Category Archives: Hangberg

Open Democracy: The Cape Town model, state violence and military urbanism

http://www.opendemocracy.net/christopher-mcmichael/cape-town-model-state-violence-and-military-urbanism

The Cape Town model, state violence and military urbanism

Christopher McMichael, Open Democracy, 5 January 2012

Lead by the pugnacious Helen Zille, the Democratic Alliance is South Africa’s official opposition party and the governing party of the Western Cape, the only one of nine national provinces not under the control of the ruling ANC. Despite recent successes the party has failed to win substantial support among South Africa’s black majority, due to a widespread perception that, notwithstanding its meretricious rhetoric of an ‘ Open Society’, the party remains a bastion of white privilege. Further scepticism has been created by the parties’ aggressively neoliberal policies which propose to reduce the country’s already partial post-apartheid social welfare system . However, the DA is hoping that the increasingly overt internecine fighting with the ANC will alter South Africa’s political landscape to give it a credible chance of becoming the ruling party by the end of the decade. With the ANC beset by corruption scandals, a growing intolerance for political dissent and the seeming inability to robustly tackle growing levels of social inequality, the DA is attempting to position itself as a pragmatic and efficient government in waiting.

Central to the strategy is the promotion of the City of Cape Town as an exemplar of good governance. The DA’s Cape Town manifesto promotes the city as beacon of ‘world class services, order and stability’ (and by extension paints ANC run urban areas as decrepit ‘feral cities’). Notably, in a country where inequality has sustained high levels of violent crime, the DA’s Cape Town model offers humanistic sounding injunctions about improving safety through reducing historical legacies of underdevelopment, poverty reduction and ‘’violence prevention through urban upgrading’’. The DA’s official line on urban safety promises to enrol ordinary people in the improvement of the city through social crime reduction strategies: as one memorable slogan in the recent local election campaign noted "a child in sport, is a child out of court". Notably, the DA claims that its policies are linked by a concern for individual freedom and the limitation of abusive state power.

However, as the last few years have shown much of the self-proclaimed success of this model is in fact contingent on state violence and the perpetuation of a low level social war against the urban poor. Rather than an aberration this betrays a basal authoritarianism within the DA, which views the poor as targets for pacification, containment and ‘warehousing’.

Take for example the saga of the N2 Gateway housing project. In conjunction with the ANC led National government the city has attempted to move thousands of people from the city to Delft. Despite all the talk about meeting housing ‘’backlogs’’, most activists and researchers argue that the construction of ‘beautiful formal housing opportunities’ between the international airport and the city was a pretext for massive forced removals fast tracked ahead of the 2010 World Cup. Indeed, the quality of these housing opportunities was quickly revealed to people who had been moved from shack settlements into the two Temporary Relocation Areas (TRA) associated with the project. The DA managed Symphony Way TRA ( better know as Blikkiesdorp) greeted its new residents with government built corrugated iron shacks, barbed wired fencing, access control by the South African Police Service (SAPS) and regular patrols by apartheid era Casspier armed personal carriers.

The residents of the Symphony Way informal settlement were so unenamoured with the prospect of being forced into a glorified refugee camp that they occupied a nearby road in Delft for 21 months, the longest political action of its kind in South African history. And as the city was continually warned by residents this uprooting of communities has seen Blikkiesdorp invaded by gang related violence. With Blikkiesdorp as its premier dumping ground for unwanted and ‘risky’ populations, the ‘world class’ security of the city is often bought at the expense of creating insecurity on the periphery.

For example, immediately prior to the World Cup last year, hundreds of homeless people were evicted from the areas around the Greenpoint stadium to Blikkiesdorp, a sudden influx of people which seemed to bear all the hallmarks of an orchestrated clean up. The international media had a field day with this story, especially because of the camp's disturbing similarities to the titular zone of exception in the film District 9. However, the DA’s slick press cadres denied that there were any links between this and the upcoming World Cup. Indeed, when conducting research for my PhD, one City spokesperson even told me that they were not even aware of any controversy about the evictions. These denials looked slightly farcical in light of the city's public unveiling of its philanthropic sounding 'Winter Readiness Plan for street people’, which aimed to "rehabilitate" its "participants" by offering vaguely described "activities" which would keep them out of the city bowl. Coincidently, the plan was initiated a month before the World Cup and happened to fit exactly into FIFA imposed by-laws about restricting the visible presence of poverty within host cities. Most tellingly, the plan stressed the importance of ensuring that "our task is to get to people living on the streets before they acquire survival skills on the streets. Once a person survives a winter on the streets it is even more difficult to persuade him to consider getting back home." Using language that wouldn’t be out of place in the control of wild animals, the statement reveals much about the status of the down and out in the eyes of the Cape Town authorities.

The creation of a far flung prison camp, whose architecture serves as a weaponised form of containment is one thing, but the city considerably upped the ante with last year's attempt to evict the residents of Hangberg. As gruellingly recorded in the Uprising of Hangberg documentary the police were clearly told to prepare for war: without provocation the SAPS opened fire with rubber bullets, destroyed homes, beat up schoolchildren. Several residents lost eyes. This shock and awe campaign was undergird by a sophisticated DA strategy of disinformation, in which the press was assured that the police were ‘liberating’ the area from ‘ drug dealers’ and it was falsely claimed that violence had been initiated by the community.

One of the most telling scenes in the film is Zille’s petulant response to the community’s anger about this officially legislated brutality. Surrounded by her police praetorian guard she storms off when the understandably furious community refuses to accept a pious lecture about their own best interests. Among activists Zille has become notorious for this kind of behaviour, with radical community groups who deviate from the official agenda set down in meetings accused of undermining ‘development’ through talking ‘politics’. As seen in Hangberg, this rapidly transmutes into the vilification of protest as ‘criminal’. The DA script entails a division between the ‘deserving poor’ who want development and ‘troublemakers’ who make the cardinal sin of demanding to be engaged in the political process.

The violence at Hangberg was so extreme that containing the negative publicity proved a challenge even for the party’s finely honed techniques of reality management. At a local election meeting this year I saw a normally slick councillor reduced to half-baked evasions when the issue was raised. After mumbling something about a ‘tragic misunderstanding’ his conclusion was "you know how the police get in these situations". While the level of state violence unleashed was perhaps exceptional, this kind of militarised policing is not. As an aspirant ‘World City’, the DA has managed Cape Town by drawing on a transnational repertoire of what Stephen Graham calls the new military urbanism : ‘crowd control’ which aligns ‘non-lethal’ weaponry with hyper aggressive tactics and campaigns of media dissemination. While this is initially tested on groups which the state considers marginal it may quickly become the norm. Indeed, the party’s official security policy reveals an eagerness to rollout such ‘first world security measures’ if in power, from mandatory prison labour to the pre-emptive identification and tracking of ‘potential’ criminals. To this end, Cape Town’s central business district (CBD) has seen the establishment of a CCTV network of Orwellian proportions whose surveillance footprint far exceeds any other city in the country. However, this funnelling of resources into the CBD stands in strong contrast to the epidemic violence in the sprawling Cape Flats to the south east, in which children have exhibited signs of post-traumatic stress comparable to a warzone.

As the party supporters are quick to point out, ANC dominated councils in other cities have engaged in similar actions, from orchestrated attack on the shack-dwellers' movement, Abahlali base Mjondolo in 2009 to last year's dramatic upsurge in recorded cases of police brutality. Indeed, it can be argued that this is a problem which transcends parties as urban authorities’ efforts to create sanitised world class cities fuses with historical legacies of authoritarianism. Despite the troubling developments, post-apartheid South Africa has a vibrant civil society which continually exposes and challenges these abuses. However, the nature of our recent past means that ordinary South Africans must be continually vigilant about the application of state power, especially when this is glossed in a packaged coat of ‘’international best practise’’.

Thus, despite the service it pays to liberal platitudes about an open society, the DA’s approach to Cape Town's ‘peripheral’ areas and populations appears to replicate a governmental strategy of disgusting inequality by force and lashing out at society’s most vulnerable. As Jean Pierre de La Porte has put it, the DA’s Cape Town model is divided into a Manichean “world of orderly haves and embarrassing have-nots, mocking the weak has become acceptable, since their own failure to be prudent and follow the rules has brought their every misfortune upon themselves – the vulnerable are dunces’’. Under Zille’s botox hardened smile lies a ready resort to the fists of iron which fortify this divide.

M&G: The rise and rise of the Rastafari

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http://mg.co.za/article/2011-10-14-the-rise-and-of-rastafari

The rise and rise of the Rastafari

NIREN TOLSI – Oct 14 2011

The reggae band Horry Quagga is busting a groove on a Sunday afternoon in Wesbank, a township near Delft, north-east of Cape Town.

Band member Barry Korana is tongue-twisting a series of clicks into the microphone, the quills in his animal skin crown dancing to crunchy guitar chords. The combination of reggae music, vocal acrobatics and plumes of marijuana smoke lends a spectral quality to the performance.

After his set, Korana says: “We sing about the Khoisan people, the aboriginal people of this country, and what has actually happened with us.

“It’s about being disrespected by other races, having our land stolen from us and how we need to rise up from what is happening with us now — young people using drugs, drinking, unemployment, our people having no future — and needing to unite and fight the system.”

Korana is speaking to the Mail & Guardian in a car park next to one of the ubiquitous glass-strewn, balding patches of grass that double as recreational grounds in Cape Town’s ghettoes.

On the stage behind him, a “selecta”, or deejay, is dropping dancehall tunes to a crowd of about 400 people gathered for a “One Love” concert, one of several hosted every year by Rasta communities.

Aside from the methodical — and constant — cleaning and crushing of marijuana, which is then stuffed into bottleneck “chalices” for consumption, the gathering has the appearance of any other Sunday afternoon community get-together.

People move between groups, laughing and talking. Rasta mothers in headscarves tend to young children, while catching up on the latest gossip over shared flasks of tea and sandwiches. Dreadlocks swish through the air like momentary peacock tails as young and old cut loose to the beats and bass.

‘Targeted persecution’

Judah Bush (also known as Winston Scheepers), a Bush Radio disc jockey who has a weekly reggae show, which also deals with matters Rastafarian, says Cape Town’s Rasta community has been “pushed through targeted persecution” to provide its own entertainment and cultural needs. “We don’t really have nightclubs, coffee shops or restaurants — places we can call our own and emerge as business people — because the police are always raiding us for marijuana, harassing us or trying to solicit bribes,” he says.

The Rasta response has been inventive: dancehall sessions, known colloquially as “dubs”, have sprung up in several of the informal settlements that pockmark Cape Town.

From one-off gigs in community halls in Tafelsig to the regular events at Marcus Garvey settlement in Philippi and the Thursday night sessions at Hangberg’s Red Lion shack club, with its panoramic views over Hout Bay harbour, the city’s shantytowns are heaving to some big bass sounds.

Papa Sam (51) has started his own “dub” session in a lean-to in Eerste Rivier where he caters for crowds who want “conscious roots reggae, because there is so much new dance-hall that is all about sex and disrespectful of women,” he says.

Part of the early generation of Cape Town’s Rastas, Papa Sam, I-Man-Taxi and King Tubby are selectas considered to have been influential in spreading Rastafari through the reggae music they were playing in the early Eighties.

Of the early stages of Rastafari in Cape Town, Papa Sam says: “There were not many Rastas, or reading material then, because of apartheid. But there was the music and the lyrics were of a higher consciousness.

“Then I was a nobody, but I became a somebody with the music and the message, the political message of Bob Marley and Peter Tosh — the music taught us about being African and proud and standing up for our rights,” says Sam after his deejay shift in Eerste Rivier.

It’s a view shared by Trevor Ebden (48) who became a Rasta in 1981 as he became more politicised and active in the anti-apartheid struggle. Ebden, who worked as a deck-hand on ships, said his travels and those of others, “to places like New York allowed us to buy banned or unavailable reggae LPs, which we made into mix-tapes for the brothers and the deejays who helped spread the message in the beginning”.

Although there are almost no statistics available, many in the Rasta community agree that the city is experiencing a significant “uprising” — more people, especially so-called “coloureds” are becoming Rastas.

Younger generation on the rise

Ras Reuben Tafari, a member of the Elders’ Full Circle, which was formed in an attempt to bring together about 30 of the older Rasta heads from around Cape Town to work through divisions in the community (there are several) and to conscientise “the younger generation who are rising,” says: “Ten years ago I would walk down Long Street and knock fists [in Rasta greeting] with maybe one brethren, today you can’t go a hundred metres without meeting a Rastaman.”

But, he says, the “uprising” comes with its own problems, not least that younger Rastas believe it gives them free rein to “smoke the ganja and act cool”.

“Rasta is not about being cool. With the Elders’ Circle we are trying to teach the youth men about what it really means to be Rasta,” says Tafari, adding that this includes conscientising people about the pan-Africanist political philosophy of Marcus Garvey and the religious tenets found in the Old Testament.

There are several hypotheses being bandied about to try to explain the “uprising”.

For Ebden, it is about the fulfilment of Rasta political prophecies: “The markets are falling and the revolution — the peaceful Rasta revolution — is on its way. The economic system’s downfall was prophesised by Marcus Garvey, Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, and a new age is about to start, that’s why people are turning to Rasta,” he says.

Bush suggests there is also growth across generations as first-generation or so-called “water Rastas” from the Eighties and Nineties grow up, get married and “give birth to pure-bred Rastas”.

There are also Cape Town-specific reasons. Many youth and elders say it provides an alternative to gangsterism for ghetto youth who are marginalised, ill-educated and see no futures for themselves. The anti-establishment, alternative lifestyle nature of Rastafari fits in well with their disenchantment.

For Kurt Orderson, a 29-year-old Rasta filmmaker who goes by the moniker Ras Azania, combining Rasta and black-consciousness philosophies “provides a political and revolutionary platform from which to question the post-1994 status quo and send a message to the mainstream that a luta continua. If you are working class, poor and unemployed in Cape Town, Rasta becomes your voice,” he says.

The denigration

Academics have drawn direct correlations between the denigration of communities in Jamaica and their turn to Rastafari — and similar trends can be detected in Cape Town.

William Ellis, of the University of the Western Cape’s department of anthropology and sociology, says “while there is no real evidence that the so-called ‘coloured community’ in Cape Town has been consciously neglected more than other races, there is a strong perception within the community that it has been marginalised”.

This, suggests Ellis and various Rastas, could explain the recent upsurge in Rastafari — and, more latterly, one that also has elements of Khoisan identity politics constructed into it.

Ellis, whose research fields include Khoisan identity, cultural politics and land ownership, says: “The whole notion of Khoisanness is one key identity that is available to so-called ‘coloured’ people.”

Ras Azania, Judah Bush and others agree that there is a new Rastafari identity conflating with notions of “colouredness” and Khoisan ethnicity.

This — it has been suggested by Capetonians both within and outside the Rasta community — burgeoned, especially after the United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People in 2007, which recognised the Khoisan as the aboriginal people of South Africa.

Statutory recognition

The South African government is also aiming for increased statutory recognition of Khoisan communities and leadership structures in bodies such as the House of Traditional Leaders, with the national Traditional Affairs Bill already passing through various consultative phases in September.

Korana, who is from Hangberg, says: “The Boesman invented the drum so the Boesman was a Niyabingi [see The three main sects below] … We are the original people of this country, and to free ourselves, we need to reclaim what was stolen from us: our identity and our land.”

Ellis says when Khoisanness is interpreted as an “authentic identity” and linked to “perceptions among ‘coloured’ people that they are being marginalised” in the democratic South Africa it has the potential to “be erroneously read”, leading to the development of a “brown nationalism'” — anathema to an Africanist understanding of Rastafari.

“Lots of Rastas are going with the Khoisan movement and, while it is good to embrace your roots, it shouldn’t be placed before Rastafari, because then you are creating a new kind of tribalism,” says Ebden.

This, according to many Rastas, feeds some of the divisions already apparent in the community. Although, broadly, there is a sense of racial harmony among Cape Town’s Rastas, the community is also extremely fractious.

Renecia Scheepers (33), Judah Bush’s wife, who gives natural food and health tips on Bush Radio — such as how to drain and use aloe juice to grow dreadlocks — says she has experienced segregation on the dance floor occasionally: “Personally, there has been the odd occasion [on the dance floor] when the black sisters are separate from the coloured sisters who are separate from the white sisters, but it could also be put down to the language barrier.”

Judah Bush says: “Cape Town Rastas are definitely the most fundamentalist and divided in the world. When Rastas from other countries come here they are surprised at our lack of flexibility, especially over really stupid things like the mix-and-clean divide.”

The mix-and-clean divide exists across Cape Town and sees Rastas who smoke marijuana without tobacco disassociating themselves from those who mix it with tobacco. It is, apparently, a big deal.

For Ebden, it is “each to his own when it comes to smoking ganja, but I prefer smoking clean. When I smoke clean it takes me to a higher level of meditation, I see the stuff I am meditating about and it takes me to a higher cause. I used to smoke mix, but it made me feel dof, tired and dirty sometimes,” he says.

“Clean smokers” like Ebden say it is preferred for health reasons.

But divisions between sects like the Bobo Ashanti, the Twelve Tribes and the Niyabingi also exist.

In this environment racial tension — despite some protestations — does exist and Ellis is wary that an “emergent brown nationalism” could lead to even deeper divisions, that mimic apartheid, between “coloureds” and blacks.

There is also an apparent tension between radical and conservative traditions inherent in Cape Town’s “uprising”.

The most obvious include Rastas invading open land in Tafelsig earlier this year and last year’s Battle of Hangberg that saw residents living in the informal settlement above Hout Bay mobilising to resist eviction by the local municipality.

Residents, many of whom are Rasta and claim to have Khoisan roots, faced down police rubber bullets and tear gas with their own bodies.

Junaid Said, also known as Naftali, was on the frontline of that struggle and says: “Where I live, this piece of land, it is my destiny.”

Naftali says Sentinel Hill, or Horryquagga Mountain, has “spiritual symbolism for the Khoisan and needs to be defended, otherwise it will be stolen by the DA [municipality] and the rich white people who want to develop this ground and live here”.

Police bullets during resistance is one of many daily experiences of violence, intimidation and harassment Rastas face in Cape Town. Many speak of constantly being stopped and searched for drugs by police. Schoolchildren talk of being persecuted by teachers at their schools because of their dreadlocks — the Western Cape education department has faced several legal cases in response to Rasta children being expelled from local schools or being forced to cut off their locks.

Last month five Rastafari warders, who were fired from Pollsmoor Prison in 2007 for wearing dreads, won a Labour Appeal Court case for unfair dismissal.

“The general impression is that we are lazy, dirty people,” says Judah Bush, “which we, as progressive Rastas, want to change — we need to show society that we can also be filmmakers, accountants and teachers.”

Orderson says persecution and intolerance has led to bloodshed. His short film, David v Goliath, dealt with the murder of Ras Champion, a Rasta elder who was allegedly defending a crèche in the Marcus Garvey informal settlement in Philippi when he was “shot at close range by police who were on a drug raid”.

In the face of such adversity the dubs rise like glorious Rastafari roses in the muck and grime of shack settlements.

Banging early into the morning almost every day of the week and with music ranging from roots reggae to dub-step, they provide both refuge and catharsis not merely for the Rasta experience, but for the marginalised too.

*******

The three main sects

There are several “mansions” or sects of Rastafari, including the Bobo Shanti, the Nyabinghi and the Twelve Tribes of Israel.

The Bobo Shanti was founded by Emmanuel Charles Edwards in Jamaica in 1958, with Edwards considered the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Followers believe in black supremacy and the repatriation of all black people to Africa. Their dress codes include long flowing robes and turbans.

The Twelve Tribes of Israel was formed by the prophet Gad and followers believe Haile Selassie was the direct descendent of kings David and Solomon. Based on the 12 sons of Jacob, a member of the tribe assumes the name of Jacob’s son that correlates with the month in which they were born.

The Nyabinghi Order emerged from a possession cult in modern-day Uganda and Rwanda in the 18th century. Nyabingi means “black victory” and its music (especially the use of drums) exists as spiritual Rasta music outside of reggae.

The one utopia that South Africa may be able to avoid?

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The one utopia that South Africa may be able to avoid?

Dylan Valley and Aryan Kaganof’s documentary on the siege of Hangberg is a textbook of orienteering: it brings together the overarching questions South Africans use to make sense of their experience.

What would white-styled rule in post 94 South Africa look like? Valley and Kaganof show us the Western Cape’s Helen Zille managing her way through civil disobedience. Her burial of history and larger issues in favor of bureaucratizing each social problem is caught in its zero hour. The Zillean society as well run corporation and parties as management stylists is shown as a simple failure of political imagination as blood flows and lives are ruined for the sake of a council by-law.

What are the rights of people other than those genial ghosts profiled in the constitution? Valley and Kaganof show how ambiguous rights can become at the edges of administrative classifications : homeless in a firebreak, poor infiltrators into a holiday home paradise, descendants of imported slaves, Muslim; these are the category-busting stereotypes that trigger bureaucracy to excesses.

Valley and Kaganof show the people of Hangberg as vulnerable and in need of greater consideration and protection in a democracy.They do this simply by talking to them and hearing what they have to say. In the DA’s Little Britain world of orderly haves and embarrassing have-nots, mocking the weak has become acceptable, since their own failure to be prudent and follow the rules has brought their every misfortune upon themselves – the vulnerable are dunces.

How does a society that prides itself on multiculturalism deal with cultural enclaves? Impeccably – as long as they are quaint enough to attract tourism and help fill the revenue pot at the end of the rainbow. Valley and Kaganof show the limits of this lip service in the scapegoating of Rastafarians for their courageous disruption of the naive overadministration of the people of Hangberg.

The list of questions could go on and so could Valley and Kaganof’s sly and sagacious answers; but these questions dont need listing for they are already the legacy of each South African, the daily prayer orientating them in one another’s reality. The return of wised-up white rule,the infantilising of politics transfigured into a business school gimmick,the dangerous fates of enclave cultures, the internal emigration to the Western Cape and to Orania or to housing estates, the mercenarisation of the police into watchdogs of the wealthy; these are the questions that Valley and Kaganof ask in order to allow the people of Hangberg to answer.

The documentary film maker is shown as an embattled counterculture to news media. Nobody could fail to notice the undignified, self-righteous and hasty spins of the Hangberg siege as they collapsed like failed gags across the media. Such sanitary campaigns eventually create a demand for facts – or better than facts – direct access to the people of Hangberg themselves; an obvious role for social media.

Valley and Kaganof’s work seems to have been shown in quite rarefied contexts to small if influential audiences. It is in fact a masterpiece of editorial summary – fuel for public opinion and civil society rather than media markets. It goes beyond social media through the constructional and design skills that are the legacy of both film makers. Kaganof, whose SMS Sugar Man drew social media into fiction now leads them to fact in The Uprising of Hangberg. This film is the beginning of an era in which unclassifiables like Valley and Kaganof become rarer while cults of administrative apocalypse proliferate.

Jean-Pierre de la Porte

The Uprising of Hangberg

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http://africasacountry.com/2011/02/22/the-uprising/

The Uprising of Hangberg

Sean Jacobs

“The Uprising of Hangberg” is filmmaking at its incendiary best. Part agitprop piece, testimonies, campaign document, and popular history, the film recounts the violent events of September 2010 when municipal police on the orders of the Cape Town’s Democratic Alliance (DA)-run council invaded the favela on the edge of the Hangberg mountain in Houtbay, outside Cape Town. What transpired is now the common response by authorities in South Africa when the poor majority demand rights. Houtbay, for those trying to place it, situated on the southern edge of Cape Town, is a combination of declining fishing industry and a reservoir of cheap black and coloured labor on the one hand, and, on the other, white privilege. With scenes recalling Apartheid’s police state, cops stormed into houses, dragged out residents, shot people in the eyes and assaulted pensioners and pregnant women. The residents are mostly coloured and loyal to the DA. The city council’s spin doctors quickly framed events in the local, compliant, media. As reports from Hangberg filtered over local radio and on TV news, a template emerged: the Hangberg residents were illegal squatters, were living on a firebreak, most of them were criminals selling drugs (especially the Rastafarians amongst them), and the city and provincial government (personified by its “Iron Lady” Premier, Helen Zille) had residents’ best interests at heart. Filmmakers Aryan Kaganof and Dylan Valley, decided to drive out to Hangberg and film events. What they pieced together–with help from footage shot by local activists–puts a lie to mainstream propaganda. Affected residents also turned on the DA. So much so that the city, and the DA tried to astroturf the film (see also below) with little success. With local government elections looming in South Africa, it is unclear whether the events will cost the DA, but the film suggests it may portend a shift in local politics–especially coloured working class politics–in the town and perhaps further afield in the Western Cape province. I sent Dylan Valley a few questions.

How and why did you get involved in the events at Hangberg

The politics of the events are complex, as the City of Cape Town went in to remove what they called “unoccupied” structures from a firebreak (a path that prevents fires from spreading and for fire fighters to gain access to fires) in Hangberg, Hout Bay. Hangberg is a “coloured” neighbourhood in the town of Hout Bay, one of the most picturesque areas in Cape Town and, as such, prime property. It turns out that people were getting evicted [without a] court order, [that] occupied structures were being demolished and people were literally dragged out of their homes by [the city’s police force]. The force with which the police went into the area was totally uncalled for, and at least four people had each lost an eye in the clashes with cops. I was not planning to get involved initially with Hangberg at all. I heard about it through the local media, but didn’t get a real sense of the urgency of what was happening there. The media reports, while seeming balanced, were very much one sided and made the residents seem unruly and violent. My co-director, Aryan [Kaganof] actually suggested we go and find out what was happening or possibly film some stuff. He llived in Hangberg briefly a few years ago and knew that the community he knew was not the one that he was reading about in the papers. Something was wrong with the picture.

Did you expect the kind of hysterical response from the governing party in the Western Cape, including what is probably a fake, negative review of the film.

I was actually expecting the worst. This project really opened my eyes to how easily disinformation can be spread. The same DA councilor, JP Smith, who forwarded us that review of the film, had hosted a press conference where he released photos of 3 of the Hangberg residents, who had each lost an eye, throwing stones at the police in a group photo. The intent was to show that their story of innocence was false, and that they had deserved to get shot. However two of the residents, Ikram Halim and Delon Egypt, were falsely identified in the police pictures, i.e. it wasn’t them. In the local newspapers, The Voice and The Cape Times, the Hangberg residents were branded as liars, totally unquestioning Councillor Smith’s story. In the film we expose this and find and interview the actual people in the police photograph.

How would you describe the Cape Town media’s reporting of class and race inequalities in the city?

I think we as a middle class have become quite used to media reports of “service delivery protests” that never quite convey the situation on the ground. Also in their subtle use of language, they generally seem to be on the side of the local government. I actually know someone who is a reporter, and who said to me once, “People in townships just want to catch on kak (cause shit).” And even when the journalists do try; I think the term “service delivery protest” is very similar in effect to what was called “unrest” during Apartheid. When middle class people read it they immediately think “that doesn’t really have anything to do with me” or “the government needs to do something” or “these people are just complaining for nothing.” I think people have an immediate response to the term, without going into the specifics of every incident or story.

City officials and the Premier of the Western Cape province, Helen
Zille, and some in the mainstream media, quickly declared the protests being the work of “The Rastas,” who were deemed as violent (as having provoked the police violence) and of doing drug dealers?

That was the most ridiculous thing. They singled out the rastas in the media because they are an easy target. Also the Rastas in the Hangberg are very politically savvy and are spreading an ideology of reclaiming their indigenous Khoi heritage. The Khoi were an indigenous group in Southern Africa, and are often spoken of as “the original people.” Most of what we call coloured people today in South Africa have some Khoi or San heritage. However with the creation of coloured identity in the South Africa, which was seen as better than black, an institutional rejection and amnesia of the Khoi and San occurred and people generally didn’t want to identify with any kind of African heritage.

Helen Zille is the face of government in the Western Cape and also the focus of residents’ anger. She is good with spin and PR. She also enjoys good press and can’t do no wrong, yet recently some of her government’s decisions have been exposed for its callousness, the toilet saga in Khayelitsha and now Hangberg. Did she and the DA overreach here? How are her whites constituents and supporters responding to it? How are her coloured constituents responding?

Helen Zille and the DA-run city council definitely overreached here … One white person who reviewed the film said he always supported and appreciated Helen Zille, but after watching the film he is questioning everything he believed about her. The majority of the (coloured) Hangberg community actually voted for the DA, but there is an overwhelming backlash against the DA now. We have yet to see what other “coloured” DA supporters think, but think that sentiment will spread as far as the film spreads. You can’t watch it without realizing how little they care for the poor. I also want to make clear however that it wasn’t our intention for people to vote for another party (like the ANC), but rather to expose the hypocrisy of the DA- led City of Cape Town.

Cape Town and the Western Cape is a graveyard of populism, pandering and divisive race politics to which both the governing DA and at times even the ANC are equally guilty of. What do you think are the hopeful politics that can emerge out of Hangberg? What is next for the people of Hangberg?

I don’t think party politics as the answer, as I believe none of the major parties in the Western Cape really care for this type of community. A unified community with strong leadership reaching for the same goal is the solution. I think this attack on the community has actually helped to bring people together. Also they have taken their case to not be moved to the Cape High Court and it is imperative that the community wins; which could have serious repercussions elsewhere in the country. Most of all, I would like for them to be acknowledge as the descendants of the Indigenes of the area, the Khoi peoples. There is a growing movement in the Hangberg community to embrace their Khoi heritage, as opposed to the blanket “coloured” identity.

You have been showing the film in venues around Cape Town. What has this taught you about film exhibition in postapartheid South Africa? Are you going to put the film online?

Well there is only one independent cinema in Cape Town, where we screened the film. We haven’t really tried to screen it in the mainstream cinemas, but unlikely that we would have been able to. Since we don’t have distribution funding as of yet, and we are not aiming to make a profit out of the film, we’ve handed out quite a few DVDs and they are apparently doing the rounds; people are copying the film and passing it on. We just want to get the story out there. We are planning to eventually put the whole film online. There is a condensed 6 minute version on www.hangberg.co.za.