Just a short distance from Cape Town, the residents of the growing township of Hangberg are struggling to keep their homes.
The arrests took place in the early hours of the morning, a week before the centenary of the 1913 Land Act. The police knocked on the doors of two women sleeping in informal shacks in the village of Hangberg and demanded they come with them.
The women barely had time to change out of their pyjamas before they were driven away. Several residents allege that the police were violent, with one reporting that a man was "beaten up" and another claiming that Tasers were fired. The women's crimes? Building homes for themselves.
The Unofficial Republic of Hout Bay
Hout Bay, isolated from Cape Town by 10 km of mountain and coast, has designated itself an unofficial republic and, nearly 20 years after the end of apartheid, is still starkly divided into white, coloured and black neighbourhoods.
It is split between what is commonly known as "the valley", a beach town popular with holiday home owners, the township of Imizamo Yethu, and the hillside village of Hangberg.
A study recently showed that Imizamo Yethu has a population of up to a hundred people per hectare, while the main district in the valley has only 1-25 people per hectare. Several thousand people live in Hangberg, and like many of Cape Town's poorer suburbs the population is growing fast with nowhere to expand to.
"There's a constant growth", explains Dicki Meter, a former councillor with the ruling African National Congress (ANC) and ex-resident of Hangberg. "And if no intervention is made in terms of future planning, there will be an explosion".
Resistance against evictions
Hangberg sits on the slopes of Sentinel hill, overlooking the seaside town of Hout Bay. It's a fishing community of crowded blocks of flats, shacks and newer bungalows, populated mainly by "coloured" residents - the apartheid designation for people of Khoi or mixed race heritage. Three years ago it was the site of bitter riots over a housing conflict which is threatening to flare up once again.
Roscoe Jacobs is a local activist assisting with the court case of a women who is currently facing eviction and who already lost her home once during the violence of 2010. "This lady had nowhere else to go so she had to put up a place for herself and her child", says Jacobs. "Now if she doesn't break it down, she will be arrested and she will need to spend three months in jail."
The woman in question, Janina Samuels, was given a suspended sentence of three months in prison after pleading guilty to contempt of court for violating an eviction order, and ordered to destroy her home in order to avoid a jail term.
Unprecedented police violence
Conflict broke out in the community in 2010, when city authorities moved in, accompanied by Metro police, to demolish several shacks which they claimed to be unoccupied.
Attempts to defend the informal buildings, many of which were occupied, escalated into riots in which Molotov cocktails were pitted against rubber bullets, and in which several residents were severely injured, with more than one losing an eye to rubber bullets.
Dicki, who was present during the riots, claims that the police behaviour that day was worse than what he witnessed during the apartheid. "I have never seen the police attack the way they did then, not even in the seventies", he says.
"We're talking about kids - 10, 11, 12 years old. They chased those kids, they kicked open the doors, they beat the parents. They saw a man running into a woman's house, and this woman's daughter was pregnant; they assaulted her daughter. They pulled the daughter by the legs out of the house, down the street, into the van, and then they came for the mother. Now this is a Muslim woman; they grabbed this woman by the legs, she must have been about fifty, and pulled her down the street to the van. They went past houses and they smashed the windows. They did not just intimidate, they attacked the community."
In early 2011, a mediated deal between a group of representatives from the community and the City agreed to a peace accord. But two years later, there is still widespread confusion about the implementation of the agreement, with many believing that the recent installation of toilets for squatting families is a sign that they could stay.
Dicki Meter is convinced that the truce will not hold. "The one thing I can put my head on the block for is that 2010 will happen again. There will be more intimidation, and there will be more evictions", he predicts.
Uncertain future for squatters of Hangberg
Hangberg is just one of several areas of Cape Town, and the entire country, where squatters and shack-dwellers have faced eviction by local authorities.
A growing population - thanks both to large families and economic migrants from other parts of the Cape - and extremely limited social housing have led to sprawling squatter camps in many parts of the peninsula. With many of them illegal, or in legally-precarious situations, evictions are common.
Ahead of the 2010 World Cup, many areas were cleared of shacks, leading residents to complain that they were being driven out to "beautify" the city. More recently, an area near the township of Philippi was squatted in and violently evicted multiple times. An investigation by the Daily Maverick concluded that evictions here were carried out under a law which did not actually exist.
The evicted often end up in Blikkiesdorp - a City-constructed area of corrugated metal huts known as "Tin Can Town" and noted for its prevalence of violence and mental illness - or elsewhere among the townships of the Cape Flats.
Dicki Meter is doubtful that Hangberg residents would accept a move to the Cape Flats, and believes that anyone removed from the community would soon return.
"Hangberg is very isolated with the result that people live there for generations", he says. "So what happened in Hangberg is that the community has families and support systems. If the mother and father work, there will be a relative who can take care of the kids. If you're unemployed, you'll be able to get help from families around you to sustain you. If you move to the Cape Flats, that all falls flat. That support system is not there."
That the question of housing and land use is still such a pressing question today demonstrates the tenacious legacy of the laws of dispossession passed last century such as the Natives Land Act of 1913, whose centenary was marked on 19 June with promises of land restitution and countless "never agains".
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The Natives Land Act played a central part in formalising the ownership of the majority of South Africa's land by the white minority. The legacy of the act is both a continuing disparity in land ownership and the rural-to-urban migration which swells townships and squatter camps of cities.
The Khoi, who make up a large proportion of Hangberg's population, have benefited even less than many ethnic groups from land restitution programmes as many lost their land before the 1913 act was passed.
And as the events in Hangberg in 2010 show, disputes over land can still have brutal effects today. Roscoe Jacobs has observed the social impact of the riots, and is worried. "Our children have become, since those riots, much more violent in nature. The summer after the riots our community was so hostile, the children were so violent, it was shocking."
The squatters of Hangberg are the product of a turbulent history, and it seems their future will similarly be marked by turbulence and uncertainty.
Correction 6/8/2013: In the first paragraph of the section 'Unprecedented police violence', the article originally stated that many buildings may have been occupied. They were occupied. This has now been corrected.
Rosa Wild is a freelance journalist who has worked in Egypt, the Palestinian Territories, South Africa and China. She has a particular interest in human rights, social movements, and security issues in North Africa. She studied Politics and Farsi at the School of Oriental and African Studies.
