Where Is Traditional Leadership in the City of Cape Town’s Integrated Development Plan?

GOOD Statement by Roscoe Palm, GOOD City of Cape Town Councillor:

Today in Council, on behalf of the GOOD Party, I raised a serious concern regarding the exclusion and erasure of traditional leadership in the City of Cape Town’s Integrated Development Plan (IDP).

The IDP, in its current form, states on four separate occasions that no traditional leaders exist in the City. Yet, this stands in stark contradiction to the City’s practice of routinely calling upon so-called traditional leaders for events, public relations, and legal matters, most notably during the recent controversy surrounding the appropriation of sacred land in Observatory for the Amazon and Riverlands development.

This contradiction begs the question: Who are these traditional leaders the City engages with when it suits its purposes? Are they rented for events? Are they bought and shelved for future use? Or are they simply deployed to legitimise decisions that betray the very communities they claim to represent?

This façade is a deep insult to the descendants of the Khoi and the San, who sit in this chamber and continue to witness the denial of their existence and identity. It is a deliberate strategy of erasure. More disturbingly, these figures have been used to justify and uplift a new chapter of genocide – this time through the establishment of Amazon Web Services in Cape Town, a technological enabler of Israel’s violent campaign against the Palestinian people.

The exclusion of traditional leadership from the City’s planning is not an administrative oversight; it is part of a long, violent continuum. It is the same colonial project launched by Almeida, institutionalised by Van Riebeeck, Rhodes, Verwoerd, and Botha – now marketed by Tony Leon’s Resolve Communications, guided by Helen Zille, and administered by the Democratic Alliance government in this city.

The desecration of sacred land continues unabated. Ancestral graves along the Black River are being exhumed illegally, defiling the memory of those buried and denying them dignity in death. This is not just heritage theft – it is spiritual violence.

And while I spoke, Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis acted inappropriately. His gestures as I raised issues of genocide, land theft, and the painful interlinked struggles of South Africans and Palestinians speak volumes about the Democratic Alliance’s callousness and disregard for injustice.

Black traditional leadership in Cape Town is being deliberately erased, and the City’s denial entrenches a political economy built on slavery, colonial conquest, and the commodification of land and culture.

On behalf of the GOOD Party, I reaffirm that only solidarity between the historically, materially, and politically dispossessed Black and Coloured communities can resist this ongoing project of erasure. Together, we must confront the machinery of capital, the legacy of colonial injustice, and reclaim our rightful place in the story of this land.

GOOD Manifesto on Cultural Heritage: Promoting the preservation of South Africa’s cultural heritage.

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