policing and the struggle for resources, but he agreed that the Azania squatters were not from the area. ‘Look at the number of stands,’ he said. ‘The majority of those people are coming from outside … If that was people from Kayamandi, they would not have occupied such a large strip of land. Maybe half of it … Look at the structures, it is something you can finish in thirty minutes before the police come.’
By 8 August 2018, the police and anti-land invasion units had proceeded according to an urgent interdict obtained by Smit in the name of his company to remove all shacks not deemed ‘dwellings’, meaning that they did not have an occupant or a bed or signs of permanent habitation – a blurry line at the best of times. This sparked a protest. The situation became fraught incredibly quickly. Smit was engaged by the municipality, which tried to head off the situation by servicing the lower section of the area, called Marikana, with basic ablutions and electricity, after which temporary housing was rolled out. This section of land had already been zoned and was owned by the municipality, which was why it could act so quickly.
In just a few months, the structures had increased in number from an estimated 100 to over 1 000 and were encroaching on a fifty-five-hectare plot of land known as Watergang that fell under Louisenhof and belonged to Smit.
Meanwhile, the temporary housing provided by the municipality was quickly filled, often not by those for whom it had been built, often traded on the hush-hush and sometimes stripped for parts. Families live there now who may never have qualified for housing or even known the purpose of the development in the first place – quite innocent in that they paid someone for housing and received it, and to their minds it was a legitimate transaction.
Allegations of shack farming and corruption in Azania soon started doing the rounds. According to Mr Ketse, municipal officials got in on this game, and he claimed to personally know people who paid Wanana for the privilege of adding an empty structure to a row. He gave me names of municipal officials, but I couldn’t be sure if they were just old enemies from the O-Zone struggle days. Other journalists in other parts of the country have experienced the same thing when it comes to covering shack farming: there’s no one willing to swear to it in court and there is no paper trail. What I often heard is that admissions of receiving money are made, but that the purpose of the money is said to be ‘logistical’ or ‘administrative’, or even to post bail for jailed leaders.
Later in August 2018, during the first attempted evictions of the squatters, a key point in the saga emerged. A man called Zola Ndalasi was captured on video telling a News24 team that ‘If a person must die, so be it. Because we are not moving here. We will fight until people receive places to live in. They can demolish the shacks now. Tonight, the people will build them again. They will make sure they stay for twenty-four hours.’ The invasion continued apace, and tensions reached boiling point.
Ten months later, in June 2019, Stefan Smit was murdered, shot dead by masked intruders.
In his interview with the New York Times, Smit insisted that he had received death threats via SMS, and that he refused to meet with the occupiers on their turf, fearing for his life. Ndalasi’s ‘threat’ was seized upon as incontrovertible proof that Smit’s murder was related to the occupation, even though he may well have been referring to the squatters’ willingness to die for the land. Pieter Haasbroek, a close friend of Smit and his wife, wrote to the local papers, the international press and later to me that the murder was ‘not an ordinary crime’, that it was ‘political’ and its implications would be ‘far-reaching’. The picture seemed clear: a white farmer murdered for his land by occupiers galvanised by the announcement of EWC. But Haasbroek turned out to be only half right.
The story that emerged went as follows: in the months before his death, Smit had beefed up security on his estate to the point that it resembled a maximum-security prison. It seemed likely that the set-up was aligned with what security experts had recently been peddling: a system of concentric security ‘circles’, each representing a different level of threat and triggering different responses depending on which circle the threat is detected in. Smit had gone even further because he had the means to do so: his head of security, Bradley van Eyslend, was installed in the estate’s guesthouse.
It therefore came as a surprise to those in the know when they heard the news that Smit had been shot three times in his dining room by three assailants who had apparently walked in through an unlocked door, despite the presence of Van Eyslend in the adjacent room. Zurenah and a friend from Switzerland were also present but had merely been tied up. Few items were taken and the attack was not prolonged. It was not clear how the attackers had escaped so easily. It seemed like a hit.
The first and most pertinent question was ‘Why?’ The municipality had caved at some point between August 2018 and Smit’s death in June 2019 and bought the occupied land for R45.7 million, so why would Smit’s death be of any value to the occupiers? The second question, of course, was how millions of rands of security had been bypassed by nothing more sophisticated than three men with handguns.
Barely a week after Smit’s murder, I received another email from Pieter Haasbroek: ‘Beste Karl. Nuwe inligting wat aan die lig gekom het, wys die moord op Stefan is in sy huis uitgebroei. Skrikwekkend!’ (‘Dear Karl. New information has come to light that Stefan’s murder was hatched in his home. Frightening!’)
A