Schoongezigt. The translation of the archaic Afrikaans name says it all: beautiful view. This new Rustenburg development, straining against geography, sits atop a West End ridge.
"People that can afford a R2.5-million property will be shielded from what happens in the mines," said clean-cut property marketer and aspirant developer, Chrisjan van Heerden, of CH Professional.
He is one of the majority of developers who are going ahead with their projects, despite the rumblings from the neighbouring mines. But, their upbeat vibe cannot mask the bad news which has had an unyielding grip on the larger Rustenburg area since the Marikana massacre on August 16 last year, the lingering threat of 6000 job losses at Amplats, not to mention the continued retaliatory killings on the mines that cast a dark cloud over the rough gravel of the platinum belt.
Schoongezigt Estate, with about 300 stands, is at the apex of Rustenburg and on the edge of its affluent community. According to Van Heerden, who is marketing the property for the developer, it may prove to be popular because the building costs are relatively low as hardly any excavation is needed.
Situated next to the Kgaswane Game Reserve, it embodies the town's geographical frustrations, as the Magaliesberg mountain range, for one, creates a physical barrier to further development.
Rockcliff Estate, on the slopes overlooking the Waterfall Mall, has similarly priced stands, while Waterfall Village, right behind the mall, fetches in the region of R900000 per stand.
"The strikes last year affected the rental market," Van Heerden said from a coffee shop inside the Waterfall Mall.
Rental prices
"In Rustenburg, you could get a property [catering to the R7 000 to R11 000 a month income bracket] rented out in a week or two. After the strikes, places stayed for two to three weeks or even a month without being rented out. With Anglo saying it is going to cut jobs, rental prices have dropped. There is oversupply and people might struggle without tenants."
Van Heerden said property sales were good for the first few months of the year and had generally been good for the past two years, with shortages in the R1-million to R1.3-million range.
This picture is more or less corroborated by Loelie Ravenscroft, an estate agent since 1989 and the manager of Remax Platinum in Rustenburg. "We received the top award for sales volumes in non-metropolitan South Africa," she said, recounting last year's exploits from her office inside Waterkloof Mall. "There's lots of business to be done in this town and our best figures came in the fourth quarter [suggesting that Marikana had no impact on Rustenburg property sales]. We've experienced no panic at all.
"If there was, there'd be an influx of stock and we've had no influx, there's still a shortage. There might be problems on the surface, but the potential is still there. People see this as a temporary issue."
Ravenscroft said the general thrust of Rustenburg's growth was in the direction of the colloquially named "Johannesburg Road", which links the town to Krugersdorp. She described it as a mix of sectional title complexes and full-title stands, with about half of the buyers being black.
The rental market, too, especially in the R20 000 to R30 000 income bracket, was, she said, largely dominated by young black professionals. Her analysis, perhaps unwittingly, serves to highlight Rustenburg's racial and class striations.
Ensuing unemployment
In some ways, the town is a case of white flight frustrated by geography. Vaguely north, Rustenburg has mostly townships and villages. Its infamous North and East End are experiencing the opposite of gentrification and in town the dividing line between the haves in the west and the have-nots in the east is Hystek street, which is awash with sex workers looking for their own sliver of South Africa's sometimes nightmarish rainbow.
At the dark end of that rainbow, there remains the threat of job losses. The impact the ensuing unemployment could have on Rustenburg depends on who is answering the question. "The platinum is still here," is the rallying cry of those who sell, market or develop choice property, largely for the wealthy and aspirant. But for those with an understanding of the desperation in the informal settlements that pockmark its platinum mines, we should brace ourselves for the aftershock.
"[The impact will be sizeable because] a lot of people in Rustenburg work in the platinum mines, people who already have many dependants," said Crispen Chinguno, a PhD fellow at Wits University's Society Work and Development Institute.
"It's an area that is already facing an unemployment crisis and has thriving informal settlements where police have no control. Add 6 000 people out of employment and you have significant social dislocation and crime. So, it will hit people at the low end who have no choices or prospects of getting [other] jobs."
Rustenburg itself is a bowl of platinum-rich soil ensnared by mountains. The wealthy climb its western perch, with cascading views spanning the stretch of mines like Amplats, Lonmin, Samancor and Impala.
A reliable gauge of the temperature of the town and symbolic of the vast divide between the have-nots toiling in the bowels of the land and the elite who settle on its ridges, is its property market.
Municipal rot
"If it wasn't for the mines, Rustenburg would be one of the top three places to develop," said Van Heerden. "The mine strikes might pull it down a bit, but I'd still choose Rustenburg because the platinum is not going anywhere. They might lay people off now, but they will appoint people later on. But if the mines fold, then we all fold."
Then there is the municipal rot. "There is a lot of vested interest in Rustenburg from ANC big wigs and it clashes with people's interests and hampers the operations of the municipality," said Steve Mokwena, a local businessperson.
"Luthuli House has never had a way of solving it, so it's easy for people to manipulate the system when there's infighting.
"Town planning is up to shit. In most places you can't build up because of mining. At the same time, there isn't a clear strategy of where it's growing to. The land that is there is sold to white developers and town planning lacks the foresight to steer how the town is growing. To my mind, it's stuck." Major roadworks in the town suggest that it is being fixed in broad brush strokes. Townsfolk speak of a rapid bus transit system that will ease blight in the CBD.
But the buoyancy around its mall and the adjacent, newly built Platinum Square is difficult to ignore. Car dealerships here will tell you that the traffic is increasingly black and upwardly mobile, which raises the question of why a young professional would settle here.
Said Tumi Mabunda, an IT technician: "Businesses are popping up. There are things that are in demand that were not before. There is less competition [than in in other places]. Many people still call people from Jo'burg and they drive here [to offer services]. This place needs a lot of stuff, actually, but it's getting there. In fact, it's easy to open a business in Rustenburg, you just need to see what's happening."
The further east you go, the bleaker the town becomes, until you hit the speckles of informal settlements that now appear to be the natural habitat of mine shafts. Here you get the sense that if the two unions sneezed, the entire belt would catch a cold.
Elizabeth Pitso, a vendor from Lesotho who plies her trade outside Billy's Tavern, where Mawethu Steven was killed in May, said business slowed for a week after the murder. "I could only make R10 or R20 to buy bread."
If there's one thing connecting her to the wealthy across Johannesburg Road, it is her scepticism about jobs being lost, at least permanently. "How can they retrench?" she asked packing up her boxes. "Who will stay here and work this platinum. But if they do retrench, I will go back to Lesotho."
History and tribal authority conspire to create a tale of two cities
According to Rustenburg municipality's housing sector plan, there are more than 38 informal settlements around the town's platinum belt. Compared with a national average of 15%, more than 45% of the dwellings in the town are informal. Thanks to a confluence of factors, these settlements are more than likely there to stay as a hairy middle finger to South Africa's millennium development goals.
"Municipalities in post-apartheid South Africa are most responsible for local economic development, but they are not equipped to deal with the extraordinary influx," said Gavin Capps, the leader of the Mining and Rural Transformation in Southern Africa project, located in Wits University's Society, Work and Development Institute.
"At the same time, post-apartheid legislation has increasingly cemented and reconsolidated tribal authorities [on which much of the platinum belt stands]. This has given them considerable power over land use and resource allocation. Their thinking often is: 'This is our land and settlers are foreigners.' Incomers can't settle permanently, and service delivery will lead to permanent settlement. Even if some agency wants to deliver services, they can't because the responsibility for delivery is not clearly defined.
"A traditional authority like the Bafokeng is the largest institutional shareholder in Impala, owning 13.2% and a holding company with a gross asset value of R35.2-billion. Locals claim that it delivers selectively to the settlements and villages falling under its jurisdiction."
With Lonmin, which sits on land owned by the Bapo ba Mogale, the jurisdiction is similarly contested. "But at the local level it's not a clear-cut case of 'we don't want them', from the villagers, because mineworkers are an important source of income.
When Impala began mining in the Bafokeng area during the late 1960s, people in Luka and Phokeng villages lost 10 800 hectares of their agricultural land. "It was a massive act of enclosure that caused a lot of hardship. There was a lot of tension with mineworkers coming in from the outside. Initially, there were issues of crime, and personal safety and agriculture declined, but later on, living-out allowances meant many could rent out their yards and backrooms, there were opportunities for vending, and so on."
Capps said that the Bafokeng area also had a history of migrancy to the Rand and to white Rustenburg. "They had a comparatively higher education level than the migrants," he said. "So they were getting better jobs, either as domestics or in manufacturing. The mythology is that the [locals] were scared of the jobs, but it was quite material. However, in recent years, locals, particularly the youth, have been promised jobs on the mines, which has created new kinds of tension with incomers."
Key to the impasse of who can deliver what to whom is the overturning of the Communal Land Rights Act of 2004, which sought to provide secure tenure to those living on communal land. In a 2010 judgment the Act was found to be unconstitutional and sent back for drafting, creating a legal vacuum that is open to exploitation by traditional leaders who want to retain their power and mining companies eager to absolve themselves from developing "privately owned land".
While the legal wrangling persists, Rustenburg will remain, as local businessman Steve Mokwena put it, "a tale of two cities, where rich people shop elsewhere and live their own lifestyle and poor people are left to fend for themselves".