FALSE BAY
TUESDAY 27 October 2020 | Tel: 021 910 6500 | Email: post@peoplespost.co.za | Website: www.peoplespost.co.za
@ThePeoplesPost
People’s Post
DIDO VALLEY
Land saga continues RACINE EDWARDES RACINE.EDWARDES@MEDIA24.COM @RAEEDWARDES
O
n Saturday 24 October, residents of Ocean View, Steenberg, Mitchell’s Plain and Redhill marched through Fish Hoek to subcouncil 19 to deliver a memorandum of demands regarding the City of Cape Town’s Dido Valley housing project. People’s Post previously reported on the Dido Valley development (“Residents slam database”, 20 October). Set to take shape over the next two years, the development has residents from several Cape Town communities up in arms. Residents from Ocean View spoke out against the database used to award housing to the 600 beneficiaries; saying the original residents of Simon’s Town were being cheated out of the very land they lost during the forced removals. Residing in Steenberg since they were removed from their Simon’s Town home in the early 1960s, the Atkins family says they would like for their 93-year-old mother to be able to return to the picturesque place she once called home. “I was born in Simon’s Town and then from Simon’s Town I went to Dido Valley. Then from Dido Valley I moved to here. But I loved Dido Valley,” says the family’s matriarch Ruth Atkins, who birthed all of her four children while living on the False Bay coast. Graham Atkins (68), Ruth’s son, says while he was quite young at the time of the removals, he remembers that Steenberg was not yet developed when they were relocated as a result of the Group Areas Act. “Steenberg was rough! There were hardly any roads, we had to use gravel roads, there were few buildings. When we were moved they put me into Primary Number One,” he says, adding that the first schools in the community were named similarly, by number. Glenda Atkins-De Villiers (65) says despite the forced relocation, their livelihoods remained in Simon’s Town as most of the family worked at the South African Seaward Defence Force, now called the South African National Defence Force. The Atkins family was just one of many who attended the protest on Saturday. Yasmino Moses was at the march repre-
Residents of Ocean View, Steenberg, Mitchell’s Plain and Redhill marched for land in Dido Valley, chanting: “The land belongs to us.” PHOTO: RACINE EDWARDES
senting the Moses/Sabodien family who once lived at 32 Second Crescent, Dido Valley. She says she has now been in Ocean View for over 50 years after her family was removed in 1969. “I was four years old but I can still remember my mom’s wardrobes fell off the truck we were on – on Kommetjie Road. I was heartbroken but that’s why we’re here today,” says Moses. She adds: “What I want is for them to at least give our land back to our people who were staying there; because they want to put other people from other places like Eastern Cape on that land.” Representing the Delcarme family, Harold (70) says he was relocated shortly after the Moses/Sabodien family. He was 20 at the time. He says he felt safe in Dido Valley but the same cannot be said of his home, now for 50 years, in Ocean View. “Life in Dido Valley was beautiful. There was no trouble – no people stabbing or fighting. Where I’m staying, the grass is so high and the gangsters lay in the grass. When you come out of the house,
they gun you (down). They rob you of everything. In Dido Valley, we never had experiences like this,” he says, adding that Ocean View was once a nice place to live, pre-1994. Sharing a similar sentiment is a woman who spoke to People’s Post on the condition of anonymity. She says mere hours before the protest, just after midnight on Saturday, gangsters attacked the Viola Court flats where she lives in Ocean View. “Over the years, bad things have been happening at the flat. In the early hours this morning, someone came to throw a petrol bomb through the window next to my flat. The flat is tormented by gangsters. They’re shooting people and killing people there; even my husband who I’ve lived with for six years was shot (while standing) in the door. It’s just going from worse to worse,” says the woman. Ocean View police spokesperson Leon Fortuin confirms the attack but says no case was opened. Delcarme says many people in the same
predicament today applied for housing or land claims and nothing has come of it. Aslam Richards, the organiser behind this movement, has said that he wants the City and national government to note the names of former Simon’s Town and Dido Valley residents from the Simon’s Town Museum records in order to gain a better picture of who should be awarded land there. Legal consultant Abe Braaf is representing the families who are looking to reclaim their land from the City. In a memorandum put together by Braaf on behalf of the families from across the south peninsula, land claims and housing in the development are the issues they would like to discuss with president Cyril Ramaphosa and the national Minister of agriculture, land reform and rural development Angela Thoko Didiza. The memorandum, which was accepted by subcouncil 19 chair Patricia Franke, states that should no talks be entered into by the government, the group will continue to picket at strategic public venues.
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