”The cops look at our houses and they see hiding places for stolen goods and drugs. They must fuck off — we raise our children here, watch 7de Laan and try to keep our boys out of prison.”
Patricia Booyes* (54) grew up on Gympie Street and is one of the residents now fighting a court battle to continue to live on it. Gympie Street stands at the rough heart of Woodstock, one of Cape Town’s oldest neighbourhoods. It is about as close to the swanky City Bowl as you can get without being on the same planet.
Most Capetonians have heard of Gympie Street — and not because of its natural beauty or fashionable coffee shops.
There is one tree, one empty plot, 11 double-storey flats and a couple of houses whose occupants carry their hardback Formica chairs on to the pavement each morning and chat and smoke loose cigarettes while watching over the hordes of small children and brown dogs moving up and down the street.
As I park my car close to the flats where I’m going to interview residents about the evictions, a teenage girl with no front teeth in a T-shirt announcing that she’s ”Born wild and free” spits from across the road: ”Wie soek die wit naai? [Who is this white fucker looking for?]”
What you think of Gympie Street depends on where you stand in relation to it.
If you’re from outside (even a block or two away), it’s a place to be avoided. The community is known to shelter its own small-time criminals, like the smash-and-grab thieves who operate on Main Road. The street’s residents are often caught in crossfire between rival Woodstock gangs. There are strikingly few men around because most of them are in prison; and some of their children don’t go to school because ”they get laughed at and called skollies”.
The Woodstock police, who patrol the street twice a day, will invariably shake down someone. In one local police officer’s view: ”If Pollsmoor [prison] is Cape Town’s crime university, Gympie Street is its high school.”
But if you live on Gympie Street, it’s probably the place your family’s called ”home” for several generations and describing it a grim sanctuary for violent gangsters is considered an insult.
Booyes grew up on Gympie Street, with her 21 siblings. Ask her what she thinks when local cops describe the ”gangs” (notably ”The Gifts”) that operate here and she’ll tell you: ”When a coloured shoots a gun in Cape Town, they say you’re a gangster.
”If something stinks in Cape Town, the authorities come looking for the one who farted in Gympie Street. Very few people here have jobs because when employers hear you are from Gympie Street, they look you up and down and say, ‘Sorry, the job’s already taken.”’
On Monday, 100-odd tenants occupying six of the 11 flats on Gympie Street will go to court to fight an eviction order brought by the owner, Dennis Robertson. Since buying the flats and adjacent properties on an auction in 2003, Robertson has not received a cent in rent. This is Robertson’s second attempt to evict non-paying tenants.
Rent and eviction issues have a long and tangled history here. Many of the flats don’t have electricity and none of them has had running water since the council removed water meters more than a year ago because of monies owed by the previous — now dead — owner.
Last winter, the sheriff evicted about 200 people from the flats (each unit is home to at least 15 people). They lived on top of their belongings outside for three weeks — then simply moved back in.
Council attempts to remove Gympie Street residents to Happy Valley — a ”temporary relocation area” 15km outside the city — were quickly doused. Residents flatly refused to move to what is essentially an informal settlement, despite its promising name.
Says Elizabeth Hecktor, who has lived on Gympie Street for 40 years: ”I’m not a squatter. I’ve got three daughters and I will not go and live on the outskirts of Cape Town where my girls will get raped.”
The occupants of Happy Valley were equally unenthusiastic about being joined by the Gympie Street residents and threatened to ”burn them out”.
Willy Hein is a community leader and heads the anti-eviction battle. Hein, who lives on the ground floor of a lovely old purple-painted house with a wrap-around stoep, is considered a relative newcomer to Gympie Street, having moved here just 18 years ago.
He detects a more sinister agenda behind moves to evict tenants than the usual tussle about unlivable conditions versus non-payment.
”This is an old and established community, but we are poor, our people survive on grants, some people live off crime. It is clear that the eviction of families is part of the gentrification process to clear the city centre of the working class so that landlords and capitalists can make the city beautiful. Poor, unemployed coloureds are not considered beautiful,” he says.
Elizabeth Hecktor agrees. ”We have a reputation we don’t deserve — it’s other streets’ people who come and cause shit here,” she says. ”The most dangerous people in Gympie Street are the cops because they’re corrupt and they’re on the payroll of the merchants in the area.”
The police remain adamant that Gympie Street ” is without doubt one of Cape Town’s crime hot spots”.
Says one senior officer: ”A lot of crime happens around Gympie Street and the perpetrators — usually young men — disappear into this street and then you’ve lost them. That community is so close-knit nobody, but nobody, will piemp [rat] on another there —”
Gympie Street might seem ungovernable, but its residents have a firm idea about the limits of acceptable behaviour.
Two of the city’s most notorious smugglers, the brothers Madat — Kaldumalla and Sedika (who is on trial on drug and diamonds charges) — moved into Gympie Street a year or so ago.
Gympie Street was not impressed. Says Patricia Booyes: ”They came here and put up a gym for the kids, but we made it very clear to them that we will not fall for that shit. They think they can come here, throw some money around and put their drugs into our street. Not te fok.”
The Madats moved out.
Contemplating the latest pending eviction order in the days leading up to another round in court, Booyes is adamant that she can’t live anywhere else. ”I’ve never been further than Cape Town; I’m not interested in the rest of this country. I live here or I die.”
* Not her real name