Читать книгу Promised Land - Karl Kemp - Страница 13

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 only by farmhouses fortified like prisons, and rows of carrots, cauliflower, spinach and broccoli. There are farm stalls and signs advertising chickens for sale, and small roaming herds of cattle and goats, apparently untended. It is the same ground, the same flat, sandy land, that constitutes the Flats and lies beneath Nyanga and Philippi East, but what stands atop it is wholly different – a horticultural agricultural zone dubbed ‘the breadbasket of Cape Town’. Many reports estimate that the area produces up to 80 per cent of the vegetables sold in the metropole, both at informal markets and in big retailers. Before the construction of the Cape Flats took place from the 1950s onwards, it would have been described as the peri-urban edge of the Mother City. Now, the City of Cape Town has dubbed it ‘the urban edge’ – a misnomer, as the entire district is totally surrounded by dwellings.

This area, which encompasses most of Philippi, is peopled by a close-knit community of fourth-generation German farmers who find themselves surrounded by and at war with an ever-expanding slum. As a farming community, Philippi stands in marked, jaw-dropping contrast to the Winelands, and almost anywhere else in the country.

The forefathers of these Germans arrived at the Cape in three groups between 1860 and the 1880s, British rule having long been firmly entrenched, and the Cape’s European history stretching back more than two centuries. The colonial government had successfully tendered for and settled several groups of Germans elsewhere, including in the Eastern Cape and Natal.

Many of those that arrived had been specifically recruited from Lüneburg Heath in northern Germany, where the farmers had adapted to eking out produce from the ‘geest’ prevalent in that area – sandy, seemingly infertile land, much like that on the Cape Flats. And so, they were allocated land to till in the empty, unwelcoming dunes at Cape Town’s edges and told to sit tight and start farming, and that the government would eventually aid them in their endeavours.

By the 1880s South Africa was en route to becoming a union. The Boer Republics would fall by the turn of the century, and the remaining African kingdoms annexed or conquered by the British in their push for federalisation. The diamond fields of Kimberley and gold reefs of Johannesburg had flipped the country on its head, transforming it from an afterthought of European imperialism to a sought-after land of investment and opportunity.

The Cape was changing too. Class and societal structure had long been established. Afrikaans had started its march towards its classification as the language of the oppressor, and the rich Winelands of Paarl, Stellenbosch and other erstwhile homes of governors and lords had taken on a uniquely Capetonian character. The loot – land, gold and diamonds – had been divvied up, and such was the level of control that the First Boer War for independence in the far-flung northern republics had been lost by the British in 1881, laying the groundwork for the second, and infinitely more meaningful, war that would begin eighteen years later to end what had started with the discovery of diamonds.

The Germans were poor, with barely arable land and not much else. They arrived into an already stratified society split between the Europeans and what had become the ‘Coloured’ population – people of mixed ethnic background. The latter had found far more favour with the settlers than those peoples encountered in the Frontier Wars, and were an integral part of the uniquely Capetonian society that persisted until the twentieth century despite the discrimination often heaped upon them.

The arrival of the Germans also coincided with the first records of migration of black Africans from the eastern frontier. Approximately 8 000 were documented as living in the Cape at the time, predominantly from the Transkei and Ciskei, but also joined by various nomads and wanderers from across the country. In 1901 they were shunted into a prototype location – Ndabeni, in what is modern-day Pinelands. The removal was justified by the authorities in the wake of an outbreak of bubonic plague, which was attributed to the insanitary conditions in which the Africans allegedly lived.

Meanwhile, the promised aid from government never came to the Germans in Philippi. The colonial government had imported massive numbers of wattle from Australia to try to halt the expansion of the sandy dunes in the 1830s, which fulfilled its function but had become somewhat of a pest. Antelope still roamed freely in the bush and dunes, and the British elite used the Flats for sport hunting, causing much grief for the farmers when the horses trampled their produce and fields.

Despite the challenging terrain and unhelpful colonial regime, the Germans made the place their own. They founded a Lutheran church and a German school, both of which still stand today, and learnt Afrikaans. During the Boer and World Wars, the Germans were in an awkward position due to their affinity with the Afrikaner people, and many were interned by the British colonial government. In short, their lives were not easy. Gunter Engelke, a descendant, is fond of recalling how his great-grandfather lived in a home that very much resembled a modern shack, and routinely made the arduous trek across the dunes to the market in Long Street by ox-wagon to sell his produce for a pittance.

But the Germans had also hit upon a spot of luck that was to irrevocably change their fortunes: a vast underground aquifer stretching from False Bay to Milnerton, covering an area of more than 400 square kilometres. This unexpected source of unevaporable water, combined with ingenuity and a unique agricultural style of ‘no tilling’, helped them develop the oasis that is known today as the Philippi Horticultural Area (PHA). Many of the Germans became relatively wealthy and entrenched, and some even rich.

Meanwhile, the next township erected on the Flats was Langa, in 1927, following the passing of the 1923 Native Urban Areas Act. It was named after a famous chief of the Hlubi, a minor Nguni chiefdom that clashed with the Zulus in Natal and then with the colonial authorities for refusing to hand over their guns when asked.

Unlike Ndabeni, Langa was meticulously planned and constructed in terms of national legislation under what was now the unified Union government. Ndabeni, by most accounts, had by this time been deemed a failure in any case, and white residents in the surrounding areas wanted the ‘filthy’ blacks removed. Langa was subsequently constructed in full view of the authorities in Cape Town and surrounded by a buffer of empty land, apparently for the purposes of maximum control and observation. In-migration carried on steadily, and in 1946 Nyanga was established as a spillover for Langa.

In order to move black people to the fringes of white and coloured society, which was wrapped around Table Mountain, the authorities didn’t have to go far at first. But when the National Party came to power in 1948, the housing of ‘non-whites’ became bureaucratic science. The Group Areas Act was promulgated in 1950 and tinkered with for a decade afterwards, and the Cape Flats earned a reputation as ‘apartheid’s dumping ground’, the coloured population now also firmly subject to the state’s whims and suffering particularly hard as a result of forced removals.

Designated large-scale black areas like Crossroads and Khayelitsha came later, in the late ’70s and ’80s, as political unrest in the homelands sent refugees hurtling to the comparatively stable white areas and the older townships overflowed. Because most of these incomers were illegal immigrants under the influx-control laws, no official land or development was mooted to accommodate them. Most reports say that this period was one of ‘rapid’ expansion. Visiting the area makes this seem like a huge understatement. According to public benefit organisation the South African Education and Environment Project, the formal boundaries, population figures and demographics of places like Khayelitsha are now mostly unknown. Locals told researchers that official census figures were gross underestimates.

Piet Koornhof, the minister of cooperation and development between 1978 and 1984, addressed the overpopulation emergency in Crossroads following an order by the Cape High Court and a protracted campaign by the liberal Black Sash. He agreed to provide basic services to part of Crossroads, and then rolled out housing in phases. This was before Khayelitsha was formulated as the official living space of all ‘legal’ incoming black people in 1983. By then, political infighting in the community had evolved out of power blocs created to communicate with government. The notoriously violent and government-aligned Witdoeke, described as a vigilante organisation, clashed heavily with the pro-resistance UDF as part of a countrywide struggle in the townships between blacks who worked with the Nats and those who sought to end apartheid.

The population kept growing, and the few farms situated in the area that became modern-day Mitchells Plain (just east of Philippi) were bought out in order to develop the area for non-white resettlement, government scrambling to keep up with demand. In 1994, 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 and on weekends, says Schultz.

If ever there was a kind of local cowboy, he is it. He’s a cavalier with a gold tooth. His ringtone is a clucking chicken to a Eurotrash beat. It rings constantly and Schultz takes every call, then picks up our conversation at the exact syllable he left off.

‘There’s a family here,’ he tells me, launching into a story without preamble, ‘a husband and wife and the husband’s brother. They’ve lived off this farm for eight years. Druggies. They steal my vegetables. Every day, every night. If we wait ten minutes now and walk around the corner there,’ he points to his fields, ‘then we’ll see them stealing. Like clockwork. Every day, every time we leave. If we catch him, he runs across the road’ – meaning Jakes Gerwel Drive – ‘and jumps across the fence at the mall, and he stands behind that fence pulling faces at you. By the time we’ve taken the road around the mall, he’s gone. I know where they live, I’ve chased him there. But when he’s in the flat block, he doesn’t come out and you don’t go in.’

I try to imagine the strange maths a Philippi farmer has to do: plant 5 000 heads of cauliflower, harvest 300; employ two serious security guards, and maybe harvest more cauliflower, but deduct per-day expenses of expensive security, and so on.

‘How do you farm like this?’ I ask.

He laughs and launches into another story.

‘A while ago we were away for the long weekend … My dad phones and says they just caught some guys stealing. You see these sprinklers?’

He points out the copper heads poking up between the rows of cabbage.

‘That’s just a little steel pipe with a brass sprinkler on top. So, the guys steal all the brass sprinklers. Now we’ve replaced them with plastic sprinklers. Then they started stealing the whole thing for the steel pipe to take to the scrapyard. When they steal, they break off the pipe going into the ground. And that is a whole fucking day’s work to fix. Three guys have to come in to fix that.’

He pauses to curse.

‘So, my dad calls and says they’ve stolen eight or ten of these things and the pipes are broken again. So, I said to him, “Jissis, just eight? That’s okay, we’ll fix them tomorrow, not a problem.” My friend who’s with us, who’s not from Philippi, he asks me what happened. I told him. And he said that we’ve become complacent – “It’s just fucking eight? It should be fucking none!”’

Schultz roars with laughter as he mimes his friend’s tone of voice. It’s lunchtime, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He’s become engrossed in telling me about the Wild West of Philippi farming.

‘We haven’t had landlines here for nine years,’ he says. ‘On weekends they steal the wires.’

The farmers now bury electricity cables and phone wires where possible.

‘Our biggest problem in Philippi is the police service,’ says Schultz, ‘but I understand why it’s a problem. They check the crime statistics and say, “Oh there’s only six cases here, let’s redeploy more police.” But there are only six cases because nobody makes cases. You go [to the police station] and you wait for at least an hour or two, and sometimes nobody speaks Afrikaans or English, just Xhosa. With me, there is theft every day and I don’t waste my time. Back in the day, I didn’t have a folder at the police, I had a whole drawer! And everyone feels like this.’

When Schultz says everyone, he really means everyone, not just the farmers. A lack of policing resources is at the heart of complaints from the communities in the neighbouring informal areas as well, from Nyanga residents to the Marikana squatters.

The police don’t enter places like isiQalo. It’s too dark and too easy to get ambushed. The city tried to put up towers with floodlights, but the wiring and cables were stolen the same evening.

‘A detective once told me that Sqalo is the best place for the organised criminals to hide,’ Schultz says. ‘No one will bother them there.’

Six officers from the recently established Anti-Gang Unit were shot in June 2019 in these exact circumstances. Squatter camps are cramped, with no spatial planning to speak of. There is no way to plan a police operation in them. At the same time, the conditions make it nearly impossible for emergency services to enter. Shack fires are an all too common occurrence that routinely leave dozens without even a shack to sleep in because firefighters are unable to reach them in time. And of course, ambulances can’t enter either. If someone falls or has a heart attack, they stand a far lower chance of survival than someone living in a formal area.

‘Some of my people live there,’ says Schultz. ‘They tell me that they see my stolen produce being sold. But they can’t say anything because they live there. And the police won’t go there. I understand it to an extent – they have their own laws in there. Police laws don’t work there. If [someone] steals within Sqalo, he gets the tyre, klaar.’ He’s referring to the practice of necklacing.

‘I will add, though,’ he continues, ‘that not everyone that lives in Sqalo is bad. It’s a handful of people. They also try to sort out those elements, but they can’t do it all. I asked my workers to ask the chief to come see me about the theft – because, you know, we pay hundreds of thousands of rands to the security companies – just so they will steal less. Not stop stealing,’ he adds, ‘just less.’

It didn’t work.

Schultz says that if something of his is stolen, he waits ‘about two hours’ then goes to the illegal scrapyard and looks around. Often, he will find his stuff. ‘And I take it back. It doesn’t help to bring the police in,’ he adds.

‘I honestly don’t know how they can fix this,’ he says. ‘I’ll tell you one thing that I feel very strongly about. We are a Third World country, not First World. If they were to take away all these unions, I tell you now, I could employ eighty people on this farm. Now I have thirty. If I didn’t have to pay a minimum wage …’ He trails off.

‘If there are 20 000 people in the squatter camp, how many people are actually employed?’ Schultz asks me. He doesn’t wait for an answer. ‘Every morning there are people asking for jobs [at the farm], and I feel terrible because I have to turn them away. I can’t afford to pay them R180. The women ask for enough money to buy food, that’s it. There by Johan [Terblanche], 450 people worked. When the minimum wage came in, 200 had to go. Now they’ll go steal, and they won’t get work from another farmer because no one can afford it!’ Schultz is enraged by this.

‘There are people that take advantage and pay people R30 a day, for example, and that’s not gonna work, obviously, but if I could just pay R100 a day …’ He trails off again.

‘If you’re hungry, what you going to do? You’re gonna make a plan, my friend.’ He lights another cigarette and I join him. By now we’re sitting on a pile of planks just outside the main storehouse. Most of the workers have knocked off for lunch.

‘If they take away that shit,’ he says, referring to the minimum wage, ‘so many more people will have work. The farmers here won’t be able to keep up. The squatter camps will run empty from people coming to work.’

The Cape Flats are certainly fuller than they have ever been. In-migration to the Western Cape has never been higher. Nationwide unemployment has never been higher. Discontent has never been higher. The cost of violent protest has never been higher. In Philippi, the pressure is felt more acutely than in areas further away from the Flats.

Schultz says that when squatter camps explode with people and there are violent protests, they almost always take place on the ‘big roads’, like Jakes Gerwel Drive, that can easily be barricaded. Often, protests happen within days of one another and overlap. When this happens, the people of Mitchells Plain can’t go to work. The latest and most violent round of protests was in May 2018, when isiQalo residents protesting for service delivery burnt down fruit and vegetable stalls around Jakes Gerwel Drive.

‘You’ve heard of PAGAD, right?’ Schultz is grinning when he asks this. His mood has swung again. I nod in the affirmative. You’d be hard-pressed to find a Capetonian who doesn’t know about People Against Gangsterism and Drugs, a vigilante group originating in the early ’90s that famously took out Cape Flats gangster Rashaad Staggie in 1996.

‘So, one day PAGAD decided “to here and no further”,’ says Schultz. ‘My friend, it was fucking war. I stood here in front of my house and said to my wife, “Jissis, hier’s kak” – it was machine-gun fire. A guy pokes his head out from his shack, he’s shot at. When the police came, the people from the squatter camp were hiding behind the police, [who were] protecting them from PAGAD! And they got such a fright from that story that the chief from the squatter camp wrote a column in the Plainsman saying that they’d stop burning the road if they’d stop sending PAGAD!’ He laughs uproariously.

‘No, the coloureds fucking hate the blacks,’ he says. ‘A coloured guy told me the other day, “Back then it was this way or that way, but now we’re still in the kak in the middle.”’

The stereotype is that because the coloured community doesn’t toyi-toyi and burn things to get what they want, they’ve been on housing waiting lists since the early ’90s, while incoming Eastern Cape migrants jump the queue by occupying and protesting. Given the fact that the coloured population’s forefathers were settled in the Cape long before black people arrived on the scene, naturally the community might feel that it has a far stronger claim to preferential treatment and redress in the province. Supporting this is the fact that there is a new strain of coloured nationalism brewing, and in the Western Cape it is most pertinently illustrated by individuals like Fadiel Adams, a community leader who has drawn both fierce criticism and support for his demands for an independent Cape.

Adams has made a powerful enemy of the City of Cape Town, which has attempted to sue him for damages arising from violent riots the city claimed he incited. He’s often accused of making incendiary demands, like ‘bussing the blacks back to the Eastern Cape’, but his official stance is that he is not a racist. ‘We have never shown hatred towards blacks,’ he was quoted in the Mail & Guardian in the wake of the 2018 stand-off across Jakes Gerwel Drive, in which he was involved. ‘This is about fairness, justice and equality. We have welcomed people from the Eastern Cape until we discovered they don’t want us here. They want our land. Sixty-five-year-old grandmothers are living in wendy houses while twenty-five-year-old black youth from the Eastern Cape have been here for six months and get title deeds.’

Schultz had talked almost non-stop for over an hour and seemed to have softened up a bit. He and his wife invited me in for lunch, and he told me a lot of stories off the record. None of them implicate him in any kind of crime, but many of them were far more personal than he was willing to share with a wider audience. Prior to that, he’d told me a few knee-slappers, as well as recounting a few more serious anecdotes, which he’d seemed to reveal with great reluctance. He’d almost been executed during a robbery once, in the early morning outside the farm stall just around the corner from where we were standing in the yard. The gun misfired, and the perpetrators fled. Friends of his are apparently great fans of quad bikes, and chasing down crop thieves on them.

‘Ja nee, nee.’ Schultz dances around the topic of whether the Philippi farmers have been driven to extremes by the ‘land’ crisis. He settles for another funny story, about a burglar who got stuck in the chimney and was only freed when the police broke him out with a pickaxe. The following week, Schultz caught the same guy on this property.

‘That was an interesting time in my life,’ he says, suddenly serious. ‘I caught that same guy six times. I kept giving him over to police, and he kept coming back. I’m not gonna talk about it further, though. I don’t actually know what happened to him. At that stage I was still a “Rambo”, carrying the firearm every day. At night, if there was a noise, I’d go out and investigate. But I don’t do that shit any more. You know what’s changed?’

I say that I don’t.

‘What’s changed is that all of them have guns now too. I don’t fucking leave the house now – I phone armed response and tell them to come. I don’t go out.’

The Philippi farmers are at odds as to what to do about the ever-worsening situation. Schultz might stick it out; he is, after all, a self-described optimist. But he’s a lone voice. Another Philippi farmer I met was Carl Gorgens. He’s got one foot out of the door already, having invested in other agricultural land, far from Cape Town but still in the Western Cape. Gunter Engelke was characteristically stoic, but I could sense a very deep sorrow in his gruff voice. Johan Terblanche was so agitated about the constant shoot-outs that we didn’t get a chance to discuss whether he considered packing up and moving out.

‘Don’t make a mistake – people still make money here in Philippi,’ Schultz had told me. The underground aquifer allowed the Philippi farmers to survive the national drought, and despite the pollution at its extreme edges, in the PHA it ‘recharges’, cleansing itself, largely due to the proliferation of sand.

‘What should actually happen here is to put up and close Philippi off with these big vibracrete walls, and block off the squatter camps,’ Schultz had said. ‘But we know that’s not gonna happen.’

Months later, I interviewed a prominent member of the City of Cape Town’s mayoral committee. We discussed the Fischer matter, and the cleavages in the city’s executive regarding policy on proactive land occupation intervention, and I eventually got around to asking him about the Philippi situation. This member, who has a reputation for being a bit of a hard-ass with little sympathy for land invaders, subtly changed his tone and told me that what was really going on in Philippi was shack farming.

‘By who?’ I asked.

‘By the farmers there,’ he replied. ‘The ones close to isiQalo and Jakes Gerwel Drive.’ I got the sense he felt he was leaking me a story. But after seeing the place for myself, the hopelessness, the overpopulation and the suffering of the farmers, I wasn’t surprised.

The foremost question on my mind when I left Philippi was how the situation had escalated to that point. The answer to this lies partially in the failure of the N2 Gateway project, launched in the mid-2000s – the state’s attempt to break the back of the Cape Flats housing crisis.

The project formed part of the broader executive policy known as ‘Breaking New Ground: A Comprehensive Plan for the Development of Sustainable Human Settlements’ that was approved by cabinet, which signalled a departure from the RDP plan. Speaking in Parliament at the yearly budget vote in May 2006, minister of housing Lindiwe Sisulu called it ‘the largest housing project ever undertaken by any government’. The preamble to the policy conceded that ‘despite service delivery’, the ‘number of households living in shacks in informal settlements and backyards increased from 1.45 million in 1996 to 1.84 million in 2001, an increase of 26 per cent, which is far greater than the 11 per cent increase in population over the same period’.

Critics immediately labelled the Gateway project a ‘beautification’ project for the 2010 FIFA World Cup, as the planned developments were situated along the N2 corridor off Cape Town International Airport, where the worst of the Flats’ squatting and housing crises are on permanent display to international visitors.

The project was intended to create 22 000 housing opportunities, both subsidised and bonded, to address the critical housing backlog in Cape Town. All three spheres of government were to cooperate, though the City of Cape Town was suspended from involvement in 2006 following newly elected mayor Helen Zille’s comments on cost overruns and poor implementation, claiming that the previous ANC majority had ‘left her with a poisoned chalice’. In the DA’s stead, national government appointed parastatal Thubelisha Homes to coordinate the implementation of the project at provincial level.

By 2007 the DA had called for a probe into housing allocation at the new development, claiming that the politically connected and wealthy were using the opportunity to move into the area.

The development was to take place in various areas across the city, but by far the largest section was to be built along a ten-kilometre stretch of the N2 highway on land occupied by the Joe Slovo informal settlement, which comprised over 20 000 residents. The settlement had mushroomed incredibly quickly in the early 1990s, largely due to its prime location close to work opportunities in the Cape Town CBD. Government informed the squatters that they were to be relocated to Delft, a comparatively recently established area fifteen kilometres further north-east, which was built and planned in 1989 as a ‘mixed-race’ area to accommodate both coloured and black people. Critics hit back that such relocation was contrary to the new policy’s stated aim of ‘in-situ upgrading where possible’. The Joe Slovo squatters were unhappy with the offer and wished to stay closer to town. They also deemed the Temporary Relocation Area (TRA) units in Delft unsuitable to their needs. They had, after all, been promised 70 per cent of the newly constructed homes (with the other 30 per cent going to backyarders from Langa). It later transpired that the housing to be built on the land on which they lived was to be rental and bonded – not subsidised, and therefore not affordable to them. A mass-action campaign ensued.

Meanwhile, a group of impoverished people from Delft, led by DA councillor Frank Martin, had proceeded to occupy many of the houses ostensibly being built for the Slovo community, claiming that if anyone in the area should receive subsidised housing there, it should be them. This led to an eviction that was so forceful that twenty people were hospitalised. Those who were evicted ended up with much the same problem as Irene Grootboom – they couldn’t return to their backyard shacks because these had already been rented out to others. And so two more squatter camps were formed – one along Symphony Way, a major thoroughfare in Delft, and another in tents provided by the city. The people in the tented camp were eventually moved into a TRA that came to be known as Blikkiesdorp (tin-can town) for its sea of metal shacks. Later, it came to resemble a post-apocalyptic refugee camp, and when the city attempted to move those who had settled at Symphony Way into Blikkiesdorp as well, they refused.

The mass action campaign by the Joe Slovo squatters continued apace. Controversial High Court judge John Hlophe ruled in their favour, and the matter was referred to the Constitutional Court. It delivered a famous and very long judgment in June 2009, holding that the government’s efforts to balance all competing interests were legitimate and legal, and allowed the eviction of the Joe Slovo squatters and their relocation to Delft to continue in staggered groups over ten months – though with guarantees that the TRAs in Delft were suitable and that the third phase of the Gateway project, which had by then already been initiated, allocate the promised 70 per cent of housing opportunities to them. The justice who wrote the main judgment was Zak Yacoob, who had also presided over the Irene Grootboom case.

Just a month prior to the judgment, the auditor-general released a report (which had actually been completed a year earlier) clearly evidencing mismanagement and a lack of due process on the part of the developers, specifically with regard to how the project was driven from the top down and disregarded the framework set out by housing legislation in terms of the different roles of government spheres in the implementation of such projects.

The N2 Gateway project’s implementation and subsequent failure have made international headlines on several occasions. It is perhaps the perfect microcosm of the housing-delivery situation in South Africa, and the fallout is an ever-wider dispersal of the patchwork housing common to the Flats. Today, places like Blikkiesdorp are just another part of the Flats, and the most you hear about them is when particularly gruesome crimes are committed there, which is frequently. The Joe Slovo settlement, meanwhile, has remained, subject to frequent land occupations, some of which are successful, some of which aren’t.

And yet, while the Cape Town metropole is perhaps one of the worst-affected areas in this regard, it is far from the only place cracking under pressure.