Globally, the notion of a ‘community’ has been used to frame the relationship between poor people and national parks. ‘Community’ in the discourse of conservation emerged from a confluence of circumstances. It was profoundly influenced by the realisation that top-down conservation strategies had negative impacts on the rural poor (Agrawal & Gibson 1999). This led conservation to ‘find’ community – in the words of Agrawal and Gibson – and also subsequently developed into community-based conservation management (CBCM) and other adaptations in conservation policy that claimed to be committed to poverty elimination, development and local empowerment (1999: 631). Hence, in South Africa like in other places, the notion of community emerged from the interaction between rural national parks and its neighbouring poor people (Cock & Fig 2000).
However, in numerous studies it has been pointed out that the inclusion of community in conservation has not necessarily been as positive as envisaged in policy frameworks. Critics have especially alerted us to the ‘limited understanding of community’ as being a ‘coherent collective, with a common purpose’
(Walker 2010: 289). Others have also emphasised the contradictions embedded in the ‘local’ part of community, given that most CBCM programmes are global and capitalist in nature (Rodary 2009). In South Africa, Robins explored the ambiguity in the internal and external forces shaping conflicts over the boundaries of ‘community’ that emerged during the course of a San land claim in the Northern Cape area adjacent to the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park (KGNP) (2004). He illustrates that the procedures of the land claim process ended up being divisive, resulting in leadership struggles and ‘the emergence of intra-community tensions between the self-designated ‘traditionalists’ and the ‘western’ bushmen in the new settlement area’ (Robins 2004: 834). The land claim by the Makuleke in the Kruger National Park
Figure 12:
View of Hout Bay: A photograph taken from the sloot
(Source: author’s photograph, 2011)
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experienced similar problems relating to conflicts over the boundaries of the land claimant community (Robins & Van der Waal 2008; Walker 2010).
The difficulties and failures with community have not only been pointed out in academic papers but also by practicing conservationists. The latter have initiated what is known as ‘back to the barriers’ which marks ‘a return to classic forms of conservation’ that ‘amounts once again to excluding social issues from the sphere of conservation which is reasserted as a biological issue above all’ (Aubertin, Pinton & Rodary 2011: 5). As a result, conservation agencies are moving away from the notion of community and prefer to engage with individual agents and entrepreneurs rather than communities. Yet, despite this transformation in conservation, ‘community’ informed the framework with which the TMNP engaged with Hangberg.
Asked what lessons the TMNP had learnt through engagement with Hangberg the following remarks were made:
[We] realised we cannot solve the problem with the community without solving other issues. A community is like an onion – a thick folder – housing, economic and social issues. Entrenched with lawlessness to keep [the] police out and facilitate drug dealing and poaching. They [Hangberg] are frayed ….. What came out from the mediation process was that they wanted to be a law abiding community. This was largely influenced by Brain Williams who did the bits and pieces to drive the legal citizen.
Williams was the facilitator of the mediation and played a central role in providing the HPMF with the symbolic language to locally mobilise residents along the terms of self-employment, education and restoring ‘honour to the community’, even if this notion, or awareness, of community did not exist prior to its mobilisation through the mediation (Comaroff & Comaroff 2009: 15). The role of the mediator is also a legacy of colonialism and apartheid and fills the self-appointed gap ‘between the ignorant community and the insensitive state’ (Jensen 2004: 194).
Furthermore, the notion of ‘community’ is also prevalent in the engagement between peripheral urban townships such as Hangberg and the welfare state (Jensen 2004: 181; Lemanski 2008; Rose 1996). In Rose’s Foucauldian analysis of governance, he argues that ‘community’ is not ‘simply the territory of government, but a means of government: its ties, bonds, forces and affiliations are to be celebrated, encouraged, nurtured, shaped and instrumentalized in the hope of producing consequences that are desirable for all and for each’ (1996: 335, author’s emphasis). Following Rose (1996) the state’s conceptualisation of community materialises as a technique of governance that redistributes responsibility i.e. the governance of crime, drug abuse, security and health is not executed through direct state intervention, instead it is delegated to the community and its affiliated community leaders, families, friends and social networks (Jensen 2004).
The notion of a Hangberg community was first formalised with the establishment of the HPMF, a forum that represented the views and desires of the people living in Hangberg by participating in the discussions
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that proceeded to the formulation of the PMA.117 However, Lemanski warns that forums representative of communities often fail because ‘these groups do not, in fact, represent the ‘community’, which was not sufficiently organized or cohesive to have agreed representation’ (2008: 400). People in Hangberg had relatively good knowledge of their neighbours and this, along with a shared history of marginalisation and the experience of collective protests, created a sense of community and union (Ross 2010: 5).
Nevertheless, as I will discuss later on in more detail, it was especially the impression of a shared fishing heritage that facilitated the idea of a socially coherent community that could be represented by a body such as the HPMF.
While outsiders often wished to think of Hangberg as a homogeneous community, it constituted a mixture of different people with individual aims, affiliations and, ‘competing political structures and differences vested in resources’ (Maluleke, Mavhunga & Tapela 2007: 64).118 Therefore, shortly after the HPMF was established, dissenting attitudes towards the forum emerged. People started questioning the forum’s legitimacy and integrity, formed oppositional factions and even prosecuted some of the members of the HPMF for intimidating residents to yield to their views. Hence, while the mediation process envisaged enriching ordinary people’s participation in the TMNP management strategies and urban developmental processes, it instead established new forms of differences and resentment between community leaders and affiliated groups.
The articulation of these differences relied on specific knowledgeable residents who related to the urban figure Hansen and Verkaaik describe as the ‘hustler’ or the ‘urban specialist’: ‘individuals who by virtue of their reputation, skills and imputed connections provide services, connectivity and knowledge to ordinary dwellers in slums and popular neighbourhoods’ (2009: 16). Many of the leaders involved in the PMA and those who opposed it had a background in community development, activism, and party politics or participated in the struggle against apartheid (and returned with little other opportunity than becoming self-appointed leaders). These so-called community leaders capitalised on their ‘intelligibility and knowledge’ of the social and political context of Hangberg and employed the notion of a community to garner local support in resisting, assisting or participating in the mediation (Hansen & Verkaaik 2009:
15). Challenged by these internal conflicts in the neighbourhood, my ethnographic fieldwork required careful navigation in terms of maintaining a stance of neutrality, whilst also nurturing a sense of understanding of conflicting views.
117 This forum was of a different kind than the Park Forum discussed in Chapter Five. It was especially erected for the mediation process.
118 Hangberg is a diverse neighbourhood representing differences in culture, religion (Christianity, Muslim and Rastafarianism), class, education levels and households ranged from being middle-class to extremely poor.
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The integrity of the engagement between the TMNP and this adjacent poor community was thus hampered by the failure to recognise the power differences within communities, as well as the relation between state institutions and ordinary people. But what about the ordinary people of Hangberg who were not involved in the mediation? During my fieldwork in the months after the PMA was made a court order, it became apparent that despite the illegal squatters’ reality of eviction, most people continued their lives largely undisturbed. Some even envisioned a future on that land (however fragile) and financed their own sewage and water infrastructure, planted trees and planned to expand their houses. Others commenced with new housing structures. Four months after the PMA was approved, I encountered two young men busy with the construction of a one-roomed shack. Fully aware of the illegality of the action, they believed it to be their only solution. Another squatter proposed that the mediation was ‘just another way by which they wanted to get them off the mountain’. The resolution of eviction was thus drafted with the consensus of the ‘community’ of Hangberg but the realities on the ground belied this assumption. Lila*
indignantly said the following:
I want to stay here… otherwise anyone can come live here. I am not going … [even if it is a] World Heritage Site, now I can live here on the mountain. We just want a roof we did not want a park - just food on the table.
This attitude towards the PMA’s resolution for eviction was further antagonised by the scepticism and mistrust reserved for its alternative housing solutions allocated to the local government. ‘Development’
was an idea associated with the empty promises made in past political party campaigns to garner votes for upcoming elections. ‘The coloured rather trusts the devil than the government’ one informant said it.
This, along with the violent eviction of September 2010 and the fear of being relocated to a state-owned Temporary Relocation Area (TRA) on the outskirts of Cape Town, contributed to the dissidence people articulated towards the resolutions reached in the PMA.119
The TMNP and state representatives involved in the mediation were fully aware of the internal conflicts in Hangberg following the establishment of the HPMF. The local newspapers dubbed it as the ‘Hangberg saga’. When I enquired about this discrepancy in the mediation in an interview with one of the TMNP representatives, he replied that ‘we [SANParks] are a formal state structure and we deal through formal programmes’. Thus, the nature of the mediation favoured – perhaps not intentionally – conservationist objectives in a de-political fashion without resolving the underlying power dynamics involved in the TMNP becoming the custodians of the Cape Peninsula (Sullivan 2003: 78). The point is not to suggest that housing for the poor should be prioritised above biodiversity protection. It is rather to suggest that the nature of the engagement between the TMNP and its poor neighbours was limited in its aim to empower
119 In a number of conversations Hangberg residents made negative references to the TRA, “Blikkiesdorp”, a problematic resettlement of the urban poor on the peripheral areas of the urban landscape.
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the local people or to limit effects of establishing (or expanding) a national park (Dressler & Mavhunga 2007: 46).