The City of Cape Town is monitoring the land occupation in Voortrekker Road, which is causing major concern for residents of the Kensington area. The settlement has grown over the years, with the landowners doing little to provide services, or attempt to evict them.
The property belongs to the Ndabeni Trust, which is supposed to develop the land to benefit the community that was evicted from the land in the 1960s and 70s.
The Group Areas Act of 1950 declared that the space be occupied by Coloured residents and all other residents, the majority of whom were Black, were forcibly removed and relocated to townships such as Nyanga, Gugulethu and Langa.
The South African History Online documents that the area initially consisting of subdivided farmlands, were made up of owners and renters, as well squatters who largely migrated to Cape Town from rural areas such as the Transkei and Ciskei in search of work.
The Ndabeni Trust was meant to ensure the land is used for restitution purposes. The land is now occupied by dozens of informal dwellings with the City of Cape Town unlikely to do anything about it, given the constrains with the law.
Cape Town Mayor, Geordin Hill-Lewis, says there is little they can do, but law enforcement does monitor the area from time to time, to prevent more people from occupying the land.
Hill-Lewis:
“We do have clear evidence that that is an orchestrated land invasion. There are people who are being tricked into paying for space on that land. They’ve got people rocking up with ready made shacks that you buy and then you go and deliver and put on site, and then it’s, you know, it’s immediately ready to go. So this is not just desperately poor people looking for any place to live. It’s actually an orchestrated, planned land invasion. This, this phenomenon that we sometimes refer to as shack farming, where essentially a local, you can call them entrepreneurs, I suppose, where they go and trick people into buying these spaces.”
