Land and Erasure I and II

 

Photos: Ashley Walters, Poem: Toni Steward

This collaborative walk and spatial intervention through performance, sound, poetry and alternative forms of collective mapping took place under the rubric of a public art festival put together to commemorate the centenary of the 1913 Land Act. The LAND festival, put together by the Gordon Institute of Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA), now known as the Institute of Creative Arts, in collaboration with the African Center for Cities at the University of Cape Town and the District Six Museum.

This work was a collaborative effort put together by the following artists: Nicole Sarmiento, Ismail Farouk, Nadine Cloete, Lucy Campbell, Toni Stuart, Shelley Barry, Ferdinand Van Tura, Sabelo Mcinziba, Kim Munsamy, Sebástian Porras and Colin Meyer.

To think about land in the present moment is necessarily to think beyond fixed categories, binaries and notions of private property, land tenure or sedimented mappings. Questions of land are imbricated in bodies, movement, memory, migration, forced displacement and removals, and therefore deeply historical. At the same time, commemorating the 1913 Land Act calls for taking on the legacies and logics that continue in the present, and manifest in forms of social injustice, institutionalized violence and historical effacement.

In this walk, more ceremonial than focused on the gaze, we take the liminal and itinerant, memory and displacement, the silenced and buried, the living and the dead, as starting points for opening the spatial literacies of the cities we inhabit.

Land and Erasure I Bonteheuwel

Bonteheuwel, as part of the Cape Flats, was conceived as a township for the relocation of people who were forcibly removed from places such as Sea Point, District Six and Diep Rivier. Today, Bonteheuwel, like most of the Cape Flats, continues to exhibit the spatial and social legacies of the Group Areas Act, as disinvestment and municipal neglect fail to address the basic needs of residents. It is also an important site of resistance. We visit this space considering the layering of time, the idea of landscape as archive, and dialogue with silenced histories in the making of the present.  

 

Land and Erasure II Central City

In the central city land comes at a premium. It is a scarce resource and foundational to questions such as who can live in the city, whose desires are accommodated in the city, and the city for whom. These elements manifest in the built environment, in modes of visibility and invisibility, as well as in the quiet dynamics of movement, networks, connections, formality and informality. In this walk we visit ongoing processes of “regeneration” in the name of culture and design that is taking place, in the context of the deep inscriptions of time that often are effaced.

Collaborating artists: Nadine Cloete, Colin ‘Boesman’ Meyer, Lucy Campbell, Toni Stuart, Ferdinand Van Tura, Nicole Sarmiento, Ismail Farouk and Sabelo Mcinziba 

 

Notes on the 1913 Native Land Act (These were exchanged during the tour).

The Native Reserve Location Act of 1902 gave impetus for the removal of black people from the city of Cape Town. One of the first official relocations was to Ndabeni in 1901/2 under this act. Attempts to force ‘Africans’ to live in the location did not always work, as some families left the settlement in protest and moved to District Six and the Cape Flats.

Bonteheuwel was designed a so-called ‘coloured’ township, that was built in 1960 and declared a Group Area in 1965. It was conceived as a township for the relocation of people who were forcibly removed from areas such as Sea Point, District Six and Diep Rivier, but people from all over Cape Town were relocated to Bonteheuwel.

There is a striking absence of formal economic activity in the Cape Flats. This district accommodates at least a third of the city’s total population (City of Cape Town, 2010), yet total turnover and payroll in 2005 amounted to only 0.5% and 0.3% of the city totals respectively.

There is continuing investor avoidance in the Cape Flats. Based on the 2006 City of Cape Town General Valuation, the value of commercial and industrial property in the flats amounts to only 2.1% of all property in the city.

Patterns of growth are skewed away from the Cape Flats and towards the city’s high-income suburbs. There is unrealised potential for economic growth in the area, especially bearing in mind that the population is growing faster here than elsewhere.

In 2012 Cape Town became the city with the highest rate of protests in the country.

The first shacks in South Africa were built in 1834 and these were, as is in Brazil’s Rio, a response to a lack of adequate housing after the abolition of slavery.

In 1901 there was an outbreak of bubonic plague in Cape Town. Following this there were armed attempts to exclude black people from the city on the basis of ‘hygiene’.

In the early years of the last century people actively sought a mode of access to Cape Town that was outside of state control. Land was appropriated and shacks were built in Athlone and Ysterplat and Maitland.

By 1948 it was estimated that around 150 000 people were squatting in the Cape.

The official township of Langa was established in 1927, Nyanga in 1946 and Gugulethu (first established as Nyanga East) in 1958.

The Prohibition of Illegal Squatting Act was passed in 1951. It allowed the state to remove shacks without a court order and to remove squatters to ‘emergency camps’ – A predecessor to today’s ‘temporary relocation area’.

In the years after the Durban strikes and Soweto Uprisings the state became acutely anxious about squatter settlements becoming a threat to its security.

The passing of illegal squatting of 1977 ended all legal protection for squatters.

During Group Areas removals, people were removed from central citiy areas such as District Six, and what is today known as Sea Point, Greenpoint, De Waterkant, Gardens, and Tamboerskloof – among other places.

In 2008 Cape Town established the Anti Land Invasion Unit. Its major task is to prevent or remove unauthorized newly erected housing structures on city or provincial land.

The city of Cape Town does not have its own policy on land invasion. To evict people or control unlawful settlement on municipal property it relies on national legislation especially the Prevention of Illegal Eviction from and Unlawful Occupation of Land Act (Act number 19 of 1998).

Most land in the rural areas of the former bantustans is owned by the state and the development trust that was setup in terms of the Natives Trust and Land Act of 1936.

The current state land distribution programme follows a market-led model. It requires a willing-buyer and a willing-seller for redistribution to take place.

Geographies of apartheid have proved enormously durable.

The Glen Grey Act was implemented in 1894. It established a system of individual (rather than communal) land tenure, and created a labour tax to force people into employment on commercial farms or in industry.

The right to private property is firmly entrenched in the constitution and in the general legislative framework of the state.

The constitution entitles existing landowners to defend their private property against the government.

Racial slavery at the Cape existed as its central social formation for over 150 years.

90% of South Africa’s land surface was appropriated by colonial disposession. In Zimbabwe it was 50%. In Nambia 44 %. In Zambia 3%. In Tanzania 1%.

The 1913 Natives’ Land Act pushed the majority of the population into various forms of wage labour for their survival. What were called the ‘land wars’ were also in many ways ‘labour wars.’

Since 1994 the South African government has redistributed only 6% of white-owned land.

The RDP in 1994 promised to re-distribute 30% of agricultural land within 5 years of democracy. Nearly two decades after that promise was made, there is still little hope of meeting that target.

Is land reducible to merely a housing question?