The residents of one of the Cape’s most popular coastal towns are working together to find solutions to conflict
Tracey Farren
Muizenberg, the once-grand town near the point where two seas meet, is back from the dead. This time it has a blacker face and speaks a multitude of languages.
Writers, artists, tradespeople and refugees of war and collapsed economies fill its century-old buildings with people who speak English, Congolese, French and Cape Flats slang.
The tourist town lost some of its moneyed majesty during the last decades of the 20th century when many of the offspring of its Lithuanian Jews migrated to Sea Point and left its beautiful buildings to the teeth of the southeaster.
Through the apartheid years people of all colours shared the air that, some locals like to say, contains a curious something that makes them unusually “mellow”.
About 10 years ago Muizenberg began to deteriorate in a way that spelt death for business and disillusionment for long-time residents. It became a place of peeling facades, sticky streets and shady deals concluded on corners. Many left in disgust, complaining loudly about the unsightliness of the homeless, the squalor of the refugees and the cruel threat of the Cape Flats gangs.
Muizenberg lost its power to absentee landlords, poor policing, egocentric committee haggling and a local authority still reeling from post-apartheid restructuring. Astute criminals moved in and operated crack houses and shebeens from its buildings, using Muizenberg’s location to secure passing trade. Crime levels rocketed and its reputation as a cosmopoli- tan town took on a sinister tint.
Ironically, Muizenberg’s rebirth was marked by a death. On the eve of the millennium, in early December, old-timer Sydney Seftel was burgled and left dead in his cellar, causing the community to dump old animosities and organise around revival.
The Muizenberg Action Group was formed the day after Seftel’s death and the villagers marched past gang houses, brandishing posters that read: “Beautiful South Africans, not ugly Americans!”
Under Nicholas Vaudrey, the group put pressure on police Commissioner Raymond Strydom to transfer Muizenberg’s police Superintendent Neville Collins, the man they blamed for Muizenberg’s slide into ill repute.
The Lindbergh Foundation and ratepayers forked out money to pay men on bicycles to handcuff, charge and fingerprint transgressors of the law.
After more than 250 arrests in less than a year, residents say that they have the gangsters all but licked.
“Only Church Street and Frankfort Road remain to be conquered,” announced Vaudrey at the last group meeting.
“Muizenberg,” says Machteld van Lennep, head of the Muizenberg Improvement District, “has turned the corner with crime.”
The early anti-crime rallies were not well attended by Muizenberg’s refugees, a symptom of their exclusion, at the time, from Muizenberg’s affairs of the heart. This year, however, invitations were sent to refugees to share the red-velvet lounge of the Lindbergh Foundation. There is refugee representation in the Community Police Forum, the Ratepayers’ Association and the Muizenberg Vision Group.
From this year refugees are included in community talks, despite the fact that some have been arrested along with indigenous criminals and despite that Muizenberg’s second affliction, the issue of “grime”, implicates some of the about 750 people trying to begin a new life on the tip of Africa.
A critical aspect of Muizenberg’s recovery, say action-oriented leaders like Vaudrey and Van Lennep and residents like Danny Keogh, involves putting pressure on South Peninsula Administration inspectors to prosecute owners of splendid old buildings being trashed, they say, by jam-packed refugees.
The determination of residents to revamp old buildings and maintain a reasonable occupancy conflicts with the plight of many of Muizenberg’s refugees.
Jose Alino, the vice-chairperson of the Muizenberg Refugee Committee, says that many are jobless and are forced to live three or four to a room to pay the R600 to R800 rent.
In his newly acquired English, Alino says: “To stay in a large group is not fine, but we haven’t got a choice.” Many refugees sleep in shifts and a couple of Muizenberg’s buildings accommodate an eight-hour-in, eight-hour-out arrangement.
The issue of overcrowding presents a dilemma in a town which, Vaudrey says, “should be a shining example of how cultures can live together”.
In July a delegation of refugees, African National Congress MP Ben Turok and other community representatives met Martha Mgxashe, the Western Cape’s Director General of its Department of Home Affairs. She said that home affairs’s 11 operatives had managed to process only a fraction of the Western Cape’s refugees.
In the meantime refugees are free to stay for six months at a time. The refugee representatives went home happy, and the other members of the delegation were somewhat bemused.
The alignment of many of the refugees with Muizenberg’s civic organisations and the drive to clean up crime has, some say, revealed a split in the refugee community.
A law student from the Democratic Republic of Congo (who asked not to be named) says: “There are those who want a peaceful life and there are those who want to break all the rules. The people of Muizenberg have a right to arrest them.”
Alan Dillon, Muizenberg’s mountain man, says: “Some of the young men have literally lived by the gun all their lives. The world has abused them. But we have been brought up to respect common law and we have a right to object to what they bring in.”
Vaudrey says that the bust in August at 29 Church Street, one of Muizenberg’s worst drug dens, not only “rattled the cages of the drug dealers” but shocked law-abiding refugees. Twelve parcels of dagga, 54 units of crack and 18 sachets of cocaine were found. Twelve refugees were charged with doing the dirty work for Cape Town drug lords.
Vaudrey says: “The innocent refugees realised that there are a load of nasty refugees upsetting their good image.”
The closure of Don Pepe, a filthy, overfull building owned by one of Muizenberg’s infamous slumlords, dislodged many locals and refugees living off crime.
Many of the “nasties”, Vaudrey reports, moved to Sea Point after these busts.
Only four years ago many refugees complained that the police blamed them for everything that went wrong and, as a Brazzaville businessman put it, “the coloured people told us we didn’t belong”.
Nowadays they say otherwise. Muizenberg seems to have absorbed many foreigners with a grace that stands out in a country riddled with xenophobia.
Alino confirms: “We are not feeling that they want to put us out.” Alino urges that funding be found to buy up some of Muizenberg’s empty buildings and allow refugees to live there at low rentals.
But Mary Turok, the head of the Muizenberg Tenants’ Association, argues that since there are no serious tensions between the refugees and the local people, separation would only differentiate and isolate the refugees.
The Tenants’ Association represents tenants in conflict with Muizenberg landlords and is often the thorn in the side of people quick to evict refugees who can’t pay. Her words, nonetheless, attest to the truth that Muizenberg’s welcome to the displaced is a wary one. Turok says: “South Africans are not giving refugees an easy ride. We should be helping them much more.” Speaking specifically of her town, though, she says: “Muizenberg must be careful not to be inhumane, but we can’t take responsibility for the whole refugee problem.”
All in all, a healthy liking and respect seems to exist between “settled” refugees and South African locals.
“We are here to stay,” is a common refugee refrain. “Yes”, says Alino with cheerful sarcasm, “I’m sorry to tell you this, but I stay in decent conditions in Dover road. Just me alone.” He spreads his hands in a universal gesture of inevitability, reflecting the well-known forbearance of Muizenberg’s people and representing its new identity in his calm, dark face.