Andy Duffy
Two signposts on the road to Muizenberg in Cape Town look hopelessly out of place.
The first is a typical developer’s billboard – an eye-catching affair, beaming optimism about an exciting new development called Westlake. The second, metres away, is a far smaller, typical council sign, advising in three languages that no squatting is allowed.
Behind both signs sits Westlake, the squatter camp. About 700 families live there – people from across the province, across the country, and across Southern Africa. And like other squatter camps, Westlake is far worse than it looks from the road.
There is no electricity, no sewerage system and few communal water taps. There are dozens of children but no schools. Medical services are limited.
The first of the 320 shacks went up nearly 10 years ago, but the camp only recently secured portable toilets and refuse collection from the municipality. Most of the squatters are employed as caddies at the nearby Westlake and Steenberg golf courses.
Whether the squatters stay in the camp or move into new low-cost housing depends largely on the success of the new development.
Cape developers Rabie/Cavcor cut a deal with the province last year to develop the 95ha site as a business and retail park, sell space on it, and use some of the proceeds to build “social houses” for the squatters. The low-cost housing subsidy of R15 000 will cover less than half the cost of the houses Rabie/Cavcor plans to build.
The developers and the province could make good money as Westlake sits on prime land. Rabie/Cavcor used a similar development scheme at Milnerton, which so impressed President Nelson Mandela that he chose the site to launch the Masakhane campaign in 1995.
The R1,1-billion Westlake development has its obstacles, however. It involves shifting the JP Marais Hospital, which shares the site, the Ark City of Refuge, a shelter for the down and out, and the squatters to an area close to the grounds of Pollsmoor prison – which isn’t a widely popular choice.
There is also some confusion about when the building starts. Cavcor chair Leslie Viljoen says the first houses will go up from June, and he is just waiting for rezoning and clearance from the provincial housing board for the subsidies.
But the provincial housing board says it has not seen a subsidy application for the scheme. “Obviously there’s something amiss here,” says one official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We don’t know anything about this.”
Neville Riley, chair of the South Peninsula municipality’s urban planning committee, says building will probably start at the end of the year. Applications for housing subsidies are still being compiled, he adds. The houses will go up at the rate of 100 a month.
Westlake’s residents have read about it in the newspapers, and some have been consulted. No one, however, has started packing just yet.
Isaac Davids, a 24-year-old from Durban, moved to Westlake two years ago, sharing a shack with Pamela Price, a 42-year-old former sewing instructor from Strandfontein. It took him a year to put the shack together, with discarded wood and corrugated tin from around the site.
The two have completed housing subsidy application forms, and even have certificates, written last October, which stake their claim on one of Rabie/Cavcor’s new houses.
But there’s a lot of suspicion about the development plan, not least because many in Westlake believe they’ve been hijacked. The name Trevor Trout comes up often. He doesn’t live in Westlake, but is vice-chair of the Combined Residents of Westlake – and has done much of the negotiating with the developer and council.
Approached for comment, Trout says the Westlake development will actually be worth R3,5-billion and adds that “it’s a whole can of worms”. He doesn’t elaborate.
“People here can’t stand up and speak for themselves,” Davids adds. “We don’t know what’s going on.”
The co-founder of the Westlake camp, John Taylor, enjoys wider acceptance as the settlement representative. He says he is 39, but looks 20 years older. He put up his shack at Westlake 10 years ago after he was pushed off three other sites in the area. Like many in the settlement, he now earns his living caddying (R60 for 18 holes). His regular customers include TV presenter Robin Jackman.
Taylor thinks building will start in April, and maybe everyone will get a house and a job on one of the new businesses the development will spawn.
Others in his front room, a de facto communal meeting place, offer their own theories, ranging from Trout’s influence to the developer’s ties with the National Party (which Viljoen dismisses) to the idea that Westlake residents would have done better if FW de Klerk was still in power.
Outside Taylor’s house, among the chicken wire, empty beer bottles and charcoal ash, the names Rabie/Cavcor, Trout or Sankie Mthembi-Mahanyele arouse little interest.
Hendrick (surname not volunteered but formerly of Upington) gives an impromptu guided tour that ends at a huge concrete wall. Behind the wall is the housing estate built in 1992 for Pollsmoor wardens. The houses are modern, all pastoral tones with gardens that run into each other. Fewer than 200 people live there.
Colin Dick, a warden in Polls-moor’s maximum security section, knows nothing about the Westlake development. And in the three years he’s lived there, he has never gone behind the concrete wall to meet his neighbours.