‘Ask some whites to leave’

Nowhere else in Cape Town is the contrast between the wealthy and the wretched as visible and as stark as in Hout Bay. And nowhere else are people as desperate, fed-up and suspicious of one another.

Caught between the mountains and the cold blue Atlantic, Hout Bay is truly beautiful. ‘This is probably the only place in the world where I can literally sit with my feet in human shit and my back against my R2 000 shack and look up to the mountains and across the valley on to a R3-million house and think: I live in a lovely place,” says Priscilla Moloke, who lives in Mandela Park, Imizamo Yethu.

Hout Bay’s problems started at least 30 years ago, when the numbers of black and coloured people — who have been settling here for generations because of the fishing industry — grew and couldn’t be housed in the single hostel built behind the harbour. As a result people started building shacks in the bushes off the beach. Moloke was born here. Now Moloke lives in Imizamo Yethu in a shack where she raised her boys. She has all but given up hope of owning land.

‘Land ownership is one of the most fundamental questions we have to answer in transforming our society. It’s the most emotional and seemingly the most dangerous — it threatens our future says Cosatu’s Western Cape secretary general Tony Ehrenreich. ‘Hout Bay’s issues are a microcosm of South Africa — that’s why everybody wants to have their say about what happens here.”

Imizamo Yethu is home to about 18 000. A study by the Southern African Labour, Development and Research Unit (Saldru) found that more than 96% of Imizamo Yethu’s residents live in shacks.

In Hout Bay itself the residents are mostly white and affluent and own some of the country’s most expensive property.

The smallest group of residents, about 8 000 people, are coloureds who live on the slopes of Hangberg, overlooking Chapman’s Peak. In this community only four kids successfully finished their matric exam last year. An estimated 80% of high school kids have used tik. About 40% of all black and coloured people in Hout Bay are unemployed.

Because of the divisive land issue, relations between community groups, ratepayers, political parties and racial groups and individuals have deteriorated so much that Cosatu recently asked the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation to facilitate meetings between them.

In 2004 the Archbishop of Cape Town, Njongonkulu Ndungane, also held meetings to ‘provide a common stakeholder platform to address the holistic development of Imizamo Yethu and Hout Bay”. Nothing came of them. Instead, crime peaked in 2004 with 900 property-related offences, 754 violent crimes and 17 murders. White residents said criminals were hiding in Imizamo Yethu even though residents there also were affected by crime.

That’s when the Hout Bay Neighbourhood Watch was established ‘and we sorted out our own crime problems”, said Graham Kelroe-Cooke, chairperson of the white ratepayers’ association. The neighbourhood watch also patrolled Imizamo Yethu and Hangberg. Since then property-related crime has declined, violent crimes dropped from 754 in 2004 to 209 in 2005 and last year the miraculous happened: Hout Bay announced a crime-free week.

Before the mid-February by-election relations soured again. Ehrenreich said at an ANC-rally in Imizamo Yethu: ‘Here we see the elite flourishing and part of the reason why so many people live in such abject poverty is because so few own so much. This war between rich and poor — it’s not a race war — is being fought and it’s time for people to take land from the wealthy and re-distribute it to the poor.”

Kelroe-Cooke responded by calling Ehrenreich ‘a lunatic [who is] breaking the law. This man is inciting race-hatred and inciting people to occupy land illegally. To see Ehrenreich once again blaming the misfortune of the poor on the rich white community is beyond comprehension,” Kelroe-Cooke said.

Cape Town mayor Helen Zille also denied the problem was racial: ‘The accusation of race is false. Eighteen thousand people in Imizamo Yethu need houses and we have space for a maximum of 2 000 housing units — that’s a shortfall of 6 000 houses even if we build on every available piece of land. The area has to be de-densified. We have to be fair to residents who arrived first and accept that newcomers have to move.”

In 1993 the provincial administration promised Imizamo Yethu residents land title-deeds. The promise was not kept. As a result, the Sinethemba Civic Association, which represents the 2 000 original residents of Imizamo Yethu, and the white ratepayers’ association brought a court interdict in 2004 preventing Imizamo Yethu from expanding on to 16ha of land ‘because the land was promised to us and not to the thousands of new people”, chairperson Goodman Mgwangwa said. ‘Sinethemba will never call for removing people against their will from Imizamo Yethu. Government must come with a solution.”

The ANC, SACP and civic organisations in Hangberg believe race, class and economics are at the heart of Hout Bay’s problems: ‘Hout Bay is extremely polarised because the difference between rich and poor is so stark. In Dontsa [a high-density squatter settlement, where about 5 000 people stay] people shit and pee in the bushes and it runs down the mountain into Imizamo Yethu, while barely 2km away a man lives in a house worth R12-million where he can choose to piss in one of his eight toilets. How can there be no racial tension?” SACP secretary Luthando Nogcinisa said.

The coloured community in Hangberg is no better off than the blacks in Imizamo Yethu. These communities occupy 4% of the total land. ‘It’s ludicrous to ignore race and land-ownership. In Hangberg we have 4 000 people living in shacks against an entire mountain owned by four white families,” said community activist Greg Louw.

Priscilla Moloke throws a bucket of human waste on to the road in front of her shack every morning.

‘I don’t know if the whites want us to leave. I know that I’ve been living in this ‘hoenderhok’ for 17 years and when I’ve asked for jobs in town, the whites don’t employ you if you’re from Imizamo Yethu because they say your children will come and break in and steal their stuff. Our children do break in and steal because they’re hungry. Our kids smoke tik because they have fokkol else to do. I sell loose cigarettes to children and it’s wrong but, if I don’t, I don’t eat tonight.

‘I’m going nowhere. Here I can walk to the beach and it’s a beautiful place. If there are too many of us, ask some whites to leave.”