Promised Land. Karl Kemp
subsistence farmers were stationed around the larger farms at various intervals, all dependent on the main street in Kraaifontein, which is ironically still officially known as Van Riebeeck Street, for entertainment and access to commerce. The Borcherdses remember the surnames of the people who lived here – the Thomases, the Goosens, the Canolis – and describe a stretch of smaller holdings stretching from Avondrust to Old Paarl Road to the north where a generation of subsistence farmers lived whose children were their schoolmates.
It was during this period and especially after the advent of democracy in 1994 that the area really expanded, and when Irene Grootboom’s case begins. Wallacedene, renamed after the Uitkyk settlement extended beyond its original borders, saw unprecedented in-migration from the rest of the country, particularly the Eastern Cape and South Africa’s northern neighbours. Parcels of land that would become Wallacedene were bought from the Borcherdses and Avondrust by the City of Cape Town. People who couldn’t find a place to make a home in the areas closer to the CBD came here and to other areas that weren’t already densely populated, as any patch of land became fair game amid the confusion and uncertainty that marked the ANC’s ascent to power. The resetting of the board also gave rise to a neighbouring informal settlement, named Bloekombos in spite of the fact that the new residents chopped down the forest of bluegums that had stood around the Borcherdses’ farm for as long as the family could remember.
Irene Grootboom and her family moved into the frenzy of construction between Wallacedene and Bloekombos during the governmental transition, and, when the poverty of their living conditions became too much to bear, she led an occupation onto neighbouring vacant land. This was in 1998. The city duly evicted the squatters and when they attempted to return to their shacks in Wallacedene, they found them occupied by other incomers to the new settlement. Eventually, they made a camp on a nearby sports field, and it is from there that Irene Grootboom and her representatives from the Legal Resources Centre, as well as a myriad of housing activists, launched a campaign that would end in the highest court of the newly established democracy.
Sitting before the honourable Justice Zak Yacoob, Irene Grootboom heard that the local Oostenberg municipality had failed in its constitutionally mandated duty of providing housing access to those most vulnerable. The city protested and brought sheaves of paper to court illustrating the steps it had taken since 1994, which Justice Yacoob noted and admitted yet still held to be insufficient. The city was ordered to take further action, and Grootboom was granted temporary relief in the form of emergency shelter while the city figured out what it would do.
Some of Yacoob’s comments and notes from a commissioned study by the Cape Metro are worth quoting in order to illustrate the severity of the influx and housing crisis at the time:
The housing shortage in the Cape Metro is acute. About 206 000 housing units are required and up to 25 000 housing opportunities are required in Oostenberg itself. Shack counts in the Cape Metro in general and in the area of the municipality in particular reveal an inordinate problem. 28 300 shacks were counted in the Cape Metro in January 1993. This number had grown to 59 854 in 1996 and 72 140 by 1998. Shacks in this area increased by 111 per cent during the period 1993 to 1996 and by 21 per cent from then until 1998…
The scope of the problem is perhaps most sharply illustrated by this: about 22 000 houses are built in the Western Cape each year while demand grows at a rate of 20 000 family units per year. The backlog is therefore likely to be reduced, resources permitting and, on the basis of the figures in this study, only by 2 000 houses a year.
By 2001, a year after Irene Grootboom’s case was successful in the Constitutional Court, less than 10 per cent of the housing in the area was formalised in any way, and when she died in 2008, Irene Grootboom was still in the Wallacedene squatter camp. She left behind her family and the tragic reality that despite its many promises, the globally lauded South African Constitution remains a document drawn up and implemented by mortals. It was the first ever case to truly test the socio-economic guarantees of the new Constitution – a constitution that quite literally compelled government to provide shelter for all – and despite the fact that the court had ruled in the applicant’s favour, that order had yet to materialise into formal housing at the time of Grootboom’s death seven years after it was handed down.
The Grootboom case has gone on to inform hundreds of academic papers, international conferences on the justiciability of socio-economic rights, and interpretations of international treaties like the United Nations’ covenant on human rights. And for all that, Irene Grootboom died amid the same squalor in which she had started. It is still contested at whose door the blame is to be laid: a municipality unable to build and provide at a pace outstripped by population growth and in-migration; a malicious council that cared not a jot for the poor; or the migrants themselves, who, as some hardliners argued, should not have migrated to a new city with no forethought as to where they would live or how they would survive, and thereby taking state resources from the innumerable local poor who had always resided in Cape Town.
Avondrust was founded when the prospect of a megacity seemed remote. Since Grootboom’s case was decided, Wallacedene and Bloekombos have mushroomed, the former inhabited by a mix of foreigners and coloured and black South Africans, and the latter largely remaining a settlement of migrants from the Eastern Cape. But still, how could the space between the farmland of Kraaifontein and the distant City Bowl be eaten up in a matter of decades? Easily, as it turned out.
As Uitkyk expanded in the late 1980s, there were numerous furious protests from local whites and coloureds. This came to a head around the same time as Irene Grootboom’s case started grabbing headlines. Wallacedene had been formalised in 1990, and basic services rolled out, with development and housing promised to follow. Such relatively secure tenure naturally gave rise to an even bigger influx of people. Academic journal Urban Forum described the situation:
Typical of many informal settlements in Cape Town, Phase I (which had started in 1991) could not accommodate all the Wallacedene residents because the settlement continued to grow while projects were being planned and implemented. Phase II, comprising 613 parcels, commenced in 1992, and Phase III comprising 449 parcels commenced in 1994. In total there were 2 000 formal parcels. Further expansion was not possible, as Wallacedene had filled the available space. It was bounded by private farms and existing residential land.
In 2002, following the Grootboom case, the city moved to purchase the land that Irene Grootboom and her group had occupied, known as New Rust. The property owners adjacent to New Rust proposed building a five-metre wall around the proposed development’s perimeter in order to avoid property devaluation, crime and the general misery that they predicted would surely follow, while 109 members of the ratepayers association in Kleinbegin, which abutted the property, signed a petition that spelt out their views in no uncertain terms:
We, as residents of Kraaifontein, wish to register our strongest objection to the further development of Wallacedene. We shall never ever approve of it. The crime in the area is already rife. This development of Wallacedene will merely increase the crime in the area. We are already surrounded by two squatter settlements and now you still want to aggravate this situation. The noise and stench of these squatter settlements are already very bad and now you still want to bring them closer to us. Why next to us, and not elsewhere were [sic] there is enough open space for these squatters? Do you at all care about the interests of Kleinbegin or do you simply ignore us because we are not an ANC war[d]? Should you continue with the development of Wallacedene, we, the rate payers in the area, will withhold our taxes and service charges from the Municipality! We are no longer prepared to be shunted around. Look for another place to solve your problem.
Local community leaders and ANC ward councillors negated the proposed wall, saying that it would be an ‘apartheid wall’. It was never built, and Wallacedene continued to expand.
Despite now boasting some formalised areas, Wallacedene is still largely a squatter camp, due to the informal housing black market that erupts everywhere such state housing projects are undertaken. The land is state-owned, and as such the residents are essentially tenants. Despite this obstacle, rental leases, backyard shacks, informal sales and occupations abound.
Over the years, Alfred and Anzette Borcherds have watched as what was already a massive settlement grew relentlessly up to the