ASHRAF HENDRICKS

It's a wild Cape morning. The southeast wind collides with Table Mountain, chilling the warm air above the city. In the distance, a German container ship dances on the waves of the Atlantic Ocean. The city smells of salty sea and eucalyptus. I'm making my last lap.

Most mornings start with a walk on the trail to Seinheuwel, so named by the Dutch who have been rounding the Cape here since the seventeenth century, flying flags from this hill to warn ships on bad weather days like this. The hill is dotted with tombs of Indian, Malay and Javanese Muslim leaders who resisted the colonial invasion of their lands and were sent as slaves to the Cape by the Dutch as punishment.  Cape Town was their place of exile. 

Early joggers deftly zigzagged around the graves, sucking their lungs full of fresh sea air. But there's no getting around it: more than a quarter of a century after the fall of apartheid, this is still a colonial city whose cruel history has given the overwhelming beauty of nature a bad aftertaste. A split city, in which the villas of the mainly white rich curl around the foot of Signal Hill and Table Mountain, overlooking that vast sea, and the poor are relegated to the shadowy side of the mountain, in the slums of the endless Cape plains.

For eight years I tried to make this divided city my home, but I can't say I succeeded. Cape Town always felt like a refreshment station, as it once did for the ships. A temporary stopover on the way to other destinations. I preferred to ignore the stories that lay outside the walls around my house. Maybe because they got too close and made me too complicit in this multicultural drama. Friends from the Netherlands who came to visit always asked the same uncomfortable questions. How can you live with this harrowing inequality?

I always defended myself with my conviction that the guarded walls around my house were just a South African version of the coastguard at Lampedusa or Lesvos, the island where Europeans perish the poor. The private security company on my street? That was our Frontex. The police who sent the homeless away on the sidewalks of the restaurants in the morning? Those were our pushbacks. The difference between a European and a South African is that the South African cannot look away. The other side is in front of you as soon as you step out the front door. You can only crowd if you keep the windows of the car closed.

New Shacks

New shacks have appeared on the sidewalk along the boulevard on the way to my office in recent months. "This is home now," says Ismael Petersen, and lifts the plastic under which his wife Vanessa is still sleeping early in the morning. Until the outbreak of Covid in the spring of 2020, they lived in an apartment in Delft, a township on the Cape Flats. “With a bathroom and two bedrooms,” says Petersen proudly. His wife is a trained nurse but was declared incapacitated after a back injury. He worked on the high seas and saw the whole world: “Tokyo, New York, Rotterdam, ” he says with a twinkle in his eye. They both lost their jobs and their home a few months later. Petersen opens the gray wheelie bin that now serves as a storage cupboard. It has dingy clothes in it. Vanessa's toiletry bag was taken by another homeless person the day before. “If we are not here for a while, everything of value will be stolen. You always lose everything on the street. All I want is a house and a normal life."

This is a city of homeless people, exiles due to history, migration or pandemic. A city built by the descendants of the staff of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) who stayed behind, who repeatedly drove the original inhabitants from their land by force. Until 1936 you could even get a hunting license from the government in Pretoria to shoot San herders in the Cape, like game in their own country.

The bulldozers of the apartheid regime razed entire city center neighborhoods to the ground to banish all non-white residents to the Cape Plains. Anyone who wants to come back now – in times of democracy – must have money.

“I wanted to live in a real house, but if you don't have anything, the street becomes your home, ” says James August. He has been roaming the streets with his wife Eslene for 21 years. When the Cape Town council banned the homeless from the city center around the World Cup in 2010, they decided to live under a tent tarp in the guardrail along the N1 highway. The noise of the speeding traffic is deafening. “This is the most peaceful place in Cape Town. No one is bothering us here. The noise keeps the police and the thieves away, ” August yells. His words barely rise above the noise of a passing truck.

"We want to see blood"

His last home was Pollsmoor. That is the prison where Nelson Mandela stayed in the late eighties just before his release. Pollsmoor is run by the drug gangs, each with their own number: 26, 27 or 28. Each of these gangs has its own specialism. The 26 is into gambling and theft. The 27's are the negotiators between the gangs. The 28's are the soldiers, who live according to strict rules. "Anyone who wants to join the 28 gang has to stab a guard. You don't have to kill him, but we do want to see blood," says Igshaan Malik.

He has been living for nine years under a piece of plastic at the end of a slope that was never finished. Behind him, the windows of a bank and a five-star hotel loom. Born in one of the townships on the Cape Flats, the places of exile for non-white Cape residents, he earned his social status in prison. Stars are tattooed on his left and right shoulders, like a high-ranking officer in the army. Underneath them is 'sex', in capital letters. 'When a soldier returns from the battlefield, he has the right to a woman,' Malik smiles. Anyone in the 28 gang who is not a soldier is a woman, who is at the service of the fighters at all times. Those are the house rules.

His life not sure

“What I miss most about home is myself,” says Cain Mudenga, who is pouring coffee every morning in the German bakery across the street from my house. He was born in the countryside in northern Zimbabwe. He studied agricultural studies and dreamed of a future as a farmer, until economic chaos at home forced him to move to neighboring South Africa. “But here I am always in the shadow of a South African. I have lost myself.”

The company of his first employer, a Pakistani, was burned to the ground by South Africans who did not tolerate foreigners in their neighborhoods. Since then he has been working in Cape Town for a German baker's wife. Here too his life is in danger after the Minister of Home Affairs announced last month that he wanted to revoke all residence permits of Zimbabweans. "He has to win elections. I understand that," says Mudenga. "After ten years I still do not have a residence permit. It is time for me to go home.

"I nod. When you leave home, you leave yourself behind. In Cape Town I was a middle-aged man, but a man without a past. The father of a school-going daughter. The two-meter-tall neighbour with a Dutch accent. A shadow of history left behind in the village of my parents, who never moved in their entire lives.

In my search for a home, I saw the inhabitants of this city build castles in the air, if not with plastic, then with radical ideas. I drive out of the city and take the road along the west coast, where the asphalt crumbles into a dirt track that ends at a farm that was once called Pompoenskraal. I am greeted by Rodney Bartman, a white man who introduces himself as the president of the Republic of Southland. He is wearing an army shirt and a cap with a flag that looks like the old apartheid flag of South Africa: orange-white-blue. “We have lost everything in this country: our culture, our heritage, everything is being taken from us. The ANC dominates every aspect of our lives. The only way to get rid of them is through secession,” says Bartman. Next to him sits Carlo Viljoen, a lawyer who has studied the South African constitution and the charter of the United Nations.

Viljoen is confident that the judge will grant independence to the Republic of Zuidland in March of the new year. For the time being, it is no more than a farm with a number of stilt houses under construction, a bar and a barbecue. Zuidland now has seventy inhabitants, adults and children together. Zuidland is not only for white South Africans, they emphasize. Khoi and San and colored people are welcome. "But we do not want the Nguni tribe here," says Bartman. By that he means South Africans with a darker skin color. "If you are a minority, you always have to adapt to the majority. That way you lose your identity. But I feel at home here," says Johan Ferreira, while he grills thick sausages over the communal barbecue.

Independent Southland

Nowhere in South Africa is the urge for secession as great as here in the Cape, the whitest of all nine provinces, and the only province not governed by the ruling ANC party. The Cape Independence Party advocates a Cape Exit, and won a seat in the city council for the first time in the recent municipal elections. For the residents of Southland, this democratic path is too slow and independence must come now. "We no longer recognize the laws of South Africa," says Bartman. "The country is rotten, the corruption can no longer be curbed. This is our last chance to save ourselves.

As he presses a beer into my hand, I ask where the co-founder of Zuidland, whom I contacted a year and a half earlier for a report on their secession plans, has gone. “I haven’t spoken to him since he couldn’t show me receipts for his expenses. He tried to dethrone me at the last meeting, but he only got 9 votes, and I got 31.” After a year and a half, this new republic had also been poisoned by embezzlement and a possible new split within the secession of South Africa. Absurdistan.

I thought back to Cain Mudenga, the Zimbabwean barista who had slapped me on the knee at the end of our conversation. Home is a decision, he thought. “For you, it’s enough now. It’s time to go home.”