Cape Flats

The noted English naturalist, William John Burchell, remarked in 1811 that the deep sand of the Flats made travel by cart or wagon extremely difficult. The situation was aggravated by a widespread shortage of firewood, causing fuel collectors to cut the relatively few indigenous shrubs and trees that stabilised the sand.[1]

During the second half of the 19th century, the area was completely overrun by alien vegetation, mainly of Australian origin.[2] The plants included hakeas and especially wattles (genus Acacia). The principal reason for this infestation lay in decisions made by the colonial authorities. It was an era before the advent of modern technological methods for the construction of permanent roads and in those days the Cape Flats was a massive sea of unstabilised sand dunes that moved at will before the winds. This made travel between Cape Town and the interior very difficult, particularly for the large ox-drawn wagons of the time. The authorities decided to try to stabilise the sand with plants native to the British colonies of New South Wales and Western Australia.

The earliest importation of wattles was in 1827. Massive plantings were established in the 1840s and 1850s and the work continued until well after 1875.

At the time, the plan worked well enough: the march of the dunes was arrested. The price paid, in ecological terms, was that the Cape Flats was carpeted by invasive species. Serious efforts have in recent years been made to roll back this alien scourge.

Khayelitsha, Township along N2 (2015)

The Cape Flats has undergone revolutionary change in the past half a century. In 1950 the area was practically uninhabited. There was a single, narrow road across the Flats from Cape Town to The Strand that ran between walls of alien rooikrans bushes and one could travel for miles without seeing any sign of habitation other that a few fences and a handful of farmhouses. Native antelope roamed at will between the dense thickets of wattles. The army used the area for military exercises and the few farmers who inhabited the Flats eked out a living by growing vegetables in pockets of relatively poor soil between the barren dunes. Modern amenities were unknown; telephones were unknown, drinking water was collected in tanks from roofs and at night the rooms were lit by oil lamps.

West Side and Thug Life murals in the Coloured township of Manenberg, in Hard Livings gang territory

Street scene in Bonteheuwel township

Cape Flats train station

Cape Flats scrap collectors

Shantytown in Cape Flats

The era of sand and antelopes vanished completely in little more than a generation. Vegetable farming persisted, but to a much lesser extent, because urbanisation enveloped vast tracts of land in short order. During the apartheid era, race-based legislation such as the Group Areas Act and pass laws either forced non-white people out of more central urban areas designated for white people and into government-built townships in the Cape Flats, or made living in the area illegal, forcing many people into informal settlements elsewhere in the Cape Flats. Large housing projects were built here, mostly as part of the Nationalist government's larger effort to force the so-called Coloured community out of the central and western areas of Cape Town, which were designated as white areas under the Group Areas Act. This meant that only whites could reside there permanently; as under the apartheid system black Africans were officially citizens of the independent homelands, regarded as temporary migrant workers, therefore having resident worker status. However, since many of the mostly Xhosa initial migrant workers bore children, these children who were born and raised in the Cape Town area—were designated under apartheid as residents of Bantustans, many were obliged to live in the area illegally, further contributing to the growth of informal settlements. Apartheid did not anticipate the eventuality of black migrant workers not returning to their homelands, effectively not permitting naturalization. Additionally, other large townships of black people (such as Khayelitsha and Gugulethu) grew up on the flats as a product of mostly informal settlement, but also forced government relocations to a lesser extent. These consisted in the main of shacks made of "tin" (in reality corrugated iron which, confusingly, is nowadays made from mild steel), cardboard and wood. In 1993, Cape Town had a housing backlog of approximately 40 000 houses and with the numbers of people migrating from the rural areas increasing each year, so the backlog increases. One of the major priorities of the RDP (Reconstruction & Development Programme) is to build houses.[3]

Since the end of apartheid, these communities are no longer legally bound by racial restrictions; but history, language, economics and ethnic politics still contribute to homogeneity of local areas. So, for example, most residents of Mitchell's Plain likely still speak a locally inflected version of Afrikaans, along with English and either they or their parents were designated as Coloured by apartheid; most residents of Khayelitsha still speak Xhosa and English and either they or their parents were designated as Black by apartheid. Nonetheless, some areas of the Cape Flats have an increasing diversity of residents, with Xhosa-speaking people an increasingly noticeable presence in some previously mainly Afrikaans-speaking areas.