Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Who owns the beaches anyway?
IT SEEMS like it was just the other day that Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu encouraged us to join him for a walk on a beach in Gordon’s Bay reserved for a handful of ostensibly white, but more pink-skinned people.
Thousands of disenfranchised South Africans who did not have their own cars heeded the call, boarding buses from Mr Isaacs and Mr Chilwan, who were the biggest luxury bus operators on the Cape Flats, and using the services of the then only taxi operator, Dr Pat Gorvalla.
Much to the annoyance of the racist regime under the leadership of the arrogant finger-swinging PW Botha and his henchmen, Magnus Malan and Adriaan Vlok, a much younger and equally arrogant Desmond Tutu spearheaded the march and coined the phrase: All God’s beaches for all God’s people.
I had an assignment from the biggest Afrikaans newspaper to capture the events of the day. and it was with great difficulty that we gained access to the town because all of the routes to the beach were cordoned off by the army and police.
Today we have a situation on the Atlantic Seaboard that is not too similar, but it reminds us of what transpired in the dying years of the hated apartheid system.
Of course, it can be argued that the absence of helicopters and Casspirs, as was the case in Gordon’s Bay, in no way equates in harshness.
Yet, history seems to have an uncanny way of repeating itself.
The debate on the Clifton cliffhanger, henceforth to be known as
schaapkraal, indeed has many sides to it. It happened! And whether the narratives into the future will be politically motivated or not, it to all intents and purposes will degenerate into a tug-of-war between the rich property owners and the poor have-nots who merely came to enjoy a day on the beach.
And, unless the government does everything in its power to narrow the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor, similar stand-offs will continue into perpetuity.