Warning! - This section contains more detail about the recent history of Vrygrond than most people will be able to stomach!

There are many “histories” of Vrygrond, each shaped by the person who tells it. The history of someone like Thys Witbooi, who has lived much of his life in Vrygrond, and known it through the hard days when officials of the apartheid state demolished his shack, is vastly different from my history.

Because of my connection with Vrygrond, I know more about its recent history than most people. The vast majority of the 8,000 residents who moved from tin shacks into brick houses, have little idea of the process or people involved in their move. The parents of the 200 kids who attend our Creche do not know of Yabonga or One to One Children’s Fund which paid for the buildings and still support the operations. Few ‘outsiders’ know the story either.

So, although this is really a very minor tale in the vastness of South Africa, where there are countless other similar stories, I feel there is some value in recording it.

HISTORY:
Vrygrond was reputedly the oldest informal settlement in the Western Cape. It was originally settled by Trek fishermen who gleaned a living from the sea and erected informal houses to live near the beach.

The years since then were not kind to the people of Vrygrond. The land they lived on was Council land and they had no title to it. Under the apartheid government they were ejected from the area they occupied. Many were forcibly sent back to other parts of South Africa from where they had come. Others left in the face of constant official harassment. Thys Witbooi, one of the original community leaders on the Vrygrond Community Development Trust, lived through those times. A core of them managed to stay on, dodging the bulldozers and police. Shacks demolished by the authorities during the day were surreptitiously re-built at night. And over the years the community managed to survive, gradually increasing in numbers as the old Government stopped implementing its policies.

The homes themselves were shacks built of tin, wood and boards. In winter there was flooding; in summer great heat and dust from the dirt roads. The majority of people had and still have no regular work. They had no electricity, no sewage, no piped water. There were 21 public water taps which had to serve over 1,000 homes. The toilet buckets were emptied once a week by the Council.

As apartheid lost its grip and the laws were not enforced, the population grew again and was further increased more recently by the influx of Xhosa speakers from the E. Cape. At present the population is roughly half Coloured who speak mostly Afrikaans and English, and half Xhosa speakers.

There has never been an accurate census, but the Council’s assessment was that there were approx 1,200 informal structures (shacks) in Vrygrond, housing approx 8,000 people. In fact when we built the new brick houses it became apparent that many shacks held two families, each of whom qualified for a new house. In the end the 1,600 new houses were all taken up by Vrygrond people.

The name Vrygrond means “Free Ground” and comes from the legend that the land was given free to the community by Count Labia, an Italian aristocrat and diplomat who owned land in the area. But the title deeds have always shown that the area is public land owned by the local authority.

OBJECTION TO LAND SALE AND HOW I GOT INVOLVED:
I returned to SA in 1991 having lived abroad for some 25 years. One of my close friends, David Altschuler, an ex South African living in London, had put together a small team to establish a Science Park in Cape Town for the new South Africa. At Dave’s request I became involved in this Capricorn Science Park . I knew absolutely nothing about this kind of property development but was dragged along in the wake of the small group of friends who were driving the process (Dave Altschuler, Dennis Fabian, Stan Newman).

By 1995 the group agreed with the local Municipality to buy a piece of land right next to Vrygrond to establish the Capricorn Science & Research Park. When the proposed sale of municipal land was advertised, the only objection was received from Vrygrond (November 1995).

The Council was prepared to overrule these objections, but the Directors of Capricorn did not want the first action of the newly-established “ethical” and “politically correct” Park to be overruling the neighbouring squatter camp. As a result Dave Altschuler met with some of the Vrygrond leaders (Siljeur, Philemon and Witbooi) and at his suggestion I then became the main liaison between Vrygrond and Capricorn. As I recall it his words were “Jonathan, you have bugger-all to do so why don’t you engage with the squatters in Vrygrond?”.

It turned out that the Vrygrond group in fact welcomed development next door, as they hoped it would provide jobs, especially during construction. They cleverly used the objection process as a lever to extract concessions from a City Council which had steadfastly ignored them for 50 years or more. Essentially they were saying to Council “You are very quick to sell Council land to the new Capricorn Science Park, but what about us?”

As a result of the intervention of the Capricorn Science Park, a deal was negotiated in Jan 1996, in terms of which both the Council and Capricorn made certain promises to Vrygrond, and in return Vrygrond withdrew their objection to the land being sold to Capricorn. These negotiations involved much discussion with the Vrygrond community leaders (mainly Trevor Siljeur who was the most able of them) and with the officials of the City Council (chiefly Rod Young, the Development Coordinator).


The Cape Town Council agreed on 12 Dec 1995 to transfer 52.4 hectares of land to Vrygrond via a representative body (a Trust to be formed). A large piece of land like this, right next to a major seaside resort, would theoretically have a huge value. In reality however, the Council would never have been able to move the 1,200 shacks off the land and so it really had no commercial potential at all. There was little else that could be done with the land except to acknowledge the permanence of its residents.

RIVAL GROUPS IN VRYGROND:
By this time I learned that there was no one body representing Vrygrond. In fact there were two rival groups each of which claimed to represent the community and who hated each other with a passion.

The RDP Forum, whose initiative had resulted in the objections and subsequent involvement of the Capricorn Science Park, consisted of Trevor Siljeur, Thys Witbooi, Maxwell Philemon, Yvonne Baard and one or two others.

They were bitterly opposed by another group calling themselves SANCO (SA National Civics Organisation). This was controlled by a virtually illiterate, powerful. man in his fifties, who was an immigrant from Zimbabwe, Danger Khumalo. Danger was like a local warlord who used to allow new immigrants into Vrygrond to put up shacks for the payment of a subscription “to SANCO”. His main henchman was Gary Adriaanse, a charming, tall, good looking young man who was dating Danger’s daughter, and who shared Danger’s suspicious and obstructive nature. SANCO was really driven by just these two people, with a handful of supporters.

The single most important item in the development of an informal settlement like Vrygrond is to have a strong organisation which can speak for the community. No outside agency, whether charities or Local Authorities, will get involved to help a community if there is rivalry between two or more groups. Each group claims that it is the true representative of “the community” and dismisses the other groups. Any project which is sponsored by one group, gets boycotted and often physically destroyed, by the other group. As a result countless development opportunities in this country have been lost; fine buildings are standing empty and unused, all because the community is split between rival groups, neither of whom will permit the other to control the facility.

It is enough for outsiders to hear the words “we represent the community” to back off with respect! But of course neither group can really substantiate the amount of support they have. Vrygrond has never in its entire history had a democratic election. A well-attended public meeting in Vrygrond, usually in the old tin and board pre-primary school, consisted of maybe 200 people out of a population of 8,000. People drove around with loudhailers 30 minutes before, encouraging attendance at the meeting.

SANCO specialized in a crude demagoguery which meant it was not difficult for them to whip up 20 or 30 angry supporters, enough to disrupt a meeting and claim the mantle of “representing the community”. Often meetings broke up in disorder. They would then present this as “the community overwhelmingly rejected the proposals at the meeting…”

It was of course largely bullshit. Like most communities, the vast majority in Vrygrond was apathetic, busy with their own desperate lives, and hardly aware of the struggles being waged between these small groups claiming to represent them. In fact, there is no doubt that the RDP people, Trevor and Yvonne etc, were more representative of the silent majority in Vrygrond.

I write now with the experience of 11 years. At the time I treated both groups in Vrygrond with equal, even exaggerated, respect. Although I connected more easily with the RDP Forum, largely because their people were better educated and more reasonable, I went to great lengths to cultivate Danger Khumalo, Adriaanse and their “SANCO” group, and to involve them in everything we did.

In April 1996 one of the shareholder companies involved in the next door Science Park, Grinaker Construction , agreed to build for free a usable road into a densely occupied part of Vrygrond which had no access. This was important not only for taxis and community transport, but also to allow emergency services like fire and ambulance to have access to the dense shacks. The Capricorn Park itself paid R30,000 for the gravel and other materials needed for the road.

I made a point of involving Khumalo and Adriaanse in the road. Most of their effort was spent in submitting me to intense questioning revolving round their obsessive suspicion that I was either stealing the money or involved in some sort of scam. Even after giving them copies of the invoices for the road materials, their acceptance of the road was at best grudging. Gary Adriaanse even took to recording our conversations threateningly on a little tape recorder which he had somehow obtained.

I wrote “SANCO” in inverted commas because, although there is a national Sanco organisation in South Africa, which provided much of the opposition to apartheid in the streets of South African townships when the ANC was banned and in exile, it was largely chaotic and disorganized. Countless groupings in townships all over SA pinned the Sanco name to themselves without really having any formal connection with the organisation. Later in this saga, the regional head of Sanco disowned the Vrygrond group, saying they had no right to call themselves by that name. It was just a self-assumed label which had no real meaning.

FORMATION OF THE VRYGROND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT TRUST:
I set myself the task of persuading the two Vrygrond groups to sit together on one body, so they could obtain their land from the City Council. To my surprise and annoyance, what I though was blindingly obvious, was not so to them. So what should have taken a couple of meetings, in fact took me four months, shuttling like a mini Kissinger, from one shack to another, often at night, trying to persuade them that, in spite of their differences, they must sit together on one body. I have no particular training for this kind of mediation work and had I known what was involved I might have thought twice. Some of my memories are almost surreal:- sitting in dark shacks late at night, lit by flickering gas lamps, surrounded by angry men shouting at me for suggesting that they work with their ‘enemies’. At times both sides accused me of being biased towards the other;

Eventually in January 1997 I arranged a meeting at the offices of the local Council and we formed an exquisitely balanced body with 4 representatives of each side. At that stage they all asked me to remain on as Chairman, largely because I had brought them together and was not aligned with either group. I was flattered at this, - there cannot be many white people elected to be Chairman of a squatter camp body, - and more importantly I saw it as an opportunity to make major improvements in the life of an entire community. I cannot say that ever since returning to South Africa I had been looking for an opportunity to get involved in community upliftment. More that when the chance was presented I took it.

THE STRUGGLE TO BUILD NEW HOUSES:
Having formed the Trust specifically to receive the land from the Council, in fact it became apparent that we should first build new houses, and then give each resident the title to his or her individual house. There would be no point in a double transfer of land first to the Trust and then to each resident. So, together with the South Peninsula Municipality we set about the huge task of re-housing an entire community.

The SA Dept of Housing at that time made available a subsidy of R18,000 for each shack dweller to replace his shack with a brick house. However this was not given directly to the shack dweller for obvious reasons. The Vrygrond Trust decided to apply for subsidies for all the people in Vrygrond. This was a major job since the application form was complex; many of the people were illiterate, or did not have documents like ID’s or marriage certificates. For a year and a half the Trust Office, housed in a converted shipping container, was inundated with residents needing advice and help to complete the housing subsidy application forms.

At the same time the local Municipality started the process of putting the job out to tender. There was some debate as to whether we should follow what was called the Peoples’ Housing Process whereby each resident was given the materials to build his own house. This method had been used in one or two small homogenous communities, but the Trustees decided that the quickest and most efficient way to build 1,600 houses in Vrygrond was to employ a commercial builder who was driven by the profit motive to get in and out as quickly as possible. I have absolutely no doubt that his was the correct decision and any other method would have been a total disaster of incompetence, theft of materials, and delays.

While this was going on the Trust broke apart. . During the first 8 months of the new Trust, the Sanco group were deliberately obstructive, difficult and impossible. They had no interest in sharing power or working jointly with others: they wanted total control. The period they were on the Trust was a time of aborted meetings, refusal to accept majority decisions, and sheer bloody-minded disruption of the process. At a meeting to discuss major planning issues, they would spend two hours arguing fiercely whether proper notice of the meeting had been given, or if someone present should be permitted to attend. If decisions were taken which they did not like, they would come to the next meeting with ten ‘supporters’ to bully the others. Their greatest satisfaction was when meetings broke up in disorder as a result of their actions.

In July 1997 they stormed out of a public meeting and out of the Trust. The majority of Trustees wanted some of the professionals involved in the housing to be black or coloured firms. It was felt wrong for a major development for black and coloured beneficiaries to be undertaken without one black firm involved. The dissident Sanco group, themselves all blacks and coloureds, insisted that only one large white-controlled company be given the work! On this extraordinary issue they finally broke away from the Trust.

From that moment their sole obsession was the destruction of the Trust and of the development of which the Trust was the driving force. And of course those Trustees who were clearly leading the process, like Trevor Siljeur, became their special targets. In July 1997 Trevor’s house was fire-bombed after a public meeting in which those present confirmed the work of the Trust and outvoted Sanco. Two months later his house was burned down and he and his daughter injured. Adriaanse and several others were arrested, but nothing came of it.

In early 1998 Adriaanse and Khumalo were joined by Jeremiah Thile, a thickset, powerful Xhosa man who had in fact been brought into Vrygrond by Yvonne Baard, one of our Trustees. Thile soon took control of the local ANC branch in Vrygrond which he used as a base from which to attack the Trust.

In many other communities, wreckers similar to these have succeeded. Countless opportunities to house poor people in this country have been lost and housing projects abandoned in the chaos and squabbling which such groups promote. In Vrygrond the remaining community leaders on the Trust, including two former Sanco supporters who had rejected the spoiling tactics of Adriaanse and Khumalo, kept the Trust going.

For those who live outside squatter settlements it is hard to understand why a group of residents, themselves living in conditions of poverty unimaginable to most middle-class families, would be prepared to destroy the delivery of new housing simply in order to gain power and control over the community. Even now, after years of involvement, I find it difficult to answer this question in a way which is comprehensible to reasonable people. In the case of Danger Khumalo, I was told years later that he feared there would be no place for him to graze his goats in a redeveloped township! I believe he also knew that whatever power he had in shack-land would be lost once brick houses were built with tarred streets and lights. And in fact he was right. Once the new houses were up, his influence did end. He has now left Vrygrond.

Gary Adriaanse I think was driven by intense hatred of Trevor, hated seeing others deliver community projects which he did not control, and delighted in the chaos of destruction, - destruction of projects which others had built up. Jeremiah Thile failed to deliver any benefits at all to Vrygrond, but tried to seize control of other projects in Vrygrond in the hope of establishing himself as a “community leader”.

Their actions to destroy the Trust and the housing development included legal ones, such as asking the Housing Board to withhold the money for new houses. With the help of a misguided, elderly, fat ex-Councilor called Joye Gibbs, they formally objected to the local Municipality and to the Provincial Premier in order to try and stop the development. When these attempts failed, some of them resorted to illegal acts such as threatening to destroy the Trust office or marching on the contractors with sticks and forcing them to stop work. Both the Trust and the contractors obtained court injunctions to prevent further harassment, and several of them spent time in jail for intimidation.

When I look back at the history of the housing, I am struck by how much of our energy was spent on addressing the constant attacks of Thile and his group. It was a lesson to me how a truly small handful of determined, malicious people, can cause immense problems to even a major project like this one. Time that should have been spent making the housing development better, - hours, days weeks, - was spent in countering their attacks.

Every time they went to some new outside agency, they presented their case with great plausibility:- the Trust was driving this development forward without due democratic consultation with the community, whom (of course) they represented. It fell to me each time to tell each outsider the whole long story, and send all the background documentation - the fact that they originally had equal representation on the Trust and chose to walk out, the subsequent attacks, intimidation, violence etc.

In late 1999, Quaker Peace got involved and in classic mediation manner, they held several lengthy meetings between the Trustees and the dissident group in their offices. The dissidents spent most of the time demanding that the entire Trust be dissolved and I be barred from ever entering Vrygrond again. When asked “why, - what is it that the Trust is doing wrong?” they had no answer. The discussion was never about the nature of the housing development or its progress. It was always about the individuals involved.

These meetings confirmed for me that mediation only works when both parties have some desire to come to a settlement. There are times when one party is just so bloody-minded and destructive, that mediation will not work.

And it got worse before it got better. On 16 Dec 1999 the Trustees had a lunch at a seaside restaurant to celebrate the completion of the first batch of 21 new houses. We had never had such a “splash-out” meal before and the photos show everyone in high spirits. That night Trevor Siljeur was shot dead.. A man came to his small “spaza shop” at the font of his house in Vrygrond, pretending to buy bread, and shot him through the metal grille.

In May 2000 another Trustee, Freddy Jacobs, survived a murder attempt. A masked gunman chased him into his shack and shot him as he tried to hide under the bed. The bullet shattered his forearm. A month later another of our Trustees, Eddy Klaasen, a charming, good-looking, happy young man in his late twenties, who was much involved in the practicalities of the housing, was shot dead one evening as he was walking across Vrygrond.

There was clearly an organized hit list out on the Trustees. With the help of the local Council, I pulled all the remaining Trustees out of Vrygrond and for 2 months they lived in accommodation outside Vrygrond, eventually coming back when they felt safe. The police investigated the murders, but due to the incompetence of those investigating the crimes, and I suppose the low level of importance of yet another slum killing, nobody was ever charged. There is little doubt that with competent police investigation and questioning, the murderer/s would have been found. There was only one group that had been fiercely opposed to the Trust and they were the obvious suspects. Whoever killed Trevor and Eddy is still walking around Vrygrond today, and I sometimes wonder if I ever meet him, maybe talk to him, without knowing.

When in mid 2002, the last of the 1,600 new houses was nearing completion, I asked in one of the Trust meetings if it had been worth the death of two of our colleagues. Had we known what would have happened would we have embarked on this? Someone answered that every winter people died because of the squalor of the old shacks; by building new brick houses and improving living conditions, we had saved many people, including children, from death by illness. Well, a rationalization which I try to use to comfort myself when I think about Trevor.

Trevor Siljeur - February 1997