In 2016, this property in Sea Point was sold by the Western Cape Government to the Phyllis Jowell Jewish Day School for R135 million. This sale has now been overturned by the Constitutional Court.
Five years ago, I wrote that the City of Cape Town’s housing programme was perpetuating apartheid spatial planning.
I did not write those words from a comfortable distance. I wrote them from blood memory.
I wrote as the grandson of a family uprooted from Claremont. I wrote for my grandfather, Booya Hajji Ebrahim Jacobs, whose claim to Stadsig Farm on High Level Road remains part of our family’s unresolved history. I wrote as a son of the Cape Flats and as a representative of African and Coloured families who were removed, divided, displaced and told that they did not belong in the city of their birth.
I wrote then: We are here. We want to be seen and heard. We want well-located land. We want affordable housing. We want an end to structural spatial inequality.
