Promised Land. Karl Kemp
the Samora Machel settlement is said to have sprung into life within a year, comprising some 245 households. By this time, Khayelitsha had almost half a million residents by some accounts, far more than the 120 000 originally planned for. The official 2011 census had the population at just under 400 000, leaving many to wonder how exactly that census had been carried out.
South African housing policy has always been reactionary and hardly ever proactive in the face of ostensibly unpredictable rural-to-urban migration. When plans are made, residents fight over the newly allotted space, which is never enough. Plans are also often abandoned or the project and servicing only half completed. The resulting patchwork of infrastructure invariably leads to yet more land occupations and squatting.
The Germans of the PHA have been faced with the fallout of this crisis for decades, from the establishment of Langa and Nyanga, the crisis in Crossroads and finally the establishment of settlements like Samora Machel. The influx has only escalated since then. The PHA is slowly being suffocated, encircled by squatter camps spilling over from the original townships and cut off from services. To the north-east is Nyanga, the country’s murder capital, and to the south-east is Mitchells Plain – gangster country. On its doorstep are various squatter camps – Egoli, isiQalo and Siyangena – all products of the housing crisis. This confluence has predictably led to conflict.
I first heard about the situation from Adrian Guy, an imposing man with a bald head who is involved in cage-fighting promotion and coffee-shop franchising in Cape Town’s northern suburbs. Guy tried living on a smallholding development called Groenvallei, close to Kalbaskraal and Malmesbury on the N7. In 2017, a man called Mark Fagan was shot dead by four balaclava-wearing assailants on a smallholding in nearby Philadelphia during his teenage daughter’s birthday party; Guy eventually left the area after the break-ins and constant security upgrades became too much. While experiencing this situation, he came into contact with some of the Philippi farmers who were in a similar predicament to the south, though on a much larger scale.
‘There’s been a lot of deaths over the years. Lots,’ he said. ‘Killed and shot and stabbed and robbed. I only lived on a farm for two years and I couldn’t do it.’
He told me that the Philippi farmers are hardcore and notoriously media shy, but have a legendary tale to tell – if you can prise it out of them.
‘Maybe they’ll be a little bit … biased,’ he warned, ‘because they’ve been hurt … They don’t want to get politically involved with anything. One’s gotta be careful – you say something, next minute you’re in the paper.’
I brought up the Philippi farmers with my parents’ friends at a braai a few weeks after speaking to Guy, and to my surprise most of them were aware of them. One old man spoke of them reverentially, conspiratorially, in tones I imagine an oppressed citizen in a fascist dictatorship would speak about the underground resistance: the farmers who fought back against farm attackers. Alfred Borcherds had also said as much to me in Kraaifontein. The Borcherdses had a distant cousin in the Philippi farmer cluster, and the stories from there were hair-raising. Everyone appears to use the Philippi farmers as a measure for how bad things can get, and what farmers are willing to do when faced with such trouble.
One of the first Philippi farmers I was in contact with was Chris Bok. From what I’d heard, he’d lost two brothers to farm murders, one of whom had been shot in his yard in front of his farmhouse. Bok refused to talk, politely but firmly telling me that he didn’t want to relive the trauma. Apparently he’d just been robbed on his farm again, and his mother had recently passed away.
Much of the Philippi farmers’ struggle against violent crime is already in the public domain – for example, the December 2018 shoot-out at Philippi Groente Verpakkers, a vegetable farm and packing plant run by Johan Terblanche and his son. Terblanche is one of the few Philippi farmers not descended from Germans and had in fact been a prison warder at Pollsmoor until 1991, after which he bought a piece of land in the area. The shoot-out was the third of three such incidents in one year for him, but it was by far the most violent. Twelve well-armed robbers had held the entire office hostage, and then engaged in a shoot-out with a police unit and the local farm watch. Nicolaas Strydom, Terblanche’s coloured foreman, was shot dead in the melee. He’d got married just four days before. One of the attackers was killed as well, and two others were eventually arrested.
The Terblanches’ farm office is part of a small, closed-off estate and looks and feels exactly like a prison. The reason for this is that a neighbouring farmer’s employee revealed that the armed robbers who had escaped arrest lived next door to her in the squatter camp, and that she had heard them talking about revenge for ‘the slain one’ of their number. The farmer went to Terblanche Snr with the information, and the police came to interview the employee, but she refused to talk. She told them point-blank: ‘If I talk, I’m dead tonight.’
Another farmer who suffered two similar robberies was Gunter Engelke, the chairperson of the local agricultural union, who agreed to meet me at his place of work. He runs a florist in Wetton on the western fringes of the Philippi farmlands, growing the flowers in the PHA and selling them here. There is a huge sign across the storefront: DUE TO CRIME WE DO NOT USE CASH ON THIS PREMISES.
In 2017, the store was robbed by two armed gangs in the space of three weeks – both slick operations executed with ruthless efficiency. The first time, a man posed as a pastor and spent a long time picking out flowers; the gang burst in soon after. The second time, the decoy was a person looking for work, and again the gang gained access while Gunter was distracted. Hence the sign and the two heavy-duty steel gates topped with electric fencing.
Wetton used to be fairly middle class but has seriously degraded. According to Gunter, the real trouble with squatting and violent crime only started in the mid-2000s. The past five years have been the worst. When I asked about specifics, he was reticent and was far more willing to talk about the history of the place. I could tell he was immensely proud of all his people had done here, and how disappointed he was that they were packing up and leaving. He described the Philippi area as a patchwork of ownership, with some of the largest players being sand miners. Silica sand is abundant and cheap to mine here, and because of the proximity to the city, carrier and logistics costs are very low.
He pointed in the direction of Philippi and said that until as late as 1987 there were farms from Wetton to the Philippi turn-off. It was the cheapest place to buy up land to develop. But after the establishment of Nyanga, he says, ‘that was that’. Workers used to live on the farms and were almost exclusively coloured. When the area urbanised, these workers preferred to move into the townships, away from the farmers. In so doing, the community and the contained farming system broke down. As the coloured foremen left, black migrant labour stepped in to fill the gap, while all around them the Flats kept expanding.
The biggest takeaway I got from Gunter was how adamant he was to not ‘make this a race thing’. The people who’d robbed him? ‘Gangsters.’ Those stirring the pot? ‘Politicians.’ He was incredibly careful around me, and I got the sense that he never relaxed. Everything he said was guarded. I couldn’t blame him. After all, Adrian Guy had warned me this might be the case. Nevertheless, Gunter never refused my calls and answered every query, although I never got the impression that he was willing to tell me everything.
I finally hit some kind of pay dirt with Christo Schultz, a Philippi farmer of German descent who farms chickens and vegetable crops. He’s of the opinion that most incidents referred to as ‘farm attacks’ in the Western Cape are robberies gone wrong. ‘But up there in the Free State, they steal nothing but they murder the people,’ he says. ‘That’s revenge.’
This statement, slightly controversial for a farmer, set the tone for much of our conversation.
The backyard of his farm is a swirling mess of mud, trucks, labourers, chickens and industry. To the south, across Jakes Gerwel Drive, we look into the houses of Mitchells Plain. Just a kilometre to the north, visible from Schultz’s property, is isiQalo, or ‘Sqalo’ to the farmers. At the last count, during a failed eviction application in 2012, the occupiers there numbered over 6 000. What the numbers are now is anyone’s guess. A lone guard patrols the farm’s fenced perimeter. There’s more security at night