MAVERICK CITIZEN: CAPE TOWN’S GANG WAR: The heartbreak of the Cape Flats By Rehana Rossouw
Rehana’s award winning first novel, ‘What will People Say?’ , is a searing, heart-breaking fictionalised account of the life of the Fourie family, wracked by gang-violence in Hanover Park during the turbulent, changing South Africa of the late 1980s. It is a South African classic, recommended reading for anyone who cares about the marginalised people and communities of our country.
I am a great-great granddaughter of slaves; a great-granddaughter of survivors of slavery who lost most of their capital after the 1913 Land Act was promulgated; and I am a granddaughter and daughter of people flung out of their homes by the brutal Group Areas Act. For generations, my ancestors suffered traumatic emotional and financial damage wrought upon them for one reason alone — so that white families could prosper.
People employed on vineyards across the Cape received a daily tot of cheap wine from their employers. This form of payment began in the 17th century and was only outlawed in 2003. White farmers doled out wine to generations of pregnant female workers and some areas in the Western Cape now have the highest incidence of Foetal Alcohol Syndrome in the world. Babies of alcoholic mothers have low body weight, poor co-ordination, low intelligence and behavioural problems.
Government bulldozers moved into Crossroads and KTC to smash their flimsy shacks. Newspapers published similar photos every winter of a woman with a baby on her back sheltering under an umbrella, their meagre belongings scattered in the mud; and the debris of a shack shattered into matchsticks behind them. In the 1990s government-sponsored vigilantes, the witdoeke, shot and hacked to death people living in the shacks that sprouted like weeds.
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