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A KILOMETRE OF dirt road connects Alfred and Anzette Borcherds’s farm Avondrust to the paved roads of urban Kraaifontein on the fringes of Cape Town. One side of the road is bordered by farmland, the other by shacks. As Alfred and I drive this stretch, he starts saying something but goes mute when he notices a young man with his pants down, squatting next to one of the Borcherdses’ fallow orchards.

The story of the Borcherdses’ land travails begins in the informal settlement of Wallacedene, and it starts with a woman called Irene Grootboom. She was one of a group of people who’d been left in the lurch in the wake of the abolition of influx control in 1986. Wallacedene was a result of the subsequent in-migration, and most sources point to 1989 as the date of its establishment. According to Alfred, the area in which it now stands was first expropriated by the National Party around 1980 in order to build a double-lane highway that would connect to the N7, placing the land under government ownership.

Alfred likes to say that he knows the exact site of the smallholding that was first squatted. Academics have pinpointed it as being a small farm known as Uitkyk, where several coloured families made their home, rebuilding the crumbling farmhouse after the old farmer sold up and left.

This area consisted of fields at the start of the Winelands and on the periphery of Cape Town, with a small number of people owning large tracts of land. The view west to Cape Town and all the way to Lion’s Head was completely unobscured by suburbs and industry. Several poorer 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 borders of their farm, fed by a constant stream of in-migration from across the provincial border and displacement from throughout the Western Cape.

In 2011, ten years after the Grootboom case and two years before the formation of the revolutionary EFF and the start of the new land debate, violent protests erupted to the north of Bloekombos. The protesters demanded service delivery and housing, setting fire to tyres and blockading Old Paarl Road. They were swiftly dispersed by the city, which owns large tracts of land on that side of the highway. The Borcherdses maintain that the city acts far more decisively when their own land is invaded, and that squatters know that private land is a different matter altogether, although events in the rest of the Western Cape point to a different reality.

On a Thursday afternoon in 2013, the Borcherdses’ son Tiaan was accosted in the farmhouse by a group of six black men. He was tied up and held at gunpoint while the robbers systemically looted the house and went on to relieve the staff in the office of their cellphones and jewellery before escaping to the north over the neighbouring wine farm and into Bloekombos, where a shoot-out with police ensued. A female police officer was shot dead. Anzette came home that evening to find several Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (Hawks) officials sitting with Tiaan, going through the weapons that had been seized from two of the intruders who had been captured. A third intruder was later apprehended in the Eastern Cape after witnesses on a bus noticed the wounded man sitting in a pool of blood.

In 2016, a mere week after the trial of the three intruders concluded, Alfred was stabbed by three coloured youths after he caught them in the process of raiding his fields for vegetables. He spent ten days in intensive care. ‘We broke our own rules trying to play vigilante,’ he tells me.

According to the Borcherdses, they had seen all of these troubles coming. By 2004, local residents had seemingly given in to the inevitable. The owner of the smallholding on the edge of land between Wallacedene and Avondrust sold up and shipped out, and his land was bought by the municipality. It had acted as a buffer zone between Avondrust and the encroaching Wallacedene. The Borcherdses showed me the old farmhouse in which this man had lived, barely visible between a forest of washing lines and shacks across the dam. He was apparently fond of firing off his shotgun at night as a pre-emptive warning to the residents of Wallacedene.

It was this small strip of property at the bottom of Avondrust, and eventually right up against the vibracrete wall bordering Wallacedene, that was settled by shack dwellers in the years following the man’s sale to the state, and which would eventually spill over onto Avondrust.

In February 2017, the occupation comprised a group of ten people. This, Alfred said, he was capable of handling. But like so many other landowners, he points to 2018 as the year things escalated. This was the year when the new land debate and, crucially, EWC entered the public discourse.

The squatter camp grew, and the city cleared the shacks as best it could. A day later, they had been erected again, plus more. From March, Anzette became an obsessive chronicler, waking in the mornings and making notes from her living room of the increase of shacks – which ones were new, which people were seen living there and which people were helping with the construction – knowing that it was only a matter of time before the occupation spilt over onto their land.

In the afternoons, as she drove home from work, she again took notes as she passed the settlement, and registered complaints with the city with almost daily frequency, keeping all the correspondence, communication and case numbers in a file, having been advised to ‘keep a paper trail’ by other farmers. For many days, she says, she logged two complaints, producing two reference numbers – one in the morning and one in the afternoon, during which as many as six shacks were built while she was at work.

Theft of the Borcherdses’ vegetable stocks increased exponentially. Rubbish piles became mountains that poisoned the dam, hampering their irrigation systems. The land closest to the dam went unseeded and still lies fallow. Neighbours started making excuses not to visit, refusing to drive the road to the farm, preferring to meet the Borcherdses in nearby Durbanville. Days without electricity became a common occurrence as power substations were vandalised and stripped of copper wire. Alfred says that the vitriol hurled at them by children when they drove past in the bakkie became progressively worse. Because the kids are migrants and local schools simply don’t have space to accommodate them, they have nothing to do all day, he says.

The next thing they had to do was add fencing and metal coverings to prevent petrol bombs coming through the farmhouse windows. On 2 October 2018, the city made a clean sweep of the buffer zone, demolishing all structures in the area. That evening someone retaliated. Anzette recalls being at home at around 7 p.m. when a strange glow caught her eye. Then came the call from the farmworkers on the property – petrol bombs had been thrown and the fields were alight. Anzette fled the farm in her nightclothes, while Alfred and Tiaan went out to combat the flames. The entire farming community pitched in – Alfred’s brother, who farms on the neighbouring property, brought his team, and the farm watch from Joostenberg across the highway showed up as well.

Alfred does not believe that the culprits were the people who had lived in the demolished shacks. Whenever there is action by the city, he says, a ‘criminal element awakens’, one that has violent intent and which he believes is ‘from outside’ and has a political motive.

Two weeks later, the Borcherdses were watching the news and a story popped up regarding the city’s conflict with the squatters in the buffer zone. The city had applied for an interdict that allowed the occupiers to stay on the land as long as they didn’t expand further. The Borcherdses had never been approached or kept in the loop about the court proceedings regarding the piece of land verging on their property.

Anzette phoned the lawyers involved and obtained copies of the interdicts that were intended to regulate subsequent proceedings, according to which further construction of shacks was prohibited and signs advising of the interdict were to be placed at strategic intervals along the farm road. According to Anzette, this was never done. Expansion and construction continued throughout the year.

On 5 December, a community leader purporting to be the chairperson of the local branch of the South African National Civic Organisation (SANCO), which is aligned with the ANC, approached the Borcherdses and begged them not to evict a certain section of the squatters, which had expanded onto Avondrust, as they were in the process of being relocated by the city to alternative accommodation as part of the deal struck earlier. He gave his name as Chippa and claimed to represent sixty-two households that the Borcherdses subsequently agreed not to evict should it come to that.

The Borcherdses’ farmhouse became a rotating cast of characters. ‘Teams’, as Alfred calls them, would come knocking; they would be received at the gate and Alfred would take them to the break room to discuss demands regarding the land. He’d long ago started carrying his firearm at all times. Chippa, an ANC ward councillor called Siphiwe, representatives from the Ses’khona People’s Rights Movement, City of Cape Town officials, a politically connected pastor from Wallacedene named Jeffrey (who eventually arranged for mayor Dan Plato to visit) and AfriForum all made an appearance. Of these, Chippa and Mamma Florence, another squatter leader, had the ear of the Borcherdses.

Pastor Jeffrey told them that plot farming was taking place, that Cyril Ramaphosa was his friend and that people were making money from this occupation; that early on, a black lawyer visited the community and walked away with thousands of rands for promised legal help.

The EFF also turned up in the area, but intermittently, promising to assist all land occupiers and invaders in their cause, but ultimately did not carry the matter through.

In April 2019 things came to a head.

On 18 April, Chippa again knocked on the Borcherdses’ door. He was leaving, going home to the Eastern Cape for the Easter weekend. He’d heard strange rumblings in the camp, he said, and pleaded with the Borcherdses to ‘keep an eye out’.

On 22 April, Easter Monday, there was a flurry of construction on the land. Anzette asked Mamma Florence to find out what was going on. Mamma Florence reported back that these new arrivals were ‘strangers’ who would not listen to her, and that they’d told her that many more were en route from the Eastern Cape. Anzette called the various City of Cape Town officials she’d dealt with thus far but received no assistance, as the construction was taking place on Avondrust – private property outside the municipality-owned buffer zone. She then called Siphiwe, the ANC ward councillor, who promised to come by but did not.

Anzette finally called city law enforcement again and requested an anti-land-invasion vehicle. While she waited, the construction increased exponentially. The buffer zone had filled up and expansion onto Avondrust was escalating. Two police vehicles eventually arrived but needed Public Order Policing (POP) personnel to be present in order for any action they took to be appropriate and legal. They made the request, but a POP unit never showed up. Anzette then called up the lawyers and asked them to get the papers ready for an interdict. She went to bed with the sound of construction ringing through the night.

Alfred opened a case of trespassing the following day. Anzette called the presidential hotline, which was over-logged. ‘Didn’t President Ramaphosa say there would be no land grabs?’ she later lamented. The Borcherdses’ advocate, Laurie Wilkes, called to say that the interdict was granted. Anzette was told that because the structures were on the Borcherdses’ private property, they were responsible for all the costs involved in the eviction, despite the fact that they had diligently reported every incident of trespass from out of the buffer zone, playing their part while the city failed to address the crisis on the strip it owned. Once again, Anzette went to bed to the sound of construction.

The next day necessitated the deployment of Capital Security Services, a private security firm Anzette had enlisted when the situation first started getting ugly. Ten armed men arrived, and one of them was sent to spy on the occupiers. He told Anzette that he overheard the occupiers threatening to burn down the farm if the shacks were removed. Alfred opened a case of intimidation. By now, the Borcherdses were desperate; they managed to claw out a meeting with Werner Bezuidenhout from the premier’s office and met him at the local police station. Alfred invited him to see the occupation. Bezuidenhout was dumbfounded by its scale. He called the premier’s office and advised them to bring forward the date of the eviction to Friday, as waiting until after the weekend would render the situation unresolvable.

The Borcherdses considered packing their bags and leaving everything behind that evening. The next morning, Thursday 25 April, the sheriff showed up to erect the ‘pending eviction’ signs necessitated by law. Again, one of the Capital Security staff walked among the occupiers incognito. He reported to Anzette that a local ‘pastor’ was selling off the plots. The Red Ants, a well-known private eviction services company, called to ask for the balance of their R160 000 fee, and Anzette duly paid up. By this time, the situation had escalated to the point where Anzette, her daughter, who was visiting from abroad, and her granddaughter evacuated the property.

On Friday morning, the various groups involved in the eviction gathered at the Brackenfell sports field. These included the city’s Anti-Land Invasion Unit, law enforcement, the Red Ants, a POP unit, and SAPS officials from Kraaifontein. The eviction proceeded, and the shacks that had spilt over onto the Borcherdses’ property were broken down without much fuss. The Red Ants called Anzette and asked her whether there was somewhere they could store the remains of the shacks, as there wasn’t enough space along the N1. Arrangements were made with a neighbouring farmer, and the materials were dumped there. The Red Ants promised to return on Monday to remove the heaps of tin sheeting and wood. By evening, reports had come in from the private security that the occupiers had started taking the materials from the heap. Anzette left the house again, leaving Alfred behind to safeguard their property.

By the next morning shacks had started reappearing. Construction continued, in Anzette’s opinion ‘more vigorously’ than ever before. By the afternoon, a man was spotted orating boldly amid a large crowd of occupiers on a guava patch. Tiaan sent up a drone to see the situation from above. Private security officers were again sent to infiltrate the squatter camp, and the man was identified as one Loyiso Nkohla, a man we’ll come to know a lot about in due course. He was telling the squatters that they had been illegally evicted, and that they must carry on the fight. This they did. From the drone footage, Anzette counted around 200 newly erected structures. They stretched across the Borcherdses’ property up to the farmworkers’ houses and beyond to their orchards. The sheriff’s signs had been stolen. The Red Ants quoted the Borcherdses another R160 000 for a new eviction. The family turned instead to a cheaper service provider, MS Adams Construction (Pty) Ltd. The building continued throughout Sunday.

On Monday 29 April, the various groups again conferred at the sports field. This time, they were slower in arriving, and the eviction started late. Again, the squatters appeared to let it go. Again, there was too much building material to remove from the area before nightfall, and the eviction was to be continued the following day. This time, the Borcherdses posted Capital Security officials to guard the piles of scrap. They made three citizen’s arrests as squatters attempted to take back the materials.

At 9.30 the next morning, the pump house at the dam was petrol-bombed. The SAPS reported to Anzette that their vehicles in the area had been similarly assaulted the previous night. It became clear that the occupiers would rebuild as necessary. The Borcherdses ultimately decided to take a stand; a neighbouring farmer agreed to bring in a bulldozer.

On 30 April 2019, the Borcherdses dug a long, deep trench in a perimeter around the occupation. In the process, they hit a water pipe that burst and flooded the area, but the sheriff was present and attested to the fact that it was an accident. Community leaders arrived to enquire about the trench. The neighbouring farmer in charge of the operation informed them that this was a border; this was where the occupation ended. It appeared that a stalemate had been reached.

The following day, a few interlopers could be seen picking up wood and sheet metal from the Borcherdses’ property, which was now protected by the trench. Anzette noted that the scene was ‘almost peaceful’. A day later, construction started on new shacks, from the buffer zone right up to the trench. Someone even built support struts on the trench’s bank to hold up shacks that were right on the edge. The space slowly filled up, but no shacks were built in the trench itself. Over the next few days, Anzette kept watch. The trench appeared to have worked, and the Borcherdses eventually dismissed the costly private security.

By the time I arrived months later, the trench was filled with rubbish. The shacks within the buffer zone were so congested that they had cut off the settlement’s access route. In June, a fire broke out and many shacks burnt down as fire services were unable to penetrate the forest. The situation was nasty, but the trench appeared to have created a reprieve for the Borcherdses. The week during the evictions cost the family in excess of R1 million. Anzette told me that Avondrust was now the ‘buffer farm’; if they were to sell up, or give up and leave, the ‘entire Bottelary district would be at risk’ of occupation. Even so, by 7 May, days after the national election, the family were in touch with the city about having Avondrust taken off their hands. On 8 May it started raining heavily, and the trench began filling up with water.

The Borcherdses have a decades-long history of trying to pre-empt this crisis. In 2008, they submitted a plan of action in terms of the city’s Spatial Development Framework, proposing that the land in the buffer zone be used as a starting point for development into an industrial zone. They’ve suggested to government the construction of a venture-farming project, zoning the twenty hectares or so of occupied land for a dual agri-residential area with the involvement of the national Department of Agriculture and Land Reform, as it was then known. Alfred concedes that getting money from government for such a venture is an incredibly bureaucratic process, and that in any case any small-scale farming here would probably be impossible now due to crop theft and pollution from Wallacedene.

Farmers like Alfred are necessarily long-term strategists because their livelihood relies on circulation, crop cycling, breeding terms and the sustainability of it all. Town planning, you would think, operates along the same lines. But nothing in South Africa is ever straightforward. Months later, there was news that squatters at the Klein Akker informal settlement in Kraaifontein, which Alfred had pointed out to me on our drive, had been evicted. The city, as in every other case of eviction, was forced to provide alternative emergency accommodation to the evictees, at least half of whom were white. It would appear that crises such as the Wallacedene housing issue are becoming increasingly non-racial.

The Borcherdses can’t leave their besieged land, not with their 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.