This land is our land
‘Land reform’ and, even more headline grabbing, ‘expropriation without compensation’. Two phrases that is used to scare just as much as to promise a new beginning. In Promised Land: Exploring South Africa’s Land Conflict, Karl Kemp travels the country documenting the fallout of failing land reform. Here are two extracts.
Chapter 4: Trench Warfare
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 con¬struction – 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 struc¬tures 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.
Chapter 9: The Sound of Hammers
We drive south through Zwelihle towards the coast, and eventually the tarred road runs out and becomes unpaved. This is where Dubai begins. Zwelihle proper is run-down but organised, clearly impoverished but obviously serviced by the municipality. Dubai, on the other hand, constitutes an ‘informal settlement’ – that is, a squatter camp. Markets sit side by side with shacks, vendors trading in the dust and pigs and chickens ambling around happily. At the entrance to the settlement is a row of dirty public toilets and a single tap installed by the municipality. Masses of women and children congregate here, waiting to fetch water.
Gcobani’s entourage joins us – a group of five people, either from the original Zwelihle Renewal movement or the Land Party. They are presumably the ‘thugs’ that Hermanus residents have complained about, the ones who have apparently taken control of the town, but mostly they remain quiet or smile, walking a little way behind Gcobani and me as we make our way through the squalor.
The shacks stand on an incline on a hill between Dubai and the Indian Ocean, and we start climbing it, Gcobani being cheered, slapping hands and greeting residents as we go, his bright smile shining. The dirt gives way to sand as we approach the coast and there are fewer vendors. Here there are only shacks that stretch across the dunes to the coast and a gated holiday resort called Hermanus Beach Club, which was one of the first targets after the riots erupted. I later sat down with the property manager of this resort and watched CCTV footage of the security wall being torn down and a petrol bomb thrown onto a car parked on the other side. Nobody could tell me exactly why this had happened, and their accounts contradicted one another. The manager said that he’d first seen shack roofs popping up between the milkwood in October 2017. The entrance to the Beach Club property is to the left of the road leading down to the coast. There are now shacks all along its right flank, the entrance to the new settlement leading off the paved road into a patch of milkwood briar. It makes for one of those photos that go viral on Facebook as proof of gross income inequality.
Gcobani tells me that he was born in King William’s Town in the Eastern Cape in 1982 and moved here with his family in 1995. When he was a kid, he’d run down to the sea with friends to harvest abalone and swim. But easy access to the sea is now blocked by the various developments here. Gcobani eyes the Beach Club’s walls and goes quiet.
‘They think they are better than us,’ he says, half to himself. ‘They want to squash us. These rocks are public land. In life, nothing is personal, but everything must be shared.’
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
About the author
Karl Kemp is a freelance writer from South Africa with an LLM in public international law from the University of Amsterdam. As a journalist, he has covered drug trafficking, gang violence, separatist movements, globalisation, nationalism and cultural identity, among other topics, for various publications, including Rolling Stone and VICE.
After completing his law degree, Kemp interned at the International Criminal Court, working in the investigations division as an analyst in the field of international criminal law, and as a legal researcher for an NGO grappling with the Syrian civil war. This is his first book.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
 |
by Karl Kemp
Land reform and the possibility of expropriation without compensation are among the most hotly debated topics in South Africa today, met with trepidation and fervour in equal measure. But these broader issues tend to obscure a more immediate reality: a severe housing crisis and a sharp increase in urban land occupations.
 |
_________________________________________________________________________________________________