It’s been a glorious summer in Cape Town. The heatwave had one and all at swimming pools and beaches all over the Cape. Long Street was packed with clubbers and tourists from all over the world. Drinks flowed freely: Hennessy, Bacardi, Hunters, Carling, you name it. Sadly, it was spoiled by talk of our beloved province being racist. Leader of the opposition, Helen Zille, wasted no time in dismissing nay-sayers as professional blacks and that put an end to the claptrap. Sort of.
But it seems that some people did not get the message. They insisted on drawing our attention to the plight of shack dwellers and backyard residents of the Cape Flats townships, from Khayelitsha and Blikkiesdorp to Bishop Lavis. Their target: Rondebosch Common. They had planned to occupy Rondebosch Common, a space open to all who reside in the suburb, where freestanding properties often sell for anything from R1.3-million to R8-million — and more — depending on the market.
The Cape Times reports that Cape Town mayor Patricia De Lille wasted no time in calling would-be protesters “agents of destruction” through its invasion of “a peaceful community of students, retirees, young and old professionals of all races, men and women”.
Needless to say, the exercise was nipped in the bud and protesters were arrested. Baseless allegations of police brutality and heavy-handedness were, no doubt, made by those with an inflated sense of the significance of their constitutional rights. Furthermore, in an effort to explain the low turn-out at Rondebosch Common, the protesters allege that they were accosted by police in the townships before they could get to the picturesque Rondebosch location.
Meanwhile, the DA Students Organisation (DASO) published posters of topless inter-racial heterosexual and homosexual couples in suggestive embraces with the tag line, “In OUR future, you wouldn’t look twice.” Certainly, we should not look twice. It is about time that DA youth realised that the Immorality Act was scrapped. Well done to DASO for raising this contentious issue.
The sexy posters made the news both in print and online media — certainly a great deal more than Occupy Rondebosch Common, which may have made TV news, but did not feature on any of the major news sites significantly.
What can we learn from this? Cape Town’s professional blacks who complain about racism and inequality in the city should know their place:
- You cannot stage a protest when high property values are at stake and where private poolside soirées and yoga sessions are bound to be disturbed by noisy chanting and annoying slogans that call for the actual delivery of election promises
- Protests and grumblings are best staged in the townships, where they can be contained or ignored. That’s why Verwoerd and his colleagues designed them in the first place
- Forbidden topics, such as sex across the Colour Bar (which is not located in Long Street, I am told), is far more newsworthy than poor people’s struggles with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
- Poverty is only sexy when it is framed for a fashion photo shoot, or for the album cover of a trendy punk-rock band or the exotic, postmodern marketing of Die Antwoord
- If you defy democratically elected leaders of the ruling party and the official opposition, you cannot expect to invoke talk of constitutional rights to free assembly in public spaces, free speech, freedom of movement or freedom from police brutality and harassment. After all, when you vote for national and provincial leaders, you are giving them a blank cheque. Live with it
- Don’t even try to invoke solidarity with American protesters by using the verb “occupy”. As any Republican will tell you, those people should just get jobs instead of expecting handouts from the hard-working rich, who deserve every perk they have earned. Professional blacks need to work hard if they want to get to Rondebosch. It is a free market, after all
Hi Adam,
I was almost pissed off. You sounded like a member of the Rondebosch Rate Payers. Then I realised your parody.
De Lille and the DA’s authoritarianism is now exposed for all to see. DA and ANC are two sides of the same coin.
What a farce of a situation. While they may have not obtained the necessary permits to protest, the reaction was absolutely ridiculous. When I see that sort of force hitting the streets of Lavender Hill to smack down the rampant crime I’ll eat my words.
Rondebosch Common is not state, municipal or regional council land as are most of the other 200 and more squatter camps where the ANC dumped the unemployed of the Eastern Cape prior to 1994.
Rondebosch Common is PRIVATE land, donated by Cecil John Rhodes in his will to be a permanent open space for the people of Cape Town.
Not that private donations are sacrosant from our new post-ANC dispensation. They have already sold off land donated by Count Labia in Muizenberg (against tghe terms of the donation), the Janet Bournehill Library in Claremont, and according to some allegations also most of the state archives!
Pippa Green records in her biography of Trevor Manuel how he told one of his staff to get rid of the former furnishings and paintings of his new offices. When it was pointed out to him that these items were historic he said “it might be your history, it isn’t mine”!
If the ANC government were to expropriate Rondebosch Common they would have to pay its value to the Trustees of the Rhodes Foundation – and the price would be astronomical. The Nats also tried, and found all they could legally get away with was road widening.
Unfortunately Janet Bournehill, Count Labia, and my Great Grandparents no longer have trustees to protect their wills from state expropriation!
I see that this heavy handed effort at sarcasm or satire or irony (heaven help us) is tagged with the label “ANC”. Since I can spot no reference to the ANC I assume it refers to Adam’s affiliation or to his brown envelope supplier.
Adam, you sound a bit one-sided to me. Please correct me, if I am wrong, but I understand that the protest action had not received the appropriate authorisation before they started, yet decided to go through with it anyway?
So, if the law is broken, you suddenly blame the DA and ANC as being authoritarian?
And then you follow that up by making all kinds of mind-boggling inferences about professional blacks, racism, and an oh-so-neat 6-point list where logic is stretched way beyond any reasonable bounds.
While I have some sympathy with the situation the “Occupy Rondebosch Common” march was trying to highlight, they messed it up and should have restarted their campaign within the parameters of the law.
As to you, I think you are relatively young (compared to me at least), very sensitive to any perceived injustice, and apparently way too emotionally caught up in the issue to apply reasonable logic. I suggest you step back, consider the centuries’ worth of wisdom that goes into principles and concepts like “rule of law,” “democratic right to protest,” “independence of judiciary,” and so on.
When done right, I fully support the right of people to protest.
But the “when done right” caveat is non-negotiable.
Great article Adam – and as an ex-student of yours I take extra pride in reading it! Please do another article on the Occupy_Cape Town movement – our numbers are growing, and we need to utilise any and all forums at our disposal to spread the word about what exactly we are trying to do. Thanks
http://www.internafrica.org/p/informal-human-settlements-of-cape-town.html
Now there’s a lot of spin and crazy numbers….
Now this is what I call great satire Adam!
The the genesis of Zille’s underlying autocratic style and the silent gentrification of CT while pushing out locals, arises from the DA’s roots. The DA absorbed the lions share of the NP circa 1994. The voting data in Wikipedia speaks for itself http://southafricana.blogspot.com/2010/12/myth-of-da-liberalism.html No amount of window-dressing can ever cause a leopard to change its spots.
Zille, like most of the beneficiaries of apartheid, have giant blind spots to their own apartheid indoctrination where interracial sex seems like some giant leap for mankind! LOL This sleazy campaign strategy says more about the inner taboos of the DA culture than it does to the majority of South Africans who couldn’t care less. Meanwhile, the DA shameful tactics to cling to power in the the WCape is once again another short term strategy that smacks of desperation and gives us another glimpse of that old apartheid mindset.
Yes, occupying whites-only beaches was also illegal. Now where is my brown envelope?
Once again, nice. Tho, obviously, actually demanding that people build houses on Rondebosch Common is a bit thick. But using it as a stunt to demand better social housing is a good one.
Does the Occupy Movement have any solutions to present to the problems they are trying to highlight or are they as directionless and pointless as they look? I have seen a whole bunch of occupying going on and that is where it stops. So, you have occupied…now what? You have shoved a great big middle finger in the face of all those middle class Rondebosch residents who get up every morning and go to work and supply the skills in short supply that govenrment is perpetually whining about. Now what? I put it to you that it is a movement more occupied with itself than the problems at hand; liberals without a cause fabricating one to be a part of. If they were anything better the movement would not be called Occupy, it would be called Solve or something indicative of what they intended to do. It is also instructive the leaders of this mess were either unable or unwilling to organise a legal demonstration in a democracy that allows legal protest.
Beyond a joke.
Dave Harris, many thanks for the insight. I have finally realised what is the matter with you — although I never really suspected you would confess. Yours is another ‘short term strategy that smacks of desperation and gives us (the longsuffering readers) anothe glimpse of that old apartheid mindset.’ You have exactly the mindset that the old regime tried to instil, which you must admit is a great shame. It is within your power to take leave of that mindset without taking leave of your senses. Your readers look forward to that.
Losers have every right to associate and gather. We all just wish you’d do it somewhere where we can’t see you. If you’re so unhappy, why don’t you vote?
@Kalahari Doringboom: good thinking! How right you are. Just like those who were born British: he just cannot get away from himself, can he?
The problem here is the “entitlement” mentality fostered by the ANC, who then cynically exploit it. “Promise them the moon to get them to vote for us, then forget about them once in power” is the game modern “socialists” play.
And to a wage-earner who is paying the bank thousands of rand each month to gradually repay (with interest) the money he or she had to borrow in order to buy a house, these people’s demands that someone “give” them one for free sound obnoxious in the extreme.
South Africa is experiencing the beginning of a fire that will soon develop into a furnace which will consume all of us. The descendants of the colonisers have one thing in common – they always back the wrong horse. As I read your parody Adam, what came to mind is that some of those who participated in the civil disobedience drive are descendants of families that used to own vast tracks of land in the area as flower growers carpenters and fishermen. These people were moved to Manenberg and other parts of the Cape Flats, an area that could be described as another concentration camp. “Cry my beloved country”.
@ Lyndall, how rich of you to claim that Cecil John Rhodes was the rightful owner of any piece of land that he aqcuired through a colonialist and murderous binge. The state should correctly expropriate that piece of land at no cost and build RDP’s!
A good read. I am also amazed that the provincial government responded so harshly to the “illegal gathering” on Rondebosch common. I would like to live in a city where voices are heard and protest is not met with brute force because “necessary permissions” have not been granted. This sad saga reveals the deep-seated refusal of white Capetonians to register their privilege, and the complicity of Zille and the DA in preserving the bubble. As a white South African living in Cape Town, i find it shameful and embarrassing that this played out the way it did. And the fact that the Weekend Argus put a picture of a white protester on the cover of the newspaper on Saturday was equally nauseating. This is not about the plight of some foolish student who’s been on twitter and thinks he’s running with a global trend. This is about real voices with real issues. Pity they won’t be heard anytime soon…
Kwame
Then the state would have to expropriate ALL private land, including your house, and stop giving away RDP houses for free.
And just to remind you Rondebosch Common and the Cape Colony was the land of the original people of Africa, the Khoisan, NOT the land of the black colonisers, because their white descendents got there first.
Kwame
And the state would also have to dump the Griqua land claim for Kimberley considering they sold it to the same Cecil John Rhodes.
@A. Haupt: “Yes, occupying whites-only beaches was also illegal. Now where is my brown envelope?”
Strange. Just today I was researching on how to make better strategic decisions, and the impact of biases on flawed decision-making came up.
Amongst them were pattern-recognition biases (“which lead us to recognise patterns even where there are none”), of which one is:
“FALSE ANALOGIES—especially, misleading experiences. Relying on comparisons with situations that are not directly comparable.”
During the time of “whites-only” beaches everyone did not have the right to vote. Now everyone has. The situation is not directly comparable.
I would welcome your demonstration, provided it is lawful, and respectful towards the rest of the citizens of South Africa (i.e. those not taking part).
I respect you and your rights. Please respect me and my rights as well. Because, essentially, they are OUR rights (yours and mine). It is OUR compact to behave towards each other in respectful, orderly ways.
PS. For those who may find it interesting, the other pattern-recognition biases are: Confirmation bias, Power of storytelling, Management by example, and Champion bias.
@Una: “…some of those who participated in the civil disobedience drive are descendants of families that used to own vast tracks of land in the area as flower growers carpenters and fishermen. These people were moved to Manenberg and other parts of the Cape Flats…”
Moving the people was simply wrong. It goes directly against my personal principles, and I support actions to restitute those wrongs. Are you saying the land claims have not been submitted and addressed?
@Lyndall Beddy: “…NOT the land of the black colonisers, because their WHITE descendents got there first.”
Oh, you just had to sneak that one in there, didn’t you?
I’m referring to the “WHITE” bit from your comment that I capitalised in the quote above. Because many people would just read right over that one.
And conveniently ignore that most recent Genome research are indicating that it is true…
@Kwame: You seem to have strong emotions above, viz. “a colonialist and murderous binge” (‘murderous’ and ‘binge’ are intense, emotional-laden words, and in many places in the world, so is ‘colonialist’).
Cool heads are needed. Lyndall seems to raise facts and reasoned conclusions?
To me a key question is probably whether land was acquired rightfully, under due process. Happy to hear (unemotional) factual views on that, because it does raise issues of “who was here first,” “who transacted with who,” and so on.
*sigh*
@ Dave Harris
Seeing that you choose to talk about Wikipedia, under “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_National_Party_(South_Africa)” I read the following:
“Despite his party’s poor performance in the polls, van Schalkwyk was given the cabinet post of Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, as a reward for aligning the NNP with the ANC.
As of 5 August, 2005, all NNP members of parliament became members of the ANC, in accordance with South African parliamentary floor crossing legislation (a series of laws which allow politicians, elected on one party ticket, to defect to other parties).”
Care to explain how you come to the conclusion that “The DA absorbed the lions share of the NP circa 1994″?
But back to the article, a question I have is how proud of Mannenberg are “Proudly Mannenberg” if they choose to live on Rondebosch common?