Last month, the Nelson Mandela Foundation hosted a screening of “Mother City”, a documentary about the living legacies of Apartheid spatial planning and urban land reform, as part of the 2024 Encounters Documentary Festival.
The “Mother City” documentary is a painful depiction of the glaring injustice that is the legacy of Apartheid in our cities. It deliberately centres Cape Town’s dispossessed through the lens of an activist and community leader, Nkosikhona Swartbooi. It is as if time has stopped for the historically dispossessed, still confronted with the land struggles of their ancestors and elders in living memory, the departed and present. Nkosikhona has been born into the struggle having been raised by his grandmother in a shack in Khayelitsha. He is now a father, and his daughter has been born into a similar struggle. The film starkly depicts this intergenerational pain of dispossession amongst the Black and Coloured communities of Cape Town. Those born into landlessness are still very much enclosed in it.
The struggle of the urban landless and all landless people of South Africa is entangled in a web of interest group politics. On one hand, there are concentrated interests of wealthy, White landowners who have their interests prioritised by the government at the expense of a legitimate land reform programme. Their interests are further enabled by unreformed property laws and a legal vacuum where the state’s responsibilities to reform the land is concerned.
On the other, there are the dispersed interests of the landless, poor communities who are not central to the government’s priorities. Consider how the government sold the Tafelberg site in Cape Town to a private developer – suitably located land which was earmarked for affordable housing. It is this blatant disregard of the people’s needs by the city and provincial leadership that caused the landless communities in the inner city of Cape Town to consolidate their struggle and confront the collusion of powerful groups through the formation of the Reclaim the City (RTC) movement in 2016.
Cape Town reifies the legacy of Apartheid spatial planning through its failures to build homes for the working class in the inner city since 1994. Instead, its strategy for urban development has been to keep Black and Coloured populations on the periphery of the city, preferring to give well-located land to private business interests. The RTC movement felt that after years of protesting and advocacy, which had not yielded meaningful results, occupying the city and its buildings was the only way for landless communities to be seen and heard by powerful groups.
A daring, youth-led movement and the fierce resistance by landless communities in the inner city of Cape Town demonstrate the importance of working at multiple levels of struggle. At the coalface of struggle, activists and landless communities strategically raise the visibility of their plight by taking up space in the city, in the face of police brutality and intimidation from private security in defence of an Apartheid city.
At an intellectual and policy level, the legal action to stop the sale of the Tafelberg site is supported by a multidisciplinary team of professionals, academics and activists. This team has forged trust and a shared purpose in realising the right to access equitable land, housing and spatial justice for the working class in the city. At the bureaucratic level, there are tireless engagements with officials who are evidentially disconnected from the needs of people on the ground. We also see examples of collaboration and solidarity amongst land activists in Cape Town between RTC, Ndifuna Ukwazi and the Social Justice Coalition. This transcends the borders of South Africa as the RTC Movement also connects with similar struggles in Barcelona, Spain, supporting their reformist mayor, Ada Colau, who campaigned on the issue of the housing crisis and against evictions in the city. Finally, in the midst of oppression, the movement is conscious to popularise the struggle through various channels, including mainstream media, investigative journalism, social media and storytelling such as through this film. “Mother City” depicts practical lessons for anyone engaged in the tiring and tireless politics of resistance.
Yet, the film also uncomfortably illustrates the limitations of tools of resistance in seemingly intractable struggles such as land and spatial injustice. In the documentary, we see the admittance by Brett Herron, the former mayoral committee member for Urban Development and Transport in Cape Town, that there is no real commitment by the city to resolve Apartheid spatial planning. This is also evident in the behaviour of public representatives who display apathy and a lack of urgency with people’s plight for spatial and other connected injustices they are confronted with daily. Even with the gains made at the Western Cape High Court with the successful setting aside of the sale of the Tafelberg site in 2020 based on the city’s and the province’s failures to redress spatial apartheid in central Cape Town, the Supreme Court of Appeal recently overturned the High Court’s decision. Ndifuna Ukwazi and RTC have taken the matter on appeal to the Constitutional Court.
As Tessa Dooms challenged the activists in the room during the post-screening panel reflections at the Foundation, “the politics of resistance is not enough.” The importance of the right political representation matters even more for the struggle against landlessness. Ada Colau, the reformist mayor of Barcelona, is a prime example of this. Aware of the limitations of struggle outside the echelons of power, activists such as Nkosikhona, the protagonist in the film, have decided to transition towards representative politics. It is the coming to life of the popular phrase, "Nothing about us without us".
“Mother City” is a reminder that the struggle continues. As we wait for the Tafelberg decision by the Constitutional Court, we are painfully reminded of the legal protections that exist for the powerful by our laws and institutions, and of the need for the continued work of demanding just laws for equitable access to land, particularly in urban areas. We are reminded of the outstanding promise of the Constitution to provide housing and ensure that no one is evicted from their home. We are also reminded of the state’s deliberate failures to provide well-located land for the urban land hungry. We are reminded that Apartheid may have been conquered in law but remains present spatially and in the lived experiences of the landless and poor communities throughout the country. Confronted with the concentrated interests of the powerful groups of our times, we are also reminded of the importance of amalgamating the dispersed struggles of the landless people of Cape Town and all the landless people of South Africa. We need to amplify their demands to be seen and heard.
Finally, in the person of Nkosikhona, we are reminded that despite South Africa being a constitutional democracy, we are a generation born into struggles of injustice and this means that for most of us, it is not a matter of choosing. Rather, the persistence of struggle leaves us with no option but to stand up for the sake of future generations that come after us. It is not yet Uhuru. Freedom remains an illusion.