A house divided against the homeless still stands on collective amnesia– a future post COVID-19

Inter-generational reflections on the plight of Cape Town’s homeless by Abbas Jamie and Courtney Koopman

Reflections by Abbas Jamie

Last night as I lay in my warm bed in leafy suburbia, I listened to the Cape rain pouring down outside. In between the intermittent rain you could hear the wind gushing through the trees. As I pulled up my cotton duvet my thoughts went out to the homeless citizens of Cape Town that had just been relocated to a holding site in Strandfontein. Protected from the elements by a temporary structure, hastily erected to create a home for 2000 of Cape Town’s most vulnerable. Close to the waves crashing up on the beach from False Bay this was not a place you want to be during a Cape Storm. But COVID-19 and the country’s rapid response to a nation-wide lockdown has caught many municipalities off guard as they hurry to find shelter for the homeless across our country.

As COVID-19 spreads its tentacles across the globe South Africa has been given some reprieve by our President’s rapid response and we have just recorded over 2000 confirmed cases with 25 fatalities. At a global scale the death toll has now exceeded 110,000 deaths. This has been an awakening for many people across the world. Discussions and online conferences are talking about a global RESET. People are saying this is a time for mankind to pause and reflect. Where are we heading? How do we move to world led by wisdom? The planet needs something better than what we have created.

As I lay in my bed these thoughts are flying around in my head. I reflect on what does a new South Africa look like post COVID-19? In this new world do we still move our fellow citizens who are disempowered to the fringe of our city? In this new world who makes these decisions? It seems that everyone is waiting for the new world masterplan. Is it government? Is it private sector? Is it a new partnership between the two? 

Will people in power be motivated to change just for the sake of doing good? Or do stakeholders have to hold them to account. Hopefully this global pandemic will accelerate both of these scenarios. With all of these academic discussions and narratives happening I am reminded that people bring narratives to life. So, what is my role as a citizen of Cape Town? 

What about the 2000 people sheltering under a temporary structure in Strandfontein? With winter approaching we know the situation is only going to get worse. Cape Town has more than fifty community centres spread across the metro. These facilities are currently standing underutilized. Can I as a citizen not rally my community and approach our ward councillor to say: “Let us open up our community centre for our fellow citizens.” Can we as a community at this moment of crisis not come together and say: “We will take care of our fellow citizens.”

In my vision of a new South Africa the citizens of our country come together and say the safety and dignity of my fellow citizen is more important than the sports event, wedding or 21st that I was going to host for family and friends at the community centre. 

In my vision of a new Cape Town the idea of moving the most marginalised to the fringe of society is not even an option.

In my vison of a future citizen I see a change in attitude from arrogance to empathy, from being a saviour to having humility and changing my narrative from “them” to “all of us.”

There is a saying: Never let a good crisis go to waste. How are we going to use this pandemic to shape a brighter future that we all want to see? A future that places the human at the centre of everything we do. A future that reduces inequality, shuns poverty and has an abhorrence for excessive opulence. This future is in our hands. We need to hold those in power to account. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.

Reflections by Courtney Koopman

Today was the first time I stepped out into the madmax experience of buying a bread during lockdown. A path usually swift and filled with aunties at their gates in melancholic chorus about the weather, their kids and the politics of the street were now empty, filled only with browned leaves the council no longer sweeps. Arrack would usually offer to scoop it up during times where there was a lull in collection for a shot at getting a R10 blessing before he made his way to the smokkie and then the shed opposite the abandoned car dealerships on Voortrekker for a night. That was until he got beaten to a pulp by the private security, and we eventually heard that he found a nestled corner behind the local market, covered by the music of a weeping willow and a crumpled Tygerberger. I haven't seen Arrack passing our gate once in the last three weeks, nor the other four or five bread negotiators that clang hoping that we're home and have a few slices to spare. I've read about the plans the metro has to "clean up" the city, but during a time where shelter is the only constant, my stomach twists at knowing that those evicted now are grasping at nothing but the violence of removal and the cold vulnerability as Cape Town welcomes its first bout of frost.

There are lots open, school fields green and soft in their overgrown emptiness, a civic center hollow with eventless coverage, and yet we accept that the homeless should find solace under the engineering graces of bridges, overcrowded shelters and a drugged embrace to get through the night. When did we accept instability as a by-product of a democracy my parents fought for? I have come to learn that as a born free, this state has a habit of ensuring the protection of buildings over bodies, and that homelessness is a consequence of those not using their 24hours in the prescribed way, rather than the residue of architected poverty. I know this isn't what Ashley and Anton arranged in their underground conversations with my mother, planting seeds of consciousness in Bonteheuwel and Bellville South, now makeshift warzones even more the army chooses to visit only on instructed occasion. I know that gentrification gives homelessness a new face every day from Woodstock to Boston, and the bodies once kept in generational bonds become faceless in a line waiting for a home that may never come. I also know the grass at the golf course in Kuilsriver is soft enough to camp for a few nights and the water pumps more regularly by the minute than Kalkfontein has seen in years of selective drought.

I don't know how we will survive a lockdown where it is legal to create homelessness when we've been instructed to stay inside. Inside of what? They police plots and vacant spaces more than drug dens in Delft, and call it constitutional under the guise of Covid. I do know that when we vote, I will remember why the cities are clean of its people, and its streets polluted with policeman and private security. When they ask me who I voted for, I'll be sure to ask them : who protected our people from a global pandemic when they were handed to the dangers of the street, where the original strollers like Arrack have been given notice, knowing their hands too unstable to appeal the intergenerational ruling.

This lockdown is little more than a lockup with a bit of agency for the privileged, and once they let us roam the street, the real game of chess begins again.