Spatial apartheid documentary tackles dire housing crisis in Mother City

I’ve been on a bit of a documentary binge lately, and one that hit quite close to home was Mother City, which was recently screened at the Encounters SA International Documentary Film Festival in Cape Town. The documentary was spearheaded by civil society movements Reclaim the City and Ndifuna Ukwazi  – and it spotlights Cape Town’s housing crisis.

The City of Cape Town has for years been battling a housing issue. At the heart of this is the struggle to eradicate the continuing scourge of spatial apartheid, which is exacerbated by the City’s gentrification development projects. I think it is necessary to examine the concept of spatial apartheid, as I fear that the term is bandied about without people pausing to understand its meaning. It also seems to me that many of us are far too comfortable with its continued existence.

The concept exists as part of apartheid – our former heinous system of governance where people were divided according to race and resource allocation, such as land and residential living. White people were allocated prime real estate and black, coloured and Indian people were relocated to less desirable areas, which were also far from their places of work. Sadly, this has remained part of apartheid’s legacy throughout the country, especially in Cape Town.

The documentary raises the question of why there has been resistance from the City to make its areas more inclusive of all residents as well as to ensure an equitable sharing of space. It also highlights the prioritisation of business interests over the needs of the city’s most vulnerable residents.

In an article written by my colleague Sarah Hoek which explored this issue of spatial apartheid, Maurietta Stewart, a heritage practitioner, planner and academic, weighed in on the matter, saying:

“We see the spatial inequality by ways people move through space. For example, for a woman to wake up at 4am in Khayelitsha, walk through unsafe streets, wait for a bus which will take her to a taxi rank, wait for a taxi, and then get dropped off in Constantia, where she has to walk further to get to her place of work as a domestic worker, is grossly unjust.”

The normalisation of this visual in SA has seemingly numbed people into not challenging why most people in the country live with the reality of these indignities.

Although we know what the government’s responsibility is when it comes to overturning this regressive phenomenon, what we should by now be familiar with is that the people’s will is also critical to bringing about change. This is what the documentary illustrates as it follows the organisations’ efforts to force social housing onto the agenda by not allowing the City or its residents to ignore poor people’s housing struggles.

Although the City seems now to have a social housing plan in place, we should all be unsettled by this issue and seek to support the eradication of this apartheid legacy that continues to divide us today.

In the documentary a rather dejected-looking member of the Reclaim the City movement says: “Cape Town is a beautiful city … but the people of Cape Town can be very cruel, very cruel…”

These words still echo in my mind. DM 

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