- Thousands of families at Doornbach informal settlement also known as Site 5 in Dunoon were left homeless on Friday when over 600 structures burnt down.
- Many of the residents have started collecting material to rebuild their homes after the City of Cape Town cleared the site.
- The City has proposed reblocking the settlement. However, this was met with anger and pushback from residents.
- The City set aside R12-million to reblock the site. Contractors are on standby to do the work.
Dunoon pensioner Sidwell Soyizwapi was still wearing the clothes he had on last week when his life’s savings burnt to the ground. Over 630 other homes at Doornbach informal settlement, also known as Site 5, also burnt down.
A decade ago, Soyizwap saved up R26,000 to buy a shack on a six-by-six-metre plot in the community. Over the years, he extended and built a double-storey structure, with an upstairs room for himself and his wife and a ground floor that doubled as a makeshift garage for his car.
His structure was levelled by a blaze that erupted shortly after 10am on Friday, leaving about 2,600 residents homeless. The next day, mayco member for human settlements, Carl Pophaim, said the City was considering sustainable ways to “respond to these fires”.
“We’re proposing reblocking. Community leaders are consulting residents to get their buy-in,” he said.
Unsure of what the reblocking proposal would mean for their tenure, many residents rushed to secure their plots. On Monday, some people collected material to rebuild, while others whose brick homes were destroyed began buying cement blocks to start again. Burnt Eskom poles lay scattered across the ground, wires still dangling. Nearby, queues snaked for nearly three kilometres as residents waited for food parcels from the charity Gift of the Givers.
Among them was Soyizwapi. He said he was fortunate to have managed to move his car while the fire tore through the settlement.
He added that he was not opposed to reblocking, provided the City allocated him a plot of the same size.
Ntombie Matiwana was visiting her sister in Khayelitsha when her home burnt down. She lost all her belongings and important documents in the fire.
Doornbach has long featured in the City of Cape Town’s reblocking plans, outlined in the Integrated Human Settlements five-year sector plan 2022/23 to 2026/27.
The plan lists Doornbach for a “super blocking” upgrade under the Upgrading of Informal Settlements Programme (USIP). It estimates that around 3,310 households could be affected, but confirms the project is still at the planning stage.
Community leader Zukiswa Kobe said residents had been briefed about reblocking plans several years ago. She said when some people heard of the City’s latest reblocking proposal, anger flared. They felt the authorities were taking advantage of the disaster, she added.
According to Kobe, land at the Winning Way business park, purchased by the Western Cape government, had been earmarked for Doornbach residents as part of earlier housing commitments. Instead of being developed for permanent homes, the land was diverted during covid.
She said residents are now demanding the serviced plots they were originally promised.
Bulelwa Mayende, the acting ward councillor, said reblocking was not the problem. The concern, she said, was that residents felt the plan was being forced on them. “For the past 15-years reblocking was in the pipeline. It was welcomed by the community,” said Mayende.
Disaster Risk Management spokesperson Charlotte Powell said on Tuesday that Eskom and the City’s Water and Sanitation Department were working to repair damaged infrastructure in the area. She said Solid Waste teams were busy clearing debris.
SASSA will provide relief over the coming days, while Disaster’s mobile joint operations centre remains in the area to oversee rehabilitation and recovery.
In a statement this week, Pophaim said, “We acknowledge the distress experienced by residents and understand the mistrust which has emerged because of past delays.” He said R12-million is available for the site to be reblocked and contractors are on standby to begin work immediately.
Further questions about the reblocking were sent to the City but no response had been received by the time of publication.
Many people are sceptical of the municipality’s plans to reblock the area.
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School violence: Bullying, fights, and other forms of violence in schools.
steel ginger
The Man who could only Drink Milk
I know an old man who had lived a life full of adventure, but his health started to catch up with him. He\’d run the Boston Marathon, was an avid surfer, and climbed Everest, but he\’d started to have abdominal pains around his 85th birthday and went to see a doctor. Sadly, he ultimately was diagnosed with a rare degenerative liver disease that slowly made him allergic to everything he ate.
He kept copious notes, and as an avid gastronomist slowly grew to despair as everything he\’d spent his life enjoying became something he could no longer eat. Alcohol went first, then mushrooms, then bread, then root vegetables, then coffee, one at a time he had to remove them from his diet. The doctor was clear: if he kept eating something his liver rejected the autoimmune response would be quick and severe, and would lead to a painful death. Little by little, everything was taken away as an option, until the only thing that remained was milk.
In some ways, this actually made life easier, because the mental strain of remembering what he could and couldn\’t eat was gone, but then so was the joy in variety. But he took it in stride, and got his own cow and took classes from a farmer to learn everything he could about the only thing that could give him sustenance. And even within milk, he could still have yogurt, butter, cream, some cheeses, and other milk-derived products he hadn\’t fully rejected yet, so it wasn\’t all bad. But then one day a few months later he felt the pain again, and he knew cow\’s milk was no longer an option.
Lacking other options, he tried goat\’s milk, and he was delighted that it worked! The protein structure is just different enough that his body still tolerated it. That bought him another month. And that\’s when we came up with a wonderful plan to go on one last grand adventure around the world. If he could get one month of life out of the milk of every mammal, he\’d actually have a few more years to enjoy life to the fullest and see the world in all its beauty. Each month, we\’d pick a place with a new mammal, and he would immerse himself fully with the locals, learn all the ways to prepare the milk, and just enjoy the hand he had been dealt as much as he could.
We milked sheep in New Zealand. Camels in Egypt. Zebras in South Africa. Giant bats in Indonesia. Do you know how many Peruvian cuy you need to milk to get a single glass? I do. Even as his health slowly faded, he stayed cheerful, and I felt lucky to join him on the adventure of a lifetime. That brings us to today when he got to the very end of his spreadsheet, and declared that he was now allergic to every mammal. He\’d enjoyed his journey, but his time had come to an end, for there was nothing left to milk.
To which I said nonsense, I bet we can milk a few thousand karma out of this post.
Wolf Tribune
Elon Musk was born in South Africa, and made an electric car. What if he had been born in Madagascar?
He would have made a gas car