Promised Land. Karl Kemp
livelihood intact. They are not mega farmers, and their assets are tied up in the land. They are among the very few smaller-scale farmers still running a profit – or were, until two years ago.
In all likelihood the state will end up buying out the Borcherdses, which is generally how occupations on private land play out. But the country is already trillions of rands in debt and racking up more at an exponential rate.
The city cannot win here either. If it is compelled to buy the land, the funding will be hard to come by, and it will likely have to appeal to national structures and funds. Anything anti-squatter gives ammunition to radical land reform proponents like the EFF, and the Avondrust situation is just one of dozens in the Cape Town metropole. But the fact that thousands of people are spilling out of Wallacedene with nowhere to go will not change. Not only that, but they are unlikely to find work in a depressed economy. The city could house every single one of these people and a backyard dwelling would be erected within weeks to supplement any income or government grants they receive. As in Enkanini, as soon as their children grow up, they’ll want their own place, and because these families are largely dependent on government grants, there will be no money to supply one. And so the entire process will begin anew, because no long-term strategy is in place.
What is happening in Kraaifontein and Stellenbosch, and in almost all major metros across the country, tends to prove right the analysts who believe that the ‘land crisis’ is in actual fact a housing and unemployment crisis, and has been for a long time.
5
The Urban Farmers
JUST ACROSS THE N1 from the Bloekombos informal settlement is another peri-urban patch of land. The farm watch here was often dispatched to help the Borcherdses. I met briefly with the chairperson, Rian Uys, at his home on a smallholding.
Uys has the quiet confidence of a man who is capable of violence. He has a buzzcut and is wearing a camo raincoat as he stands waiting for me in the drizzle. His home is surrounded by a complex security apparatus, all cameras and crackling electric wires. He was attacked on holiday in Gansbaai a few months prior and spent a long time in hospital. He believes it was a revenge attack for a gang arrest he’d made in Kraaifontein. His thirteen-year-old daughter is in therapy to deal with the anxiety this event caused; his wife, he says, goes shopping in Kraaifontein with a small concealed pistol. When he goes on patrol with the watch, he takes a bulletproof vest and a couple of flashbangs. He plays all of this down, though, and I get the sense he is only speaking to me as a favour to our mutual contact. As soon as I turn on the recorder, his entire demeanour changes, and his answers become curt, although the facts of the matter filter through.
Uys’s life and the stories he tells me are the new normal in parts of the peri-urban fringe around Cape Town’s northern suburbs: six disfigured corpses found in scrub just off a main road in a mob-justice incident in Joostenbergvlakte; a nine-year-old girl, Privilege Mabvongwe, kidnapped in front of her home in Kraaifontein and her body later found at a dumping site in Bloekombos; Hannah Cornelius, a Stellenbosch student abducted outside her res, raped and murdered, and found in Kraaifontein. In recent years, police stats have consistently placed Kraaifontein as one of the worst areas in the province for serious violent crimes. Cape Town mayor Dan Plato noted in a speech in September 2018 that the Western Cape has nine of the country’s top thirty worst police stations for contact crimes – murder, rape, robbery and the like – and one of them is Kraaifontein, alongside places like Nyanga, Delft and Khayelitsha. The total number of murders in the area shot up by 31 per cent to 186 for the 2019 period – a murder every other day. This might not be shocking to South Africans at large, but to the people, including myself, who grew up knowing Kraaifontein as a largely unremarkable working-class neighbourhood, the change is staggering.
There is one other place in the Cape Town metropole that boasts this type of crime at this level of frequency – the Cape Flats. In early July 2019, controversial minister of police Bheki Cele deployed the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) to this gang-infested area, which has a murder rate comparable to a war zone.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the Flats have also seen the worst land invasions in the province; if the peri-urban fringe of the Cape Town metropole is the run-off point for the squatting crisis, its beating heart is here. New settlements have sprouted out of the oldest areas of government-allocated black settlement – Ndabeni, Langa and Nyanga – and now push all the way into Cape Town’s more affluent northern suburbs.
One morning in May 2013, seventy-seven-year-old Iris Arrilda Fischer woke up to find her once-isolated cottage in Philippi East surrounded by shacks. The widow had lived there for five decades and her two sons lived in two smaller houses on the 2.7-hectare property, part of Erf 150. The land around her property is owned by private developers, one of whom is another elderly man, Manfred Stock, who is said to have inherited the land from his father who fled Nazi persecution in Germany during World War II.
The City of Cape Town assisted Fischer in evicting the squatters (who had spilt over from a neighbouring settlement in Lower Crossroads) from just under 200 structures and supplied regular patrols to prevent reoccupation.
According to the city, more or less nine months later, on 7 January 2014, fifteen vehicles loaded with building materials arrived and parked on Sheffield Road next to the property. By late afternoon, just over thirty shacks had been erected, and the city moved to demolish them, doing so without a court order as the shacks, they said, were largely uninhabited. The occupiers claimed otherwise and said that they had been living in the shacks since the previous year. This dispute of fact formed the basis of the first court hearings. Six years later, Fischer is still caught up in litigation, but now against the state, attempting to compel them to buy out her occupied property.
In the interim, 60 000 people have occupied the land and refuse to leave – to my knowledge the largest land invasion in the country’s recent history.
The seven-year spell between the first occupation in May 2013 and mid-2019 saw almost a score of deaths during riots. Three distinct neighbourhoods formed under the overarching name ‘Marikana’, said to be so called in honour of the slain mineworkers who had died for their cause – as the occupiers would do, given the chance. The neighbourhoods in Marikana were christened New Marikana, Old Marikana and Rolihlahla.
New Marikana was eventually co-opted in terms of political leadership by the ANC-aligned Ses’khona People’s Rights Movement under the leadership of Andile Lili, a ward councillor and ANC affiliate, assisted by his lieutenant, former ANC Youth League (ANCYL) member Loyiso Nkohla (who, you may recall, made an appearance at the Avondrust occupation). They were sometimes dubbed the Poo Fighters, as Lili had doused the entranceway to Cape Town International Airport with several canisters of human excrement the previous year in a symbolic protest against the lack of toilets in Cape Town’s squatter camps.
Violence erupted as residents of New Marikana clashed with the areas not under Ses’khona control – buses and cars were torched, a local ward councillor’s house in Lower Crossroads was burnt down, there were panga attacks and cars were stoned on the freeways. The cause of the fighting was murky, but press reports had it down as political infighting. In late September 2017, a group of thirty men arrived in vans and spread through the settlement, killing eleven people in what was described as an act of revenge for the vigilante killing of seven other people accused of gangsterism the week prior.
Time passed, the area remained largely unserviced and the violence turned into service delivery protests as the political leadership situation appeared to be resolved. Meanwhile, Fischer, Stock and another landowner, Coppermoon Trading, fought it out in court to try to force the city to buy their property at a fair market value. The sticking point was that (up to now), a court cannot compel the executive to expropriate property. Such a scenario would likely create a precedent for large-scale land invasions where the occupiers know that they have the backing of the law. In truth, this is already the de facto situation.
Six kilometres from Marikana and the Fischer property as the crow flies, in Philippi proper, is a 3 000-hectare oasis. The landscape here differs drastically from its surroundings: open stretches of land covered in creeper vegetation suddenly appear amid the urban sprawl, their spread broken