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ENKANINI IS AN informal settlement in the Western Cape town of Stellenbosch. The name translates to ‘the struggle’. It is, and will likely remain, unserviced, meaning that the local municipality cannot provide basic amenities, such as water and electricity. Until the site was cleared by squatters, it was dense bush abutting Stellenbosch’s industrial area – a hill of eroding soil that cannot safely hold structures or be paved. It is a lawless place, where the police rarely enter and people live largely by their own rules.

The man who tells me this is Mzwandile Ketse, a community leader in the neighbouring formal township of Kayamandi and a former ward councillor. In 2012, when I covered a service delivery protest in the area, he explained to me how Enkanini was formed, and why.

Mr Ketse, who is Xhosa, came to Kayamandi (which means ‘nice home’) in 1992 from the Eastern Cape, caught up in the huge waves of migration resulting from the abolition of influx control and the gradual move to democracy that coalesced after the 1985 state of emergency. Millions came to the Western Cape’s urban centres from the Eastern Cape in search of a better life. One of South Africa’s most famous townships, Khayelitsha, was founded at this time to accommodate this trickle-turned-flood and is now home to more than a million people.

Prior to that, it was difficult and illegal, though not impossible, for black people to settle in the area. The Western Cape had been declared a ‘coloured labour preference’ area in 1955, and Kayamandi was established under the framework of the Group Areas Act, part of wide-scale social engineering that saw large parts of the native Afrikaans-speaking coloured population forcibly moved to what is today Cloetesville and Idas Valley, suburbs on the outskirts of Stellenbosch.

The black township constructed as part of this plan, and which came to be called Kayamandi, was small and sat behind the Pappegaaiberg industrial zone. It was well planned, vastly outnumbered in scale by the white and coloured populations, and strongly regulated by law and local authority, until in-migration from the Eastern Cape began.

Mr Ketse settled in an informal section of Kayamandi known as O-Zone. He became an ANC ward councillor, joining and quitting various civic organisations in the area but always maintaining a finger on the pulse of the community, which was far more vocal in the new South Africa and clamouring for the benefits of state initiatives like the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) introduced in the mid-1990s.

By 2012, the area had been largely serviced, and there was a semblance of permanence and order. Though the shanty houses were still largely constructed from zinc, wood and plastic, many had been partially formalised and expanded, in sharp contrast to the tiny makeshift shacks in Enkanini.

Mr Ketse explained to me that the formal houses are usually inhabited by large families. Eventually, the children wish to move out and get married but have not accumulated any wealth to strike out on their own. Government seems to always be on the back foot when it comes to the provision of housing, and by now the RDP has been roundly declared a failure. As Mr Ketse says, ‘There are always promises after promises after promises.’

Enter the phenomenon of the backyard dwelling, the vehicle by which Enkanini emerged from the overcrowding of O-Zone.

A backyarder is someone who lives in a self-constructed shack in the backyard of a formal house, such as one of the original township dwellings or one built by government as part of its housing delivery. There are never enough houses to go around, and there is a lot of money to be made in the illicit rental market, so shacks are ‘farmed’ on any open property – generally just one but often far more. These are rented out to new arrivals and younger family members. As a result, the formally planned township becomes cramped, leading to hygiene and service delivery issues, which leads to dissatisfaction. Backyard shacks often spill onto the streets, and in particularly bad cases start to vastly outnumber formal houses, leading to small islands of brick and mortar in the middle of a sea of shacks.

The lack of housing provision by a centralised government that is constitutionally mandated to do so, and spent much of the early 1990s promising such, has led to people taking matters into their own hands. In 2019, Professor Ivan Turok of the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) noted that according to Gauteng province’s own statistics, backyard dwellings increased by 200 per cent between 2001 and 2016. No surprise then when stories of shacklords, who build up to sixteen shacks on a single government plot, make the news. It’s good income. In this situation lies the basic fact of a South African ‘land grab’.

Enkanini was born of such a land grab, when rioting for service delivery that quite literally cannot be granted led to an impasse, and a mass of backyarders and new arrivals settled on the slope behind the industrial area. Mr Ketse tells me that communication in this context is sorely lacking. The community isn’t informed by their leaders that what they seek from the municipality is difficult, if not impossible. The municipality will make promises and sometimes they will be fulfilled, but it is never enough. Provincial government is often hamstrung by budget constraints and regulated spatial planning. The township was never designed to accommodate so many people, because who among the original National Party planners saw the sun setting on apartheid? Meanwhile, backyarders have no legal recourse in cases of eviction. When they get the chance to speak out, they invariably complain of being unable to pay rent. Often, a landlord will jack up rent simply because someone else can afford a higher rate and the original backyarder is left homeless.

Kayamandi proper is planned and serviced, with named roads, electricity and plumbing, and is laid out according to a logical structure devised at a time when a large-scale influx of black people from outside the Western Cape seemed unthinkable. At its centre, O-Zone is partially serviced. Purely by virtue of having existed for almost three decades, it has established roads and has taken on its own shape, but it clearly falls far short of its older surroundings in terms of liveability. And then there is Enkanini, now officially on the outskirts of Kayamandi, edging into the suburbs of Stellenbosch – a cluster of shacks on a slope of eroding soil with no access to plumbing or any other kinds of service, uncovered electric cables criss-crossing above it like a net. There is no space left, but incomers arrive every day from Kraaifontein and Cape Town and Grabouw, all fleeing poverty, and those who have lived here for a while have given birth to a new generation. None of these people can afford to send their children away or pay rent in a more formal area, or even pay rent for a backyard shack to those old or lucky enough to have a formal house with a yard.

By 2018, the only space left into which the township could expand was the land behind Kayamandi, stretching along the industrial zone and culminating in a farm estate. This land belonged to Stefan Smit, a sixty-two-year-old Afrikaans farmer whose great-grandfather had bought Koopmanskloof in 1896, from which Louisenhof, Smit’s wine farm, was apportioned. Divorced with two daughters in their twenties, Smit lived with his partner, Zurenah.

A man called Midas Wanana is credited with launching the occupation of Stefan Smit’s land, along with an individual known only as ‘Madiba’, who Mr Ketse says is a devout EFF supporter, part of the new wave of black revolutionaries who arrived in the area with an explicit intention to cause disruption.

According to Mr Ketse, Wanana has been engaged in land struggles for twenty years. He is from the Eastern Cape, was part of a ratepayers association and was a ward councillor at some point. Mr Ketse believes Wanana is, or was, ANC-affiliated but eventually became disillusioned with the ruling party. 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 friend at Rapport had told me something similar just a day earlier. No statement was released, but Rapport’s senior reporters were confident that the police had shifted the official line of inquiry from a home invasion to a premeditated assassination, with Smit’s wife Zurenah suspected as the mastermind of an elaborate scheme.

It took a few months for all the details to come out. In December, it emerged that Zurenah had allegedly falsified Stefan Smit’s will in January 2019, six months before his murder and around four months after the first attempted evictions. This information emerged from pleadings handed in at the Cape High Court by Smit’s two surviving daughters, who had roped in handwriting specialists. A week before that, a judge had ordered that Zurenah be barred from acting as executor of Smit’s will. And long before that, smatterings of rumour had emerged in the press that Smit’s daughters from his first marriage had actually stood to inherit millions, and that there were suspicions about the latest will, in which Zurenah was the chief beneficiary, as well as standing to take ownership of Louisenhof.

This rubbished the idea, hinted at by the New York Times, that Smit’s murder was linked to land conflict stemming from the fact that ‘Mr. Smit and his friends hold vast tracts of land brutally snatched from African inhabitants generations ago and deliberately kept in white hands for decades to come’.

On the day that Mr Ketse and I drove to Azania after Smit’s murder, we spoke with an old friend of his whom we found walking purposefully along the first row of the settlement. It was a slow day in Azania. Dark, spent clouds hung in the air, having disgorged desperately needed rain onto the Winelands the previous day. Half of the shacks were empty shells. Some industrious younger men were erecting or renovating. Azania is far less clustered than Marikana and Enkanini, where we’d just braved washed-out dirt roads to rise above the smog. Several times we got stuck and Mr Ketse had to climb out and help me navigate the ravines that the rain and streams had lashed out of the earth. Inevitably, a crowd would form. The children especially loved chanting ‘umlungu’ (white person) at me as if they were from deepest rural Eastern Cape, despite this being an urban township less than a kilometre from the umlungu part of town.

Mr Ketse’s friend made it clear to me through Mr Ketse’s translation that Wanana and Madiba were not the only powers in Azania: that he and others like him were older residents of Kayamandi, and that they were the most deserving of the occupied land. I realised that not only were there two or more power blocs in the occupation itself, but all of this was steadily riling up residents from Kayamandi – those who’d been there longest and whose lives had been severely disrupted by the constant fuss the newcomers caused. The housing waiting list, an apparently sacred document kept under lock and key in the municipal offices, had been all but torn to shreds by the occupation.

News reports on the initial invasion in 2018 stated that the housing list comprised 22 000 people. Some who had been on the list for over a decade were forced out of the queue as the municipality panicked and pacified those who shouted loudest.

‘There are people who come here for three years and they get a house,’ Mr Ketse said. ‘My daughter is twenty-two years. I am still living in a shack. How corrupt is this municipality? If you are not the right person, you become an enemy to them, the officials of the housing department. How can someone who comes in 2010 get a house before somebody who is actually a founder of O-Zone?’

I constantly badgered Mr Ketse about EWC. Why fight for land when EWC was on the cards? He shook his head and intimated that many people did not believe that the ANC would deliver on that promise; not that this excused the behaviour of the occupiers.

‘When you do things, you must do them legal,’ he preached to me in the car as we wound our way through the mud and shacks. ‘Whatever you do, if you do it by force, in the form of grabbing, someone will suffer. When two bulls are fighting, which bull will suffer? It is the grass.’

Wanana paid the ultimate price for his involvement in the conflict. On 15 August 2019, two months after Smit was murdered, and almost exactly a year after the saga began, Wanana was shot and killed. Rumours were that local taxi bosses, the real players of any township economy and notorious for their influence and criminality, were involved. To my mind, the real culprits are most likely those who’d seen the housing list thrown to the wind in the wake of the occupations. Perhaps they had sought the help of the taxi bosses. No one can say for sure.

The media weren’t as enamoured with the story as they had been with Stefan Smit’s, and it received little coverage. Wanana’s brother made a statement the day after the killing: ‘He was supposed to participate in the march today. In the early hours, maybe after 4 a.m., he received a call to move his car in the road, as it was blocking someone. When he got to his car the two tyres on the right were flat, it looks like they were slashed. When he went to check them, someone opened fire on him.’

A friend who had been with him had apparently ducked for cover as ‘multiple shots were fired’. Wanana’s widow added that her husband was killed ‘for being at the forefront of addressing land issues in Stellenbosch’. The police noted only that it appeared that the suspects were three men, and that the motive had yet to be established.

Stefan Smit’s murder made international news for all the wrong reasons. For the New York Times and many others, the land occupation was a poetic representation of black dispossession and historical injustice, and Smit’s death an inevitable sentence passed on a history of blood and conquest. For those who had been apprehensively following the talk of EWC and the radical rhetoric of black leaders who believed that farm murders were intrinsically caught up in the struggle for land and at the behest of a shadowy black force, it was the inevitable first shot across the bow of a coming uhuru.

Neither of these theories hold water. The black occupiers of Louisenhof had zero ties to the land in Stellenbosch. In fact, Louisenhof had been founded as a winery in 1701, some seventy-odd years before the Dutch burghers first made contact with the Xhosa over the Fish River, 900 kilometres away. Perhaps the occupiers were infused with the spirit of land reclamation, but their presence in the area dates back less than half a century, and in substantial numbers only since the early 1990s. This in contrast with coloured people, who certainly suffered dispossession here, first as the Khoikhoi were displaced by the Dutch and then when coloured families were evicted under the Group Areas Act.

The most important question Smit’s death raised was how exactly the murder of a landowner would ensure victory for occupiers, because the fact remains that the tried-and-tested method of protesting and stubbornly refusing to move until services are delivered, no matter the waiting time, has worked far more effectively, ever since James Sofasonke Mpanza expanded Orlando in Johannesburg in this fashion in the first half of the twentieth century, which we’ll come to later in this story.