CHAPTER 3

A Decade

A Chronology of Projects

“We Need Help”

In Gerty’s lounge that cold winter afternoon in 2004, I listened to the report on the backyard survey, noting both the frustration with the scope of the surveying and its companion, a barely touched neighborhood plot map intended to record completed interviews. The survey was designed to count the numbers of backyard structures, map their locations, track the densities of families and individuals residing in shacks and formal public housing units, and record their levels of access to basic services, such as running water and toilets. But the task was huge. There were more than seventeen hundred formal households to interview. Gerty stressed, “We really need help.”

I was, then, about six weeks from starting to teach an urban geography class, a course with fifty students, which ideally included some fieldwork. For the class, and for my teaching, working on the survey would be ideal. As the meeting proceeded, I asked, “Could I bring my students on board? Could we work together to complete the survey?” The mood in the room shifted markedly. We started to imagine what such a project might require. This was the point at which our partnership began. Although we did not know it then, this was the foundation on which our research would build for the decade to come.

In this chapter, I introduce the Civic and its leaders and share the chronology of research we completed over the decade, and through these projects, describe the partnership’s incremental building. I track the ways in which this initial work grew, the specific motivations that shaped our research, and the ways in which the Civic and I navigated our individual and joint agendas for documentation and research.

The Civic, an Introduction

I first met Gerty Square and Washiela Arendse in 2001 at a Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign meeting. Both were community leaders in the Valhalla Park United Front Civic Organisation (the Civic), which at the time was taking part in the campaign. Washiela Arendse was the anti-eviction campaign’s treasurer. Forcibly removed from District Six, she and her family were part of the last group of residents moved in the 1980s to Valhalla Park, a then–newly built neighborhood, segregated for families classified “coloured” under apartheid. Responding to the harshness of this forced removal and the hardness of life in this new township, Washiela helped form a neighborhood tenants’ association. While serving the campaign’s meeting participants from big pots of curry and akne, she introduced me to Gerty Square, at the time secretary of the Civic.

A savvy and experienced activist, Gerty was the backbone of the Civic, a powerful figure in the neighborhood. To explain her activism, she recounted her own hard experience of multiple evictions in the early 1980s, invoking clearly and loudly that she was evicted “not once, not twice, but thrice.” She described the horror and outrage of coming home at the end of a long day’s work in a factory, in Salt River close to the city center, to find her children out on the road, her furniture and possessions unceremoniously removed from her house, dumped on the street. Twice she moved herself back inside her house. The third time she went in frustration to the “rent lady,” the neighborhood housing official—an employee of the municipality—to say, “I am a single mother, I earn this much, look at my income slip, these are my costs. I cannot pay the rent; you cannot evict me. Treat me with some respect!” Her personal experience of the hardship and stress of forced eviction was a kernel on which she built her activism, the mode through which she learned to fight and through which she inspired others in her neighborhood. Made redundant from factory work in the early 1990s, Gerty found her full-time vocation in her activism, her Civic work, and in later years, her work on minstrels (known locally as Klopse, or “Coons,” a racist term). Over the years of the partnership, Gerty shared her personal story with me numerous times. It framed her explanation of Civic work, a master narrative of sorts, told well, forged in personal hardships, the lived realities central to the Civic’s activism.

Through Gerty, I met George Rosenberg, then-chair of the Civic. A stalwart figure in the neighborhood fight for justice, he represented the African National Congress in the democratic transitional local government structure in Cape Town in 1994 and was elected to represent the ANC in the first fully democratic city elections in 1996. Later declared too radical, he was kicked out of both the party and his local government position. A record keeper, he carefully stored and preserved the Civic’s history, tracking the neighborhood struggles in files and a photo album.

All three leaders were beacons in Valhalla Park neighborhood struggles. Although over the years the Civic fluctuated in its size and focus, its agenda stayed consistent: it fought for the residents of Valhalla Park. When we first met during the anti-eviction campaign, Civic activists were steadfastly resisting evictions, putting families back into homes, mobilizing fiercely for resident rights, for city resources and support. As a former “coloured” group area, Valhalla Park had formal public housing, and thus its material need for new homes was only semivisible. In consequence, it did not feature in the city’s list of housing developments or number among its political priorities. Civic activism on housing aimed to make this imperative visible.

The Civic won some extraordinary struggles against the state, fought in the streets of the neighborhood, in the city’s rent office, in the city council in the center of Cape Town, even in the regional High Court. A product of close to thirty years of activism and community work in Valhalla Park, organizationally it was the amalgam of two tenants’ committees, both established in the early 1980s to protect renters in this new segregated public housing scheme, and a concerned citizens group, formed in the mid-1980s to mobilize for better conditions, for electricity, and for some respect at the height of apartheid racist rule. It aimed to defend the neighborhood and to fight for better conditions, to challenge political and social engineering central to apartheid segregation, to defend families classified racially by the apartheid state as “coloured,” some affected by the last stage of forced removals from District Six in the early 1980s, and others from shanty towns and squats targeted for removal on the edges of the city.

Built in the early 1980s as a dormitory township for families segregated as so-called coloured, the neighborhood was dominated by public housing, attached small single-story three-room homes, and rows of maisonettes, attached two-story units, built with cement block exteriors. In the intervening years, with no new housing opportunities, residents had expanded and extended, building informal structures called backyard shacks by the city, Wendy houses or bungalows by residents. When I first met Gerty and her colleagues, the Civic and homeless residents were in the middle of a legal and physical struggle with the city over their building of a land occupation, a settlement of shack dwellers that had reclaimed a disused neighborhood park.

The Civic had the capacity and interest to welcome the research work I proposed. Gerty appreciated the purpose and potential of research, its possible relationship to her activism, and other possible benefits that might emerge through our collaboration and partnership. Immersed in research on community organizing and urban politics, I was passionate about and committed to teaching fieldwork (something I found missing in my own training). I was excited by and convinced of the potential of fusing my research and teaching interests and had experimented for three years with this form of work with a nongovernmental organization in New Crossroads, a formerly racially segregated African neighborhood adjacent to Nyanga in Cape Town. Through this work, I had developed an initial method and confidently saw the possibilities of embracing this form of collaborative research in my curriculum. I was also excited about the potential of working directly with members of the Civic, themselves residents and organizers, who bore the brunt of the urban political issues that we aimed to research.

In terms of our first project on backyard housing, Gerty’s and my first objective was clear: to complete the survey started by the Civic.

Getting Started, a Project on Backyarders

Backyard dwellings were technically informal and usually illegal, self-built, or self-bought housing units located in the back and front yards of the public housing flats that most families in the neighborhood rent from the city. These housing conditions were taken for granted in many ways. Backyards were strategic in the apartheid era because they were invisible. By necessity, they were behind homes and walls, built in the interstitial spaces between flats, in the yards behind each one- or two-story unit. They proved a way to extend housing for a family, a way to secure better-located homes in the city despite authoritarian apartheid regulation of movement and residence. Backyards were a form of housing that made it possible for people to stay in a relatively well-located neighborhood near family and friends, near the networks that made life possible, near familiar parts of the city.

In the post-apartheid period, in contrast, the relative invisibility of housing in backyards backfired, so to speak. Neighborhoods like Valhalla Park with their many backyarders fell off the priority areas of extreme housing need because, from the streetscape, the neighborhoods’ rows and rows of apartheid-era public housing looked “formal.” But enter a home, cross a small living area, head out the back door: it was in these interstitial spaces between the rows of public housing that backyards were largely built. Sometimes they were prefabricated Wendy houses, at others, pieced-together shacks, in which a gathering of salvaged materials made up the walls and zinc sheets weighed down the roof.

Our research goal was therefore threefold: to collect survey data on backyard densities and conditions, to interview families in backyards about their experiences, and to use the research as an opportunity for our partnership to experiment with fieldwork for the first time. We started with the survey, a list of questions that the Civic and I had developed for the Community Research Group work to map and record the geography and demographics of backyards: who lived where, in what densities, and how they accessed basic services such as toilets, running water, and electricity. I approached our then-cartographer in my department, who generated a base map for the neighborhood, which included the city’s demarcation of individual plots and streets.

We used the map to divide up the survey area into sections and to allocate a Civic partner and two students to conduct research in each section. In practice, even before beginning the interviewing and surveying, we found the map hard to follow, with few street names included and no landmarks, the normal features through which our partners described and navigated their neighborhood. We worked together to “ground truth” the map, to develop it into a usable guide for the research, and to figure out where area boundaries lay to ensure that each partner was clear on where we would work when the research began.

A logistical plan was also essential. Gerty drew together a team of neighborhood participants, made up initially of those who started the survey work themselves but supplemented by others, largely women Civic members, interested in working on the project. On campus, I organized buses, drew on our departmental fieldwork budget to fund the project costs (in particular the per hour honoraria for the work completed by the partners and the transport costs), and integrated the research into the practical laboratory sessions that I was responsible for in the urban geography course in 2004 and 2005. The work to complete the survey and interviews with backyard dwellers could begin.

Out of the Classroom, into the City

I positioned myself at the front of the Jammie Shuttle (the UCT bus we hired) full of students to direct the driver to Valhalla Park for the first session of our research project. Down the N2 highway that cut across the city, we headed past the Rondebosch golf course, its verdant greens flourishing in the winter rain. We flew past the canalized Black River, a weed- and garbage-choked marker that divided formerly white- and coloured-segregated neighborhoods, in this case, middle-class Sybrand Park from Bokmakierie, full of 1930s public housing stock on the edge of Athlone. As the highway straightened, we continued across the Flats, past Langa, the oldest remaining segregated African area, and Joe Slovo, its dense shack settlement on the highway edge. At Vanguard Drive (renamed Jakes Gerwel Drive in later years, to remember this prominent anti-apartheid activist and post-apartheid government leader), we turned to the left, through Bonteheuwel, another generation of late 1980s public housing, onto Valhalla Park Drive. We followed Angela Street, an artery through the neighborhood, for most students a first view of Valhalla Park, a varied patchwork of fences and walls, front-yard shacks, and small homes. The bus parked on rough part-pavement and road curb, across from Gerty’s home. She and her Civic team welcomed us, her yard a neighborhood hub, the shipping container outside a Civic meeting space, with a public phone box built onto the side of her house—in those days, pre–readily accessible and affordable cell phones, a communication line for many families.

Eleven teams of students and Civic members worked together in the months that followed to try to complete the backyard housing survey. We mapped the density, the numbers, and the levels of service access. We discussed with backyard families the lived realities of this form of housing, what was for some a chance to stay with family, for others an expensive private rental, in which they were at the mercy of the formal home’s occupants for access to the toilet, to electricity, to water. It was this relational element that made backyard dwelling either a decent option or hellish, an affordable way to stay in place or a costly, worrying form of shelter. Either way, flat-roofed structures invariably leaked, from the roof down, from the ground up, through the walls. Lined with newspaper, roofs held down by rocks and tires, many backyards were little different in physical makeup from shacks in more visible informal settlements across the city.

Our research tracked family histories, rooted in this neighborhood, in the legacies of the apartheid city. Families expected and hoped to secure a stable home after apartheid but faced the hard realities of continued struggle and mobilization, the disappointment of post-apartheid democracy. Our research traced the precarity of living in backyard housing, the everyday realities of limited access to toilets and electricity, to cooking and cleaning. We explored the demands placed on relationships with family and landlords in the front formal houses. In some cases, the research showed the comforts of living with family, of securing a safe space to live in a relatively well-placed location. Many families described their homes as “bungalows,” “Wendy houses,” rejecting the stigmas of shack dwelling and informality bound up in a language of “backyards.”

Many of our Civic team members themselves lived in backyards, a frame that added layers and depth to the conversations in the partnership and with backyard residents we interviewed. For our partner Dan, for instance, this backyard project really mattered. The backyard housing crisis was personal and citywide; it was his story, his own struggle to find a place to live, to house his family of girls decently, securely. He had spent decades of his life in backyards, moving frequently, navigating what he described as destabilizing ups and downs. As he worked with his research team, the interviews he completed resonated with his own understanding and his experience. He shared this thinking, his own hard life lessons, with us.

After the semester was over, we manufactured a large map with backyards marked, tables of backyard data, and a series of reports on “backyard life,” which tracked the varied ways in which individuals and families coped with backyard living. We completed close to half of the surveying work and decided to continue in the following year, the next time I offered the class. We learned a lot in this first set of projects on backyard shacks. Completion of the research was much more complicated and time consuming than we expected. Even combining forces, the energy and time of students and the local savvy and knowledge of the Civic, the process required endurance, a system, and a commitment. After this first project, we decided to aim for a simpler product from the research process. Our initial idea was too complex, involving the production of several different types of maps, some for running the project and tracking our collection of data, others digitized and useful—we hoped—as hard evidence for negotiation with the city officials. We rejigged our ideas about what might be doable, useful, and usable.

We committed to completing the surveying and mapping the following year. Willing to work together again, we had found something productive, albeit slow, defined by the weekly timing of our research and class sessions every Wednesday afternoon, the regularity of the semester, its fixed start and end dates, an ebb and flow with the routine and the pacing of the semester. Our biggest takeaway in year one, perhaps, was how much we enjoyed the process. To mark just that, at the end of the project, we held a braai—a barbeque—at my home, a relaxed moment without an agenda, a chance for me to return the consistent welcome and hospitality, the care I experienced from the Civic partners in this first project. This get-together became part of the project repertoire, a relaxed annual event to celebrate our project’s end. In this rhythm, and in the rhythm of the neighborhood, this initial experimentation became a model for our work together.

Land Occupation, a Shift in Research Agenda

In early 2006, I sat in the regional High Court in the center of Cape Town with leaders of the Civic and Sewende Laan settlement families, overwhelmed by the “milords”—the archaic language and confusing protocol of the court. As already mentioned, the housing crisis in Valhalla Park had remained relatively invisible to city decision makers and politicians. The neighborhood was not on the city’s priority list for formal housing, despite the overcrowding and experiences of homelessness that were common in families across the area. The Civic opted for radical action, mobilizing homeless residents to occupy vacant land, organizing them to build their own homes. Pulling together whatever materials they could find, families had constructed homes in a disused park in the middle of the neighborhood, naming the settlement “Sewende Laan” (Seventh Avenue) after a popular South African soap opera. Civic activism had turned to land occupation. In response, the City of Cape Town had interdicted both the families in the settlement and the Civic, taking them to court for trespassing.

The city’s appeal of a judgment in favor of the Civic and families was what we had come to listen to in the court in mid-2006; the city lost its appeal. Sewende Laan families were granted the right to stay in the settlement. The city was instructed to prioritize a housing project for families in this neighborhood and in its surrounding areas.

To reflect this momentous achievement, my class and the Civic teamed up again, this time to document Sewende Laan, the security families found in living in a legal informal settlement, what it meant to families in the settlement to have fought the City of Cape Town in this epic struggle and to have won, and what this form of Civic mobilization demanded. This land occupation, the building of the informal settlement, our activist partners explained, was a starkly visible way to solve the neighborhood housing crisis, to take the city’s mandate to build homes for the homeless into their own hands. Just under a hundred families faced with extreme homelessness came together with the Civic to build homes in 2004 in a dilapidated and disused neighborhood park. As families explained in the project interviews, they could no longer live in the “bush,” in the field next to the neighborhood. They could not tolerate moving from floor to sofa, in already overcrowded homes. One family had enough of making do in a rusted and discarded car in a vacant lot nearby.

The city called this act a “land invasion,” powerful language that marked this homemaking as illegal. Families described how city law enforcement and anti–land invasion units had responded immediately by calling the South African Police. Together they had torn down these “illegal” structures. The Civic and the settlement families defended the settlement, as Gerty explained, despite “the City shooting at us, rubber bullets; they threw our shacks down with bulldozers . . . We continued building anyway.” In response to this persistence, the city interdicted ninety-seven families in the settlement, as well as the Civic, which was named in the court case as the organizing force behind the land occupation. In interviews, settlement families and Civic members described the experience of fighting the city, attending the High Court, working with the Legal Resources Centre (LRC), a nongovernmental legal organization that worked on cases such as this one. In the face of the city’s claims that their needs were illegitimate, neighborhood families invited the judge to visit families in their homes in the settlement. They described how surprised they were when he did, the experience of meeting him outside of the court, and its protocol. The LRC, an NGO that tries cases that have potential to substantiate and stretch constitutional rights, represented the Civic and Sewende Laan families. Working with the LRC, the Civic won the case, and the city was instructed that not only would Sewende Laan residents be granted access to services and legality where they lived but also that a housing project would be built in the neighborhood to address the housing emergencies.

This research project was heartfelt, immersed in the settlement families’ lives and stories. Each week I joined a research group. In one case, I was ushered in to sit in Aunty Lissie’s house. We bent down to enter through its door, were shown proudly around its rooms. We admired the lace, her wedding pictures, and a small vase with a single-stemmed plastic red rose. These personal touches made it her home, precious, in this damp and musty corner of the settlement. We listened and documented her story of housing insecurity, of meeting her husband in the settlement, of building this home, a narrative in which she emphasized that she was the oldest person in the settlement. I listened, helped here and there with questions, which I aimed carefully to build the team’s confidence in interviewing.

The Civic and I decided to host a party in the neighborhood to share the work in progress and to reflect upon it, two-thirds of the way through the semester. We asked the students in each group to produce posters to share their work, to show and get feedback on the stories they produced. We hoped that this method would provide an opportunity to account to the families we interviewed. It would also be, we hoped, a chance for others in the neighborhood to better understand the process, the partnership, why we were conducting interviews.

The Sewende Laan research party was a great success. Thereafter, we integrated an annual research party into the research process and the course curriculum. The process helped make visible what the partnership entailed, as well as the logics and motivations of each research project. In practice, these events also indirectly built the energy for and commitment of residents toward civic activism, adding a layer to their mobilizing and organizing.

With the research material, we constructed a map of the settlement, marking each family’s occupation, the space they reclaimed. We produced a booklet that shared Sewende Laan stories, the security families found in this illegal act, in the precariousness and possibility of building their own homes. The book shared stories of building and defending this settlement, a complex mix of defending the site and extending beyond the neighborhood, mobilizing with the LRC, traveling to court, the activism required across the years to win the case. The research was rooted in this site, cosmopolitan and constrained; it situated the partnership in these geographies. In the extending of the project to Sewende Laan, our confidence in our partnership method, and in the research and its forms of publication, grew.

Who Has Moved into Agste Laan?

The success of Sewende Laan and the security found in occupying land, ironically, produced a crisis for the Civic when a second land occupation developed in the neighborhood. Backyard residents in Valhalla Park occupied land and initiated a second settlement in January 2006. Families moved onto unused land technically zoned as part of a school adjoining the neighborhood, and no interdiction or evictions occurred. Through the delivery of rudimentary services, the city in essence sanctioned the settlement’s permanency. Thereafter families moved into the settlement from surrounding neighborhoods in and beyond Valhalla Park. Named Agste Laan (Eighth Avenue), the settlement comprised families occupying land on two empty fields between the formal edge of Valhalla Park, Modderdam Road (now Robert Sobukwe Road), and Nooitgedacht, the adjacent neighborhood. In this case, however, the Civic had not organized the occupation.

The Civic was anxious about who was living in Agste Laan. How had they related to the neighborhood, to the Civic and its housing mobilizations, and to Valhalla Park families in need of housing? These tensions amplified when the city rapidly provided electricity and essential sanitation services (portable toilets distributed through the settlement). On the new settlement’s first birthday, a year after its formation, Gerty suggested we research it: could we find out where people had moved from, their stories? This focus became our 2008 project. As the settlement was unmapped and in the process of being built, we had to revisit and extend our research process and method. The settlement occupied an empty school field and a vacant set of plots next to a city rainfall runoff drainage area on the side of the busy Modderdam Road, a thoroughfare across the Cape Flats to the city’s northern suburbs. We had to figure out a substantively and politically acceptable method to engage with this large settlement. We needed to produce a working map, from scratch, a base map from which we could plan and run the research systematically. In a creative and necessarily flexible process, we aimed to produce a sensible and workable base map that could divide neatly into areas for research teams to work on in the coming months. As best we could, we sketched out newly built homes and streets with a matching narration in words. This penciled and photocopied base map became the structure for our research process, directing research groups in interviewing and documenting work across the Agste Laan settlement. As the map evolved, our logic and confidence in a process for the coming research emerged slowly.

By the end of the project, we had interviewed most of the families in the settlement and produced a full map, which shared the plots, photos of families, our data. It placed Agste Laan on the map, producing a way of knowing the settlement, a collaborative outcome that documented the settlement on the first anniversary of its occupation. The map demarcated homes and recorded families living in the area. The accompanying research shared residents’ stories, why they had made the hard choice to move onto the land occupation, what some found as contentious and painful, others as a place of relative peace because it offered some autonomy and privacy. For some new residents, the settlement offered a counter to a past transitory lifestyle that had involved moving between various relatives’ and friends’ floors in overcrowded public housing. The map marked the partnership, too, its deepening, incremental development, the weaving of its parts together, project by project.

In 2009 we conducted one more project linked to housing, focused on families living in public housing, stories that shared the ways in which families grew across generations, making do in increasingly overcrowded rental homes. In the hardships of these living contexts, multiple generations waited for alternative homes, or, eventually, made a move themselves into backyards or onto land occupations such as Sewende Laan and Agste Laan.

The following year, our research shifted to the Civic and its work across the neighborhood.

Civic Work and Its Wide Parameters

The door cracked open and a head appeared, with a greeting, a request, a question, a need, sometimes a demand. Day in, day out, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the Civic’s doors could be knocked on for help and assistance. I too knocked in particular on Gerty’s door, with questions on our projects, part of the many layered demands made on the Civic. This often-unaccounted-for work led to a new research project. The organization’s work had its exceptional, sometimes spectacular, moments, particularly in its mobilization for Sewende Laan, for land and housing, and its subsequent demand for water in the settlement. Much Civic neighborhood work and activism could also, however, be banal, mundane even. As our partnership developed, we saw this daily—often uncommented-on—work, which demanded consistent commitment and involvement, a permanent, unwavering presence. Neighborhood residents, outsiders, city officials stopped by, asked for help here and there, consulting and checking on neighborhood matters.

We ran a research project that documented and reflected on the multiple mandates on which the Civic worked, the nature of this daily community work and activism. It unfolded in a period in which the Civic worked to define itself. As the organization was caught up in changing neighborhood priorities, its work shifted, as did those involved in the Civic. Uncle George, for instance, sadly took ill with cancer. Eventually, he passed on.

There was a different rhythm to this 2011 project. Each research group chose a theme, something a particular partner worked on, for instance, fighting for homes and preventing evictions. It extended to organizing for access to services and to challenging and circumventing water cutoffs for families deep in arrears to the city. Activism addressed, as well, critical issues in the neighborhood; it attempted to reduce or ameliorate violence, to advocate for better police responsiveness. It engaged with the hard realities of unemployment and the necessity to run businesses, including negotiating informal trading spaces and navigating issues of xenophobia. Other partners were passionate about youth in the neighborhood. They grappled with challenges linked to drugs, alcohol, and teenage pregnancies. Some focused on improving access to health care, and on questions related to and struggles with mental illness and HIV/AIDS across the neighborhood. Others threw themselves into Klopse, into culture and music and sports, and associated citywide competitive networks.

To follow each of these disparate threads of work, we designed an ambitious research process. At times, it felt straightforward. We were well practiced; we knew the routine, from preparatory work to orientation, to running the research sessions, to our process of sharing the work once the research was complete. Yet, in this comfort zone were many little niggles, and frictions, which easily rubbed rough our smooth edges. In its diverse focus areas, the project also opened questions about the Civic itself, its coherence, its identity, the politics of its mandates and leadership.

The research project documented an expansive sense of the Civic’s work. In short, it demonstrated what our partners knew: the Civic often faced immense challenges, was immersed in sometimes violent conditions, and experienced limited, if any, state response. The Civic and its multiple mandates were wide, sometimes overwhelming, sometimes dispiriting, often against the odds, sometimes uplifting. The latter aspect was particularly evident in Gerty’s and the Civic’s commitment to reviving the neighborhood Klopse troupe, the focus of the next annual research project.

Minstrels as Community Development

Nas Abdul Abrahams, the Ward 31 councilor, an elected local politician in Valhalla, a DJ by career, and a long-term resident of Valhalla Park, called minstrels and the Valhalla minstrel troupe “the heartbeat of this brave community.” In his analysis, Klopse offered an annual opportunity for celebration, for freedom of a sort, amid struggles to make ends meet. In other words, in his view, behind the public spectacle, minstrels worked to build community. A contested claim, it motivated our research on the Valhalla Park Klopse in 2010, five years after the Civic restarted the troupe. Could our research substantiate that Klopse was a form of community building, of development, activism even? This was the thrust of our research in 2010.

Minstrels are arguably the city’s largest single, citywide public expression of working-class coloured identity. A “coloured” rather than “African” tradition, a product of notions of race and blackness bound up in the colonial and apartheid periods, this event is also controversial in the city, easily steeped in racist stereotyping. Klopse troupes bring tens of thousands of working-class black people into the city center to watch and compete. The competition is the focus and passion of thousands of residents in over sixty neighborhoods who participate in minstrel troupes, spread largely across the economically impoverished, formerly segregated coloured neighborhoods of Cape Town.

The public citywide celebration of Klopse comprises the annual march through Cape Town’s city center on January 2nd, the second celebration of New Year that commemorates the abolition of slavery. It includes as well competing on most weekends in the summer, January through March, in stadia across the Cape Flats. In the project, we researched the work involved in organizing and training the troupe and documented the tradition on which this practice builds, a long and contested history. Klopse embodies and challenges violent practices of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid segregation, and the perpetuation of their legacies in the post-apartheid period.

The research on Klopse proved to be one of our most passionate and successful projects. Alongside the research, my students and I attended competitions, cheering on our partners who performed and competed. One student joined the troupe herself; one year, I participated as a judge. We traveled to Mitchells Plain to the stadium, and joined the neighborhood for fundraising events during the year. Key to the research was documenting the yearlong organizing required to make Klopse happen. This was the fundraising, the training, the choir practices and band practices, the organization of the making of the uniforms, the logistics of transport, the wide array of work that led to a polished passionate performance. Our interviews focused on this community organizing behind the scenes, the daily, weekly, and yearlong work of organizing funding, uniforms, practices, participants, everything it took to run a troupe and compete.

Gerty and Fuzlin, a neighbor and the then-leader of the African Zonks, called organizing Klopse “engineering work.” By engineering, they meant the constant effort to hunt down and negotiate bargains in the best places across the city. They laughed as they explained they were experts, trained in making household ends meet and thus skilled at this work as well. Organizing Klopse was expensive and required immense logistics and an events management plan. Our research process documented this work, its motivations, the individual members’ work to scrimp and save to be able to pay for transport, hats, uniforms, and incidentals along the way. It explored the leadership behind the organizing, from the troupe’s directorship of seven to its eight captains, their organizing members, transport, coaches, access to instruments, and their constant struggle to find contributions (in time, skills, or cash) and to cut costs or cover the excess themselves. Of these fifteen leadership posts, unusually, in 2010, women in the Valhalla troupe filled eleven, with Gerty the chief director (or “owner”) of the troupe.

Organizers and their families lived among the paraphernalia of Klopse, the instruments stored in bedrooms, the banners stuck under the stairs, the trophies stacked on the shelf, sequined jackets hanging from windowpanes in small four-roomed homes. Our partner Zaaida explained she dedicated her time, energy, and the greater part of the day “to make Klopse time the most enjoyable time of the year for the residents of Valhalla Park.” As Aunty Ellie profoundly suggested when she was interviewed for the project in 2010, this work was “community, what we leave behind, our legacies, to children and great-grandchildren so they can pick up the reins and keep going.”

Reflective of the passion and commitment for Klopse, the final research party for this project was particularly full. People we had interviewed were keen to come and engage with the stories they had told us, to celebrate Klopse through the research we had conducted. Used at various meetings and events, the research posters shown at the party were eventually laminated, so they could be better stashed behind Gerty’s bedroom wardrobe, ready for the schedule of annual organizing meetings held every year.

We published a book on Klopse with beautiful photos and narratives. In the opening section Gerty explained that “when people hear of Valhalla Park, they associated our area with the 28 Gang and drugs. We needed to do something to show the world out there and the people out there—standing in Cape Town, across the Cape Flats, in the surrounding areas—to show them here we are. We come from Valhalla Park. This is what we are doing in Valhalla Park. And this is what we can do.” This was why Klopse mattered, why it was central to Civic work: it challenged the stigma she and others felt in the city. In small ways, it helped address the difficulties common in the lives of residents. It linked the Civic and neighborhood families to a proud past. Copies were stacked up at Gerty’s front door—the Klopse books were in demand in the neighborhood, in the Klopse Board, and beyond.

Making Ends Meet, Neighborhood Economies

The focus of our final formal research project was a pressing everyday challenge that underscored all the partnership work: the mundane and hard reality that most families in this neighborhood struggled to make ends meet economically, to secure work, and to build long-term livelihoods. In 2012 our research responded to this reality. Two motivations shaped our approach. The first was a chance to document the work undertaken by individuals and families despite the lack of formal employment; the strategies and the challenges to build local businesses, practices that were often subsumed into rough and less helpful notions of informality and illegality. At the same time, the research unfolded in the challenging context of xenophobic violence against so-called foreigners, largely immigrants from other African countries who resettled in South Africa and opened small shops and businesses in many township contexts. In Valhalla Park, as in other townships across Cape Town and South African cities, tensions had fomented; debate on the place of so-called foreign shops and businesses was rife, and sometimes violent.

In this complex and very real context, our project documented and mapped this critical area of the neighborhood economy. We searched for and interviewed the area’s businesses, some formal, most informal, some well signposted, public, others less visible behind the doors of homes. Many businesses were run by long-term Valhalla Park residents; others by newcomers, some of whom were “foreigners.” We explored how families and businesses started, sustained themselves, and quite often closed in this hard economic context: from tuck shops behind burglar bars, built into a home or an exterior wall, to veggie stalls, open on the street, to seamstresses working on piecework from factories in a home garage, to bakers barely signposted in kitchens here and there, to well-posted burglar bar makers and car repair places. We tracked these practices on street corners, on the main thoroughfare, as well as in the back streets, the garages on corners, the alleyways of the area settlements. We grappled with the geographies of businesses, rooted in the neighborhood but linked to diverse city economies, from sourcing vegetables in Epping Market, the largest city source of fresh vegetables, to trading iron scrap across the Cape Flats, to small piecework contracts with Truworths, a national clothing chain, to one woman’s biennial travel to Dubai and China to buy goods for her business.

As in other projects, our method worked with a base map, the foundation of our systematic approach and the designation of research areas for each team of researchers. As always, this strategy proved more complicated in practice, with lots of necessary checking of boundaries, walking the neighborhood, populating our map with useful landmarks so teams did not overlap or step on each other’s toes, so to speak. The project traced tricky territory, navigating both the question of to what degree some businesses were more illicit than others and a heated and dangerous debate on xenophobia, particularly vociferous in that period. From this research, we produced a neighborhood Yellow Pages, a small business directory, copies of which were delivered to nearly every household in the neighborhood in 2013.

Incremental Rhythms

Led by Gerty and me, the initial collaboration evolved into a decade-long partnership. The Civic and its community workers, and my class and its students, worked together. Mobilizing against evictions shaped the Civic, its genesis, its leaders, and its mission in this period after apartheid to put Valhalla Park “on the map” as a place in need of housing, first and foremost, and later to rework its reputation as a gang-ridden rough area, where violence was the norm. Our partnership projects followed this trajectory, focusing first on housing struggles, then shifting to the broader array of Civic and community-building work, from minstrels to making ends meet.

There was a necessary slowness to our approach, from our tentative start researching backyard shacks to the completion and sharing of the Yellow Pages directory, a publication from our final project on neighborhood business economies. Across the decade, the partnership stretched and expanded. It morphed incrementally and unevenly in the particularities of the projects we worked on, in the comforts and limits of processes, in the often-irreconcilable nature of university demands, in the dynamics of the neighborhood, the ups and downs of the Civic, and in the dissonances of city politics. It was bound up in Gerty’s and my commitments to each other, those things that sustained us, that brought us to work together year after year.

The research and teaching became part of the rhythm of activism and neighborhood work for the Civic. Our partnership, our annual class, and my relationships with the Civic and with the neighborhood became part of my rhythm, my research and teaching. The Civic as my partner became a critical interlocutor, key to my thinking and to our collective work theorizing the city together. The annual semester teaching together punctuated the year. This project-by-project incremental approach was essential, developing our capacity to research, to ask questions, to write, and to reflect. In being present, regular, scheduled, in being incrementally and unevenly pieced together, the partnership built and sustained trust and confidence in our process. Civic partners came to present and participate in seminars and course sessions in my department and elsewhere at UCT; they spoke to students, sharing experiences, and our partnership work, with my colleagues. These elements became the foundation of our legitimacy to work together in the neighborhood and in the university.

The process mattered deeply, in its detail, in its productivity, and in its compromises. We designed our projects loosely, building a sensibility of listening, an ethos of engaging respectfully. To participate as partners, we attuned ourselves to be flexible, to listen more carefully, to record and reflect. We paid attention to, and engaged or tried to manage, competing agendas that shaped and split our interests. Students learned to listen in these moments to personal and powerful experiences, to see and to observe, to note and to engage, in ways that illuminated and disrupted literatures and lectures, the traditional staples of university learning. Civic partners introduced students to a world of critical knowledge, what it meant for them and their families, for the Civic, to live and struggle in our city, what it took to engage and challenge these conditions. Partners realized their research abilities. For some this was work that they recognized as always core to their activism. They claimed the title “researcher.” For others, research and its pedagogies were new, a different way to engage with their neighborhood and the city, to link to the university; and, sometimes, to re-see themselves.

The partnership held together our varied rhythms, interests, and capacities—contained in the research process. It allowed us to work in and against the grain of neighborhood agendas, the urgency of crises, the imperatives of the Civic, and its struggle with the city, as well as in and against the logics of the university, its prerogatives, and practices. It built on the trust we nurtured to maintain and extend an unconventional research and teaching mode. We innovated and persisted, sometimes deepening our approach. At other times, we just kept going, working in and across the urban inequalities that divided us, living with the conflicts that so easily could have torn us apart.

In many instances, relationships became friendships, which enabled us to work together, to sustain the partnership over the long term. In the fabric of these growing relationships, over the years we celebrated birthdays—my daughter’s and Gerty’s grandchildren’s birthdays, Eid and Christmas, special moments like weddings. Crises also galvanized us, such as the devastation of fires in Sewende Laan and Agste Laan that razed homes and lives repeatedly—shattering losses. In later years, increasing levels of violence refractured the neighborhood. Gerty’s son-in-law described an afternoon when the police forced him, together with Gerty’s then six-or-so-year-old grandson and others, to lie flat on the street outside her house. He emphasized the humiliation of this act, of being searched in front of their home. These dynamics placed our partners and neighborhood residents on constant high alert, a vigilance and violence linked to the police, a citywide underworld, a politics beyond direct neighborhood activism and mobilization. Other moments were hard and intimate, deaths in families, my father and Gerty’s father passing on. Attending her father’s funeral, I saw her face and her passion, her power and energy, in her son and her brother as they gave the eulogy, in the proud picture of her father, placed on his coffin. She could not attend my father’s funeral, held outside South Africa, but she probed the shadows of my sorrow, helping me navigate my sadness.

We planned a final project that would focus on the long-organized-for housing project once it was built. We intended to interview Sewende Laan families following their move out of the settlement into formal homes. This last project would be, we hoped, a chance to celebrate and engage this key outcome, the product of Civic housing activism. We hoped to understand and document its meanings for families, this transition to home ownership, the product of moving into these long-sought-after homes. But the housing project was delayed, once, then again, and again. The bulk infrastructure, the water and sewerage pipes, the roads, were laid. The construction of actual homes—the top structures—was first delayed by city bureaucracies and funding cycles, then caught in a neighborhood-city rivalry, a contestation for construction contracts, a politics in which the project foreman was shot, reappointed, and again shot at twice. The contractor withdrew. The project was postponed, then cancelled, then eventually rebudgeted and scheduled. (Only in late 2021 did the process of building homes finally begin.)

In this increasingly contested, unsafe neighborhood context, the weight and responsibility of our partnership became too much to bear for our partners. The neighborhood’s social fabric frayed slowly, at first. Then, at increasingly frequent intervals, families became housebound, shots ringing out at random; uncertainties multiplied. Such heartbreaking hardships and violence exceeded our partnership and any issue our research might have addressed. Our work together slowed down after 2013, eventually ending in 2015. While we remained in contact, long-term friends, our formal partnership and collaboration concluded.

Coda—A Process

To keep the partnership relevant, we had to shape-shift with its politics. We began small, in some senses, ambitiously in others. We incrementally extended and developed the process. We built the partnership, solidified it, worked on it, tinkered at its edges, changed its middles. As the Civic’s work shifted, so did the partnership. These changes were substantive, our mode changing with the projects we worked on. Housing questions required a particular approach, a mix of guidelines, a set of experiences. Klopse and Civic work required a different array of links into the neighborhood, a tailored mode of method and writing, a journaling process. Across the slow time of a decade, the Civic’s role altered and transformed, its form changed. Across the years, the partnership changed, as did I. Over the long haul, the relationships we built exceeded the partnership itself. Our partnership became a friendship. We developed ways to extend and translate this work, a way to root it, to sustain the partnership across and in the contradictions of the university and city.