Cape Town denies its people a
The Western Cape High Court judge who granted an eviction order couldn’t fathom why Salt River residents want to be close to the city. If they were unemployed and had no spending power, he reasoned, why did they want to be near schools and transport route
Abu Bakr Smith doesn’t know it yet, but time’s up. The Western Cape High Court has already granted an eviction order and, eventually, his family will have to pack up and leave.
For much of his life, Abu Bakr has thought that he would always be safe in Salt River. His name is on the court papers, an applicant in a battle for better housing. It’s got to be better than what’s waiting for him in remote Wolwerivier. He doesn’t fully understand it. Despite the people who have come and gone in Salt River, his cottage — with its broken floors and damaged walls — was meant to be his forever.
Recently he’s started praying more. He goes to mosque a few roads down from his house, tattoos hidden under his kurta. The mosque isn’t big or grand but, set in between houses, it is an embrace of familiar walls and comforting words. Religion has helped him to hold on to his faith that his family will be safe and so he sits, legs tucked under him, in prayer.
On the court papers his name is Cheslyn, but he refers to himself as Abu Bakr. His mother never wanted him to convert to Islam, but he prays.
After that one trip to Wolwerivier, he immediately knew that he could not live there. It wasn’t about living in a shack and it wasn’t really about Wolwerivier, either. It was about leaving Salt River for almost anywhere else.
“I could live in a shack but not there. I can live in a shack in Salt River,” he says.
He’s now sitting inside Charnell Commando’s home. She lives a few doors down from him but here in the Bromwell Street cottages it’s almost as if doors are just for decoration during the day. Neighbours are always in and out of each other’s houses and, on weekends, they party together with loud music and alcohol flowing over walls.
They tried to convince Western Cape High Court Acting Judge Leslie Weinkove that they deserve to stay in Bromwell. That the City of Cape Town shouldn’t give them accommodation far from where their lives have been made. Why, asked Weinkove, should you need to live near the city if you have no job?
“Where you have got a person who is not working, who has not got an income, what do you do? What is the point of them being near a school? What is the point of them needing transport? Where are they going to go? They have not even got money to spend anything,” Weinkove said in response to residents in court.
Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille doesn’t believe that the city owes Abu Bakr or any other evictees a place in the city’s emergency temporary accommodation. This is only for flood victims or those who lost everything during fire season, she insists.
“If you want to choose where you want to live, then unfortunately you have to pay for it yourself,” says De Lille.
She is evidently not familiar with the Blue Moonlight case in 2011, where the Constitutional Court made a precedent-setting judgment that a municipality is obliged to give temporary emergency accommodation to people who are evicted and have no alternative homes.
Abu Bakr’s world is far removed from the formal procedures in court. Jirre, sometimes they even still use Latin words, he argues. He, like many of the Bromwell residents, is unemployed. He keeps playing with the idea that people with money always win, but he has none. Charnell is busy protesting with the Reclaim the City housing activists, yelling out slogans about how poor black people should not be removed by white people who have money to buy their homes.
Abu Bakr has never been in a meeting with the directors of the Woodstock Hub, the people who now own the Bromwell cottages, and he has no idea about that block of flats they want to build here.
Jacques van Embden, a director of the Woodstock Hub, said that the flats will cost R5000 to R8000 a month to rent. He says it won’t be affordable for the Woodstock Hub to charge a lower rental for the Bromwell residents, adding that the new housing will bring in people who earn too much to qualify for social housing.
“We say the ‘stress-squeezed middle’. They keep getting pushed further out and no one’s trying to pull them further in,” said Van Embden.
Abu Bakr can’t imagine a cosmopolitan block of flats in the place where his home now stands. His life will soon be separated from Salt River, unless there’s a miracle. No matter where they put him, he tells himself, he will always come back here.
Magdalene Minnaar is arguing at her door with a man who wants his identity document. He’s looking for a job in the extended public works programme, but Magdalene is trying to convince him that she doesn’t have his ID — he took it from her last time he was here, remember? She closes the door. Doef! Doef! Doef! His incessant knocking makes her pull her shoulders back and open it once more.
His face is weathered, its brightness dimmed. His clothes are baggy and, even if he hasn’t got the construction job yet, his sun-beaten skin makes him look the part. He stares hard at Magdalene, silently willing her to give him his ID. But she returns his look with a raised eyebrow and a “bugger off”.
It’s one of those days. She wants to go out but she has no lift to get anywhere. She’s usually bright and upbeat, creating some form of escape for herself, but occasionally she feels like she really does live in Wolwerivier.
Her thoughts sometimes go back to her childhood, when her father owned land and she was happy and safe. In her adult memory, the younger Magdalene had no worries.
“I was born free; I was free,” Magdalene says.
Her optimism usually darts through the bleakness of her sur-