IT TAKES John Miket five hours to walk from Wolwerivier relocation camp to the suburb of Parklands. On Wednesdays that journey must be done before daybreak, when dump trucks start their rounds and empty wheelie bins litter pavements outside middle-class homes.
Men and women wake at 2am in the camp. Paraffin stoves flicker behind curtains to break the deep darkness typical of Cape Town’s northern farming reaches – none of the promised streetlights have been installed. People step out through the shacks, call for friends to join them and march south across the gravel.
Miket, 53, walks in one of several small groups on footpaths through the acres of shrub land which separate Wolwerivier from the nearest urban areas: Parklands on Wednesdays, Melkbosstrand on Thursdays, Blouberg on Fridays. They sweep through bins and carry growing loads of food and scrap until their exit at midday along the same paths. Everything is carried – the footpaths are too rough for trolleys. The spoils of three days’ picking comes at the cost of about 35 hours on foot.
It has been nearly five months since the City of Cape Town trucked people from Skandaalkamp informal settlement, near the Vissershok dump, to Wolwerivier – the municipality’s newest relocation area. Those moved now have better access to utilities with flush toilets, taps and electricity in every home. But, the predicted crisis of densely populating a tin shack settlement kilometres from any meaningful source of employment, health care and education has also materialised. Dozens of families have lost long-standing livelihoods that centred on scrap collection at the Vissershok dump. They are now permanently unemployed.
The threat of starvation has driven breadwinners to the limits of endurance. Miket has not heard of the city’s commitment that Wolwerivier, situated in one of the metros “growth corridors”, will one day be well located. He has always known these parts, seven kilometres north of Skandaalkamp where he lived for over 20 years, as a rural area.
Miket speaks from a sick bed on a Thursday afternoon. Two days worth of picking have been lost. There is no food in his shack save for the last pieces of a chocolate cake given to him in Parklands the previous week. His four-year-old son, Paulus, plays on the concrete floor with a repaired toy truck, picked up by his father from Vissershok. The walls are adorned with items from the dump: a poster of dolphins, a toy from a McDonald’s Happy Meal, a large broken clock.
“The white people and farmers do not want us here. They are the only people who can give us jobs. But, when we go to them for work they say ‘Where are you from? Wolwerivier! You are a horrid people. Better you get off my land or there is really no telling what I can do. I can shoot you or anything.’
And so we must walk further. (In Parklands) I find food or anything that is useful to carry home. The people there sometimes feel sorry when they see us walking and they give us a food parcel.
“This is the way that we live now.”
Ironically, it was white landowners from the wider Morningstar area who first warned about the effects of taking Skandaalkamp residents away from their economic base at the dump. During a public participation and comment phase in 2010, many objected to the development of the Wolwerivier site. The concerns were based mainly on the effect a Wolwerivier settlement would have on property values and safety in an area known for its equestrian club, historic bluegum-lined roads and quiet country living. But, sometimes these comments were couched in a concern for the well-being of Skandaalkamp families.
“All the Vissershok people have basic employment in the close vicinity where they live (at) the dump,” resident Tara Collier wrote to the city.
“You won’t be enriching these people’s lives by moving them; you will be taking what little they have away from them and forcing them into a life of crime and severe poverty. Should these people not be moved closer to areas that will be more beneficial? Closer to clinics, transport, shops, schools.”
In response, the city generally brushed these comments aside: “This is an emergency housing programme, not poverty alleviation.”
During the preparation phases for building Wolwerivier the issue came up again. in 2011 concern about creating an isolated community in a rural area without work opportunities was raised by the authors of Environmental Impact Assessment for the development. The Environmental Authorisation, which gave the city the go-ahead the following year, echoed this sentiment. Last year and this, minutes of meetings between city officials and the Skandaalkamp leaders show these concerns coming from the community itself. By then, the construction had begun and the plan was all but a done deal.
Relocation, isolation and lost livelihoods are themes that played out through the apartheid era in South Africa. Even by those standards, the early starts and long commutes of Miket and his team are “extreme”. That was the word used in a 1985 Surplus People Project report to describe the response of a rural black community after a forcible relocation from Riebeeck East to Alicedale between 1981 and 1982.
Alicedale, now in the Eastern Cape, was isolated with no work opportunities, but some men managed to get work at the railway goods yard in Port Elizabeth about 100km away. Their daily routines were not dissimilar from those of many Wolwerivier residents today. They too would wake at 2am, get to the city by foot and train to be in time for a 7am start. At 4pm they would return the same way, arriving home at 9pm.
Nationally, Wolwerivier’s completion and the Skandaalkamp relocations coincided with a renewed debate between planners and the government over the isolation of the poor, and what post-apartheid cities should look like.
In Gauteng, the debate has centred on Human Settlements MEC Jacob Mamabolo’s June announcement that new housing mega projects are the preferred remedy for the province’s growing housing backlog. But planners, like the Human Sciences Research Council’s Ivan Turok, have warned that large numbers of housing units in isolated “greenfield” locations – a description which applies to both relocation camps like Wolwerivier and mega projects in Johannesburg – reinforce the exclusion and fragmentation inherited from apartheid city planning.
The trend, which continued through housing delivery under the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), has been detrimental for affected poor households which are most in need of access to the amenities and opportunities offered by cities. Turok’s big point, however, is that it also makes for a more sluggish economy and more strained human relations in a society still trying to overcome decades of institutional segregation – and that is bad for everyone.
These tensions have also played out between and within different spheres of government. Politicians who support mega-projects and isolated relocation areas as quick fixes in the midst of a housing crisis clash with policy writers who buy into the vision of integrated housing developments in areas close to schools, hospitals and jobs.
“All the evidence and best policies point to urban densification,” says Marie Huchzermeyer, a professor at Wits University’s School of Architecture and Planning.
“It is the basis for National Development Plan, the Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act and Spatial Development Frameworks of metro municipalities. But, at the delivery end, best knowledge and practice often gets disregarded. And with this, developments like Wolwerivier enter into the fray.”
Locally, Wolwerivier has also come at a time of shifting conceptions over what relocation areas are. Built with funding for emergency housing, many relocation areas (like Blikkiesdorp in Delft) have been considered as “temporary” arrangements for families facing homelessness. In fact, says Huchzermeyer, the idea that emergency housing can be permanent is a contradiction in terms.
But Wolwerivier is in fact a permanent settlement, built according to emergency housing specifications. This was illustrated by Jens Kuhn, the city’s Human Settlements director of Land and Planning, when asked at a public participation meeting in August 2010 to explain why he was asking for a “temporary” relocation.
“The source of the funding is called temporary. No other reason – if we don’t use the word we don't get the money… I’d be lying if I said they’d be moved (again) somewhere else.”
This has caused uncertainty among residents about their status and future. Some believe that they are owners of the units (which they are not), others believe that they are yet to move elsewhere.
“The city told us that they are just lending the houses to us and that we do not own them,” says new Wolwerivier resident Nomahule Platyi.
“We hear rumours that we will be moved out but we do not know to where. I know very little about our futures and that makes me feel very uncertain.”
Before the relocation, Wolwerivier farm was home to a handful of farmworkers, scrap pickers and their families. Here the burdens of unemployment and food insecurity are nothing new. Magdalene Minnaar grew up on Avanti, a farm near Melkbosstrand, and has lived on Wolwerivier for most of her adult life. Coming from a background of relative standing – her father was a foreman and grew enough vegetables to produce a surplus – she has been able to feed the most vulnerable around her. Today, she runs a feeding scheme for children on the farm.
But the influx of Skandaalkamp families has stretched her kitchen and stocks, donated by businesses in Table View, beyond capacity. From the second week after the relocation, people came through the bushes which separate the farm’s old settlement from the relocation area. Now she estimates that 50 families are partly dependent on her packs of rice, dried peas and soya. Beyond the child feeding scheme, she now hands out an extra 900 meals a month, just a quarter of what is actually needed, she says.
“Even though they are hungry, the people from Skandaalkamp are proud. They come through the bush quietly so that no one will see them. Begging for food is never a nice thing, especially if once you could look after yourself and your family.
“I help where I can, but I know that it won’t be enough. So we do not advertise the food because I know I cannot help everyone. It is painful to turn hungry people away.”
Miket admits the self-sufficiency of life at Skandaalkamp was, at the best of times, a balancing act dependent on which dump trucks arrived and when. The dump, which has now been secured to discourage the return of pickers from bygone years, was a source of food from supermarkets, of raw scrap to be sold or repurposed as products for the informal economy – doors, furniture, fixed-up appliances. For most people, however, that way of life had to be supplemented by more traditional and earthy livelihoods.
“I used to grow my own vegetables to sell and feed our children – spinach, beans, mielies and carrots,” says Pastor Nkosimayibongwe Jonga, who lost both his church and food garden as a result of the relocation. “I spent a lot of time getting the soil to be productive in Skandaalkamp, but here in Wolwerivier the soil is too hard and too sandy. Nothing will grow.”
Meeting minutes show that both these concerns were raised during meetings with city officials, followed by commitments that the municipality would support the establishment of a church and food gardens.
A plot for the gardens has been set aside, but it lies barren and uncultivated.
Benedicta van Minnen, mayoral committee member for human settlements, says the development is in a “growth corridor” of the metro and that services and the living environment have improved in comparison with life at the dump.
“Wolwerivier is an ‘incremental development area’ and it is therefore the start of the process to build a better life for the residents.
“Every city initiative and development is driven by the desire to improve the lives of all of our residents, and especially our more vulnerable residents. The city takes a diverse range of considerations into account, such as the potential socio-economic growth of an area and market conditions; legislative requirements; and balancing the vast and often conflicting views and interest of residents, stakeholders and other interested parties... The city, as it has done for years, will continue to engage closely with our residents.”
For all their disappointment, people like Miket do not wallow in discontent. He carries his new lot with a quiet determination that is borne of necessity. It is an attitude pervasive among poor people who survive on the fringes of mainstream Cape society.
And in Philippi, the farming region on other side of the Cape Flats, 49-year-old Igshaan Adams captured it by reciting his credo during a recent interview. Unwittingly he echoed Mother Teresa:
“We have done so much, with so little, for so long, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.”
l Knoetze is a researcher at Ndifuna Ukwazi (NU) and a freelance journalist. This article draws on testimony and findings from a recent NU report on conditions at Wolwerivier. See http://nu.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Wolwerivier-Social-Audit-Report.pdf