New city for Cape blacks

Press, 6 March 1984, Page 21

New city for Cape blacks

From

ALLISTER SPARKS

in Cape Town

At a time when the South African Governmnt is trying to persuade the world that apartheid is dead and a new age of reform has begun, it is forging ahead with one of the biggest social engineering projects it has ever undertaken.

On 7400 acres of marshy duneland called Driftsands, 22 miles east of Cape Town, on the azure curve of False Bay, a task force of bulldozers is scraping clear the site for a new black “city” that is intended eventually to accommodate the region’s entire African population of some 250,000 people. There is a certain official coyness about the project, which on the face of it looks like involving apartheid’s biggest ever human upheaval. When the Minister in Charge of Black Affairs, Dr Piet Koornhof, first announced it last May, he made no bones about it being the Government’s intention to relocate the entire African population of the Cape peninsula there, which would involve moving the 250,000 people residing in the existing townships of Langa, Nyanga, and Gugulethu.

That would make the removal of the 60,000 Coloured people from District Six in central Cape Town, generally regarded as apartheid’s most inhuman act, pale into insignificance.

Latterly, both Mr Koornhof and his officials have been trying to downplay the extent of the removals that will be involved. They still say they would like to see all the people of Langa, Nyanga, and Gugulethu go to the new “city” but they give assurances that there will be no forced removals.

The people will be encouraged to move they say.

This does not allay all misgivings. Elsewhere, such as at the western Transvaal village of Magopa recently, people have been encouraged to move “voluntarily” by such subtle devices as bulldozing their schools and shutting off their water supplies. Inhabitants of Langa, Nyanga, and Gugulethu say they are already experiencing difficulty getting buildings repaired and trading licences issued.

Timo Bezuidenhout, chief Black Affairs Commissioner for the Western Cape, admitted at a press briefing that ’ there was now a freeze on all development and upgrading in the three existing townships. But, again, coyness revealed itself when his housing director, Graham Lawrence, suggested that perhaps “freeze” was not the right word. He thought “hold down” might be more appropriate.

The embryo city has been named Khayelitsha — “New Home” in the.

Xhosa language — and the idea seems to be that it should serve as a sort of combined dam and filtration plant. Not only is it to accommodate all the Africans in the catchment area of Cape Town and its environs, but it is also to serve as a screen to sift out the desperate work-seekers who keep flowing into this area from the jobless tribal homelands of Ciskei and Transkei, 700 miles away in the eastern part of Cape Province. The Western Cape is the only part of South Africa where Africans are in a minority, and the members of Prime Minister P. W. Botha’s Cape National Party are determined to keep it that way. Influx control regulations, more stringent than those in the rest of the country, are the means for doing so. But the desperate workseekers keep slipping through, building shanty towns which the police then demolish, only to see them rebuilt. It is an endless cycle of ideological determination doing battle with economic necessity. However, once the Africans are consolidated in a single large township it will be much easier to exercise population control and prevent the influx of these “illegals.” The project will also tidy up the ethnic map of the area, which is always a priority concern of the apartheid planners. It will concentrate all the Africans in one place and enable the Coloureds to move into Langa, Nyanga, and Gugulethu, which will consolidate them into a single ethnic ribbon of 1.5 million mixed-race people between the Africans and the “white” city. There are strategic advantages, too, from the white Government’s point of view. The present African townships lie astride the highway between Cape Town and its airport. The security boffins do not like that. Khayelitsha is beyond the metropolitan area, bounded on one side by the sea and on the other three by military land. It has only one access road. The site is said to have been personally approved by Prime Minister Botha after he was flown over the area in a helicopter last April. Work started a month later and 280 families are already housed in Khayelitsha, taken from one of the mushrooming squatter camps.

By April, 1985, enough housing should be ready for 30,000 people, and by 1995 enough for 250,000. The plan is for an L-shaped “linear development” of high-density housing built astride a railway line that will shoot the black workers to their jobs in “white” Cape Town. The whole thing will cost an estimated $5OO million. Copyright — London Observer Service.