Who mothers the Mother City?

A WHILE back, the DA councillor for Sea Point, Nicola Jowell, posted a photo of the busy local public swimming pool on her Facebook page. The place was packed, with all races represented, but predominantly brown and black people.

I wrote a comment about the photo full of jubilant people: “It's wonderful to see how everyone can use the pool." In my stupid naivety, I had forgotten how nasty and bitter a certain loud and aggressive group of white Sea Point residents had become over the decades. 

“What are you talking about?" one woman asked as if I had been robbed of my senses. “Everyone has always been welcome there."

“No," I answered. “When I grew up in the early 1970s to the early '80s, only white people were allowed there. So-called nannies could come, but only if they wore a uniform and to come and watch over the little white children when they were swimming in the shallow water. 

“They were not allowed in the water. Not on the benches either. All of the benches on the boardwalk were only for white people. Also the beaches. 

“The only place they could go swimming or have a picnic was on Sunset Beach, the beach with the sharpest rocks, where no one wanted to go."

She wrote: “Oh twat! Besides, for as long as I can remember it's been mixed!" I quickly realised that for her history started when she began to grow a “mind". She played dumb about the rest because it suited her. It is a common trend among certain white people these days, such whitewashing. 

What was true was that her defence of Sea Point's image ran counter to the place's mainstream thinking. For a group of extremely privileged people has hijacked the narrative in and around Sea Point to try to create the illusion that this place did not have a history in which all races took part. The place was born in a vacuum. 

But I have a sneaky suspicion that the aforementioned woman had done a Trump on me and simply lied so that the village idiots could crawl out of their holes. Indeed, the complaints began, about how they foul up the Sea Point pool, how they queue in row upon row in order to enter (the barbarians are at the gate) and there are far too many of them (the swart gevaar, breed is all they do).

Then the predictable question: Why don't “they" go swimming in their own public swimming pools? Yes, Sea Point has been a puddle of ​​metaphorical Make Sea Point Great Again adherents for some time now. 

***

Let's turn back the clock for a bit. Yeah, sure, I know people don't want to read about poverty or apartheid, but let's press on so that we can get to the making of the award-winning Mother City, which partly plays out in Sea Point as a microcosm of prosperous property owners.

From 1959 to 1961, in accordance with the Group Areas Act, coloured residents (34 families) were forcibly removed from Tramway Road and Ilford Street in Sea Point to the Cape Flats (read: driven out). Lorries came to collect them and they were loaded like furniture on the back. 

People cried and lamented but the removals tore apart a community that had lived there since the late 19th century. Everything was taken away, all that remains today of that era is the Anglican church of the Holy Saviour, where most had gone to worship. 

Strange lack of knowledge

Residents remember that there was a small general store called Alie's near the top of Tramway Road that was owned by an Indian family. There the young bunch of the time bought sausage-shaped orange lollipops, pink star candies and black balls. 

Opposite Alie's was a shoemaker and tailor. Above someone's house was an improvised cinema, with old green padded leather seats from the trams that ran in Cape Town at the time. 

Imagine you have grown up on a farm, and your family has owned it for generations. One day the police come and chase you all off the farm. You are being moved to a dry, windy area, far from the homeland that used to be in your DNA. 

York Road and t'Groenehof in Green Point too were areas where coloured families had lived since the 19th century. They were removed, like the families in De Waterkant. Today mostly white people live there and properties are sold for R4 million to R20 million. 

When I recently told a resident of t'Groenehof that I remember the coloured families from the '70s, she was amazed. “No, it can't be," was her reply. This strange lack of knowledge about history is nothing but affectation and denial. 

In the 2000s, the City of Cape Town granted land to the Tramway Road Trust as part of a restitution claim, on condition that it be redeveloped for its beneficiaries. In 2014 the Tramway Trust sold the land to developers after a string of failed development proposals. Bordering on Bantry Bay, the irony is that today it is one of the most expensive residential properties in Cape Town and Africa. 

A real estate agency writes about the new development on its website: “[We] participated in an historic Atlantic seaboard sod-turning ceremony on Tramway Road, Sea Point, marking the launch of the upmarket Orchards urban development project on the border of Sea Point, Fresnaye and Bantry Bay.

“The Orchards development occupies 7 500 m² of prime land, with 75 units on landscaped grounds surrounding a citrus orchard and heated communal outdoor swimming pool. All apartments will be served by an underground parking facility. 

“Architects Stauch Vorster have designed contemporary lines, with units enjoying state-of-the-art, sophisticated finishes and magnificent sea, mountain or orchard views. Additional facilities include Wi-Fi connectivity throughout the estate and a fully equipped Technogym fitness room with Kinesis exercise wall. 

“The residential development has been deemed pet-friendly and is minutes away, on foot, from the beachfront promenade, shops and all amenities, yet sufficiently set back to ensure being an oasis of calm.” 

An oasis of calm built on the sorrow of coloured people. 

***

During apartheid, Sea Point was declared completely white. Black people were not allowed to pause on the sidewalks and hang around or strike up conversations. Everywhere there were signs: “No Loitering", I clearly remember that.

If you were a gardener for white people in Fresnaye, and you walked up the hill, the police would stop you with their dogs and vans and ask where you were going. Black people on the street or in any public place were considered dangerous criminals.

You had to be able to provide proof that you worked for a family in their garden. Brown women were hired as servants and had to live in small rooms behind houses, or in special rooms in apartment blocks, usually with a small bath, a bed, a two-plate stove and a kettle. 

They were not allowed to receive any visitors. During the week they had to look after the white families' children. Many of today's rich white businessmen in Sea Point's domestic servants were second mothers to them, pushing them around in prams on the promenade where they were not allowed to sit on the benches when they got tired. Most domestic helpers were released for one day a week and could then visit their own families and children on the Cape Flats. 

Even today a dividing line

Many brown and black children grew up without a mother or father and were raised by their grandparents. At Christmas, if the oubaas and miesies were feeling generous, the maid could take leftover food home, mostly pieces of meat that had partly been eaten, or dessert that was mushy and warm after a train ride to the Flats. 

How do I know this? I was there, I saw it at my friends' houses. How has it changed? Even today there is a dividing line between the predominantly white residents of Sea Point and the people who work there. 

Workers still  have to commute for hours to where the Nationalists had displaced them. Let's take a look at a kitchen in a seedy eatery in Sea Point. 

The kitchen will be open until 23:00. The last guests will leave just before midnight. Afterwards, the place has to be cleaned. 

The workers leave for home around 01:00. Sometimes they have a minibus that drops everyone off at their homes far from the city. By 02:30 they get into bed. 

If they have to work a morning shift, they have to hit the road by 05:00 to open the place for breakfast by 06:30. The customers usually come fresh from Virgin Active, or pilates, to indulge in health drinks with almond milk and wild seeds. 

This is where Mother City's story becomes important.

***

The blurb for Mother City reads: “Against the backdrop of a country celebrating three decades of democracy, Mother City exposes the deep fault lines that still exist in South Africa because successive governments since 1994 have not offered solutions to the most urgent and explosive issue of land and ownership rendering generations of working class people still homeless. 

“Cape Town, known as the Mother City, lies resplendent between the iconic Table Mountain and the icy Atlantic ocean. A narrative documentary, it charts Nkosikhona Swartbooi leading a defiant war against government and property developers in one of the world’s most unequal cities. 

“Our story starts in 2016 when the government decides to sell the old Tafelberg School in Sea Point, earmarked for affordable housing, to a private developer. This careless disregard of the desperate housing needs of Capetonians gave birth to a social justice movement, ‘Reclaim the City’. 

“The stakes cannot be higher. Local authorities are determined to evict the more than 2 000 people living in two occupied state-owned buildings in the inner city of Cape Town. Our documentary tells the dramatic story of these residents who do not accept living in the shadows of one of the world’s most visited cities. 

“For Nkosikhona Swartbooi, the battle for housing is deeply personal. Raised by his grandmother in a shack in Khayelitsha, he saw the humiliation she faced as a domestic worker in Sea Point. Over six years, he grows from a young activist to a father trying to balance his political work with family commitments. The story is vintage David and Goliath: activists taking on property power and politics in a city still disfigured by spatial apartheid thirty years into democracy.”

Sea Point's residents do not want to know anything about this. The general feeling is that “they" are scumbags who are jeopardising the value of “our" properties. They must stay where they came from. 

On Sea Point's Facebook pages they are referred to as “rubbish". “Oh man, everyone wants a little house by the sea," is the common refrain. “But not everyone can afford it, stay where you are." 

This is the core of the mentality of Sea Point and surrounds (and many other neighbourhoods throughout South Africa) – we form a laager and our motto is “Right of access reserved".

***

I meet with the co-director of Mother City, Miki Redelinghuys, at an eatery in Mouille Point. It is 12:45. Outside, people are jogging or walking with headphones on and staring out in front of them. I wonder what podcasts they listen to, in these parts it's probably Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson. 

Babysitters in pink uniforms tend to white babies. They have to be grateful to have a job, I can just hear the comment. 

Behind us is a retirement home. Elderly people in wheelchairs are pushed across the stop street. They then sit down with their brown or black helpers and turn their faces to the sun. The helpers hold the gnarly hands. 

To grow old comfortably, after a lifetime of hard work and white affirmative action, is wonderful. Oh, how sweetly the sun burns on those narrowed, blue eyes that serenely gaze out over the waves. 

I sit and ponder all this while waiting for Miki. She calls, the traffic is bad. Johannesburgers are flocking to the Cape, there is hardly any room for their big 4X4s. The day smells of petrol as the traffic rushes by outside. 

I became a fan of Miki after watching her 2018 documentary, This Land. It is a 48-minute piece about the Makhasaneni community in the north of KwaZulu-Natal who opposed the development of a mine and asserted their right to the land they live on.

It made me think deeply about how people can be randomly pushed around like trash by hard-nosed ideologues or developers and mining bosses with big money. I have long been aware of the two sides of the Mother City and often ask myself, whose mother is this city really?

Who does it care for? Rhetorical question, don't answer. At the launch of Miki and Pearlie Joubert's Mother City I saw how many awards they had already received. This doccie kicks you hard, slaps you in the face. Especially bad was the arrogance of the City of Cape Town lot, people like former mayor Dan Plato.

Miki does not want to talk about herself, she is the person in the background, the one peering through the camera, yet briefly: As co-founder of Plexus Films, she has been producing creative factual content since 2 000. She also works with film teams to design impact strategies for their campaigns and is the programme manager for the University of Cape Town course Sunshine Cinema Impact.

Now the story of the doccie, from how it started until it was launched.

***

“The idea started when Pearlie and I talked about race, racism, our place as white people in this order of things and how it is part of our lives in cities," she says. 

“We wanted to tackle something together and had talked about it for a long time and started wondering how it should happen. We started attending Reclaim the City meetings in, among others, the Methodist church in Sea Point. 

The saga began in 2016 when the Western Cape government sold the 1,7 hectare Table Mountain property (an old school) in Main Road, Sea Point, for R135 million to the Phyllis Jowell Jewish Day School. 

Activists fought for the site to be used for social housing, and spoke out against the private sale of the land. Eventually they moved into the empty building next to the New Somerset Hospital, the Helen Bowden Nursing Home. They were occupying it, they said, because the authorities would not listen to them.

Opposition to affordable housing

The name of the building was changed to Ahmed Kathrada House. In the documentary, viewers meet the occupiers and listen to their side of the story. 

The old Woodstock Hospital had also stood empty for many years. Activists moved in there too and renamed it after Cissie Gool. Both places are neat and nicely furnished. About 1 900 formerly displaced persons live at both locations.

I ask Miki why there is so much opposition when it comes to affordable housing. “People don't want to confront their comfort zones. To shift the gaze is uncomfortable. They are afraid they will lose something. Democracy was a good deal, nobody has to give up anything," she says.

“Democracy is not about the ANC. It’s about you and me, it doesn’t happen beacuse of a new government. We as individuals need to be active citizens.” 

She and Pearlie became more deeply involved when the Cape Town Metro cut the water and lights to Ahmed Kathrada House. They took water there and got involved in that way, cameras on their shoulders. 

Miki's camera work is her great passion and she is particularly keen on good sound. The visual and sound aspects of Mother City are breathtaking. 

Over the years they have had to interview activists, legal scholars such as those at Ndifuna Ukwazi, housing developers, and many others involved in the city's affairs.

“We wanted to look at all aspects, collect and film as many different opinions as possible," she says. “We also had to organise funding and if there was disapproval from someone, I just cried."

Previously, to raise money for a project, Miki would simply get going and sell watches and clothes at flea markets. She did what she could with what she had. 

Work on Mother City was hard, like when they had to stand in a court for five days with cameras on their shoulders. They had to knock on people's doors early in the morning, even before the sun had risen. Sometimes Miki's children had to come along and help carry things. 

DA federal council chair Helen Zille granted them an interview, but served cake and tea and refused to talk about the case. When the documentary opened, the tickets were sold out. They have won many prizes and are distributed internationally (see their website below). 

Mother City held its premiere at the V&A Waterfront, where the mayor of Cape Town, Geordin Hill-Lewis, gave a disappointing speech. To my mind, he sounded like an apparatchik. His attendance as a whole turned out to be a great pity for Miki and the audience. 

“Why was it a pity for me? It's a shame that he talked about the film without watching it. He was invited for the premiere, he didn't stay for the show. We dearly wanted to show Mother City to city leaders – the stories and lives of the people they dismiss as ‘criminals' – in all the nuance and love with which it was filmed. 

“His pre-speech made assumptions about the film and the people and stories in the film, without really making an effort to listen and gain insight. This is unfortunately true of many politicians, who are unwilling to truly listen to the people they serve. 

“Initially I was optimistic that there would be change under the leadership of  Hill-Lewis, and indeed, he has made an effort to appear more accessible. 

“But the narrative of the city towards the activists remains the same, and it is disappointing. Still, the recent turnaround in the Western Cape government's position on the Table Mountain property indicates that the pressure from Reclaim the City and Ndifuna Ukwazi does have an impact. As Nkosikhona ‘Face’ Swartbooi says in the film, maybe they are listening.

“This movie is my love letter to Cape Town," she says. And what a letter, one that will leave deep traces in its history. 

***

I emailed co-director Pearlie Joubert, one of Vrye Weekblad's original journalists, a few questions while she was on the run somewhere. 

It took six years to make the doccie. Were there times when you thought you were going to give up now, enough was enough? If so, what made you push through? 

I didn't really ever want to give up. I wanted to muddle on. I was hanging in for that grand finale. Miki was the bulldozer. She said enough was enough and took us through the final stretch.

How did you and Miki complement each other? 

I organised many of the interviews and shoots. As a journalist, I knew the mayor's spokespeople and knew how to beg to film in the courts. Knew how to make nice to get a camera in somewhere. Miki and I had our own relationships with Reclaim the City and Ndifuna Ukwazi. 

Miki is generally much nicer than me. Much more patient. She films beautifully. The sequence in Mother City that is so cinematic was shot by Miki. Where people climb over wires in the evening was filmed by me. We encouraged each other a lot. We were in agreement instinctively when we had to film somewhere. 

What is it about the subject that compelled you to work on it? 

Jirre, people can't live in so much natural beauty, so much money and privilege and sunshine and oak trees and not literally fall over poverty and inequality.

Miki told me seven years ago that we should make a documentary together. We had a long talk about race. A film about race, racism and this city (Cape Town) in this country. And while we were talking, the movement and activism happened around us. 

We both felt such a deep rage about the carelessness of our government. Politicians have a duty of care. 

The Boers didn't have that for anyone but people like them. And 30 years into our democracy, our city still looks JUST as it did in the '70s and '80s. It upsets me that people sleep outside when we have money to build parks and hotels and malls. 

The most difficult aspect of making the show? 

The editing and agreeing on what goes in and what goes out. I sometimes fretted for hours what line of argument to take with Miki about a scene... when you film for so long and have filmed so many hours and hours and hours of material, that process is really difficult. 

When you saw the final product, how did you feel? 

Teary. So insecure. So excited. So nerve-racking.

How have viewers responded? What feedback did they give? 

People were very affected and they were very shocked by the brutality of the reality of Cape Town. In general, people are terribly inspired by Nkosikhona “Face” Swartbooi [the young activist driving the story]. They really have fuckall interest in Miki and me!

Some white South Africans still have a low opinion of displaced people, also of people living in townships. They are described as garbage on Facebook pages. They must stay away, disappear – without any conscience about how their white skins mostly contributed to their own prosperity. The way they talk about affordable housing, especially in Sea Point and surrounding areas, borders on sadism. What is this disconnect? Why are they so cruel? 

I think people are cruel because they know deep in their hearts that “there by the grace of God go I". Most white people know deep in their hearts that if we lived in a place with a level playing field for everyone – and didn't have oppression of black people where we took all the best land and everything else for ourselves – MANY of us would be living in Langa and Khayelitsha. Money and this system of meritocracy, which especially the DA loves so much, make us inhuman. Make us cruel. Makes us lose our duty of care towards each other.

Anything you want to add? 

My big fight against the provincial and national government is this: Public land does not BELONG to you. You did not BUY it. You TOOK it. Your forebears STOLE it during colonialism and then the whites STOLE MORE during apartheid. So what is so hard to imagine a new politics where you act as the custodians of public land rather than the legal owners? Isn't that obvious? It is the government's duty, duty of care, to look after her citizens who have not, who have less. That is also why people pay tax. It is not a favour. It's your job. Do it. 

***

• Mother City will be shown in Cape Town on Sunday February 23, 2025 at 14:30 at the Labia Theatre, 68 Oranje Street, Gardens. Get tickets here,  for R90 per person.
• See the preview of Mother City on YouTube.
• Go to the website of the documentary.
• More about Judge Pat Gamble's court ruling on the Tafelberg property in Sea Point.
• What the dividing lines in South Africa between white and black neighbourhoods look like from the air.

♦ VWB ♦

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