Khayelitsha Remembrance Square

During the 1950s, the government replaced 2,000 African employees in the Western Cape with coloured and white workers, and pass laws were enforced by police trying to catch ‘illegal’ immigrant workers. However, the fast growing shanty towns on the edge of Cape Town were evidence that influx control was not really working. Central government imposed ‘The Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act’ in 1952 which forced local authorities to set up ‘emergency camps’ where shanty dwellers could be ‘concentrated and controlled’, and permitted authorities to destroy ‘illegal’ shacks. In the late 1950s the destruction of shack settlements increased in areas as diverse as Hout Bay and Elsies River. Over 5,000 so-called ‘bachelors’ were forced to move into hostels, and thousands of ‘illegals’ – mostly women – were ‘endorsed out’ of the city. In 1959, despite vocal protest from many employers, the Native Affairs Department decreed that no more Africans could be employed for work in Cape Town. At the same time, the conditions in the Eastern Cape reserves were deteriorating and therefore migrant labour became a more significant lifeline for many families. The clearance of squatter camps continued throughout the sixties and seventies. In the 1970s a shanty town developed at ‘Crossroads’, near the airport. It began when workers were told to leave a white farm and move to ‘the crossroads’. Finding only bush, they built shacks and established a community that afforded families more scope for creating individual, respectable homes than the hostels of Guguletu. As Crossroads was considered a temporary camp by the authorities, eviction orders were made in 1975. However, these were not enforced because a Men’s Committee and a Women’s Committee had formed in order to fight this decision, the latter of the two being particularly successful at gaining support from within and outside the community. In 1977 a survey showed a total of 18,000 living at Crossroads. The Black Sash began to support the ‘Save Crossroads’ campaign, and in 1978 it was declared an ‘emergency camp’ thereby obliging the Council to supply water taps and remove refuse for a small fee. The battle to save Crossroads from destruction became a major battle of will between the government and the opposition movements during the late 1970s and 1980s. However, tensions rose within the shanty town and violence erupted around the schism between supporters of Johnson Ngxobongwana as head of the residents committee, and those who contested his behaviour of favouritism and reward to his henchmen. In 1983 there were bloody fights in Crossroads that spread into the nearby areas of KTC and Nyanga. A group of older Crossroads residents resented the rising influence of UDF supporters or ‘comrades’. A group of these men, the ‘witdoeke’, wore white armbands and formed an alliance with the police to fight against these young ‘comrades’. The ‘witdoeke’ were sanctioned to use weapons, and in the attacks on neighbouring townships and the setting fire to all the shanty settlements in old Crossroads, they caused an enormous amount of violence and rendered 60,000 people homeless. Some residents moved ‘voluntarily’ to a tented town near Site C in Khayelitsha to avoid the violence. Meaning ‘new home’, Khayelitsha was intended by the government to provide housing to all ‘legal’ residents of the Cape Peninsula, whether they were in squatter camps or in existing townships, in one purpose built and easily controlled township. The plan was to create 4 towns, each with 30,000 residents in brick houses, a proportion of which were to be privately owned. Settlement began with a tented town - rows and rows of tents, to which Crossroads residents fled. By 1986 over 8,000 people lived in 4,150 ‘site and service’ plots at Site C (site and service means demarcated plots, each with a tap and toilet), and a further 13,000 rented core houses in Town 1 (a core house is a small cement-brick structure that can be extended into a larger house). Yet, by 1990 the population of Khayelitsha was 450,000 and unemployment stood at 80%. Only 14% lived in core housing, with 54% in serviced shacks and 32% in unserviced areas. A handful of residents had electricity and most families had to fetch water from public taps. In conditions of overcrowding and lawlessness, unofficial councils elected by community members maintained social control in the neighbourhood, and enforced physical punishment upon adults and children who broke the local codes of behaviour.