Indigenous fishing community of Kalk Bay remembered during Heritage Festival

The Kalk Bay Heritage Festival takes place in the fishing village. Pic: Supplied

The Kalk Bay Heritage Festival takes place in the fishing village. Pic: Supplied

Published Oct 28, 2024

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Cape Town - A remembrance of the reciprocity with Kalk Bay’s indigenous fishing community with the land and ocean and deep-rooted connectedness was brought to the fore and honoured during the inaugural Kalk Bay Heritage Festival.

The festival commenced on Friday and featured a number of stalls selling foods, seafood dishes, traditional sweet treats, and other items, with the backdrop of the original seven blocks of fishermen flats, which to this day, houses its descendants, on Harbour Road. Under the open night sky, attendees were able to listen to interviews done with displaced Kalk Bay residents, some who had now passed on and watch documentaries as part of the film festival.

Festival organiser, storyteller and activist Traci Kwaai said the gathering had served as a reunion.

“These flats were built in 1947, but we’ve actually been living here for 200 years, first in our sink huisies (sink houses) and then the sink huisies got thrown down and then these flats got built.

“There were forced removals in the whole of Kalk Bay. Here specifically, it was the women who were forcibly removed.

“So if fishermen died, his wife had to move out, which is also forced removals and the next fishermen on the waiting list would go into that flat,” Kwaai said.

During the winter time, boats were not able to go out to fish so the community depended on harvesting and taking shell fish off the rocks.

“And when apartheid came, those spaces were severed. Imagine living here and seeing the sea and you have no access to it but you actually can see it every day physically and smell and taste it in the air. But we were not allowed to go to the tidal pools and when apartheid happened, we lost our harvesting areas because they were on whites-only beaches. And so it’s not that you just lose a harvesting area, you lose a cultural practice, you lose the practice of reciprocity, which is what we’ve had, not just us, all indigenous people, all black people, we have reciprocity, with the ocean, with the land and that gets taken away and we forget who we are.”

Kwaai said she hopes the event could take place twice a year, also as an economic benefit, especially for women.

Those currently residing in the flats are of the fifth and sixth generation of the indigenous fishing community.

“Filipino descendants, Muslim descendants from the freed enslaved bodies, a Creole community, a mixed, everyone here, most of the people here are related.”

Kalk Bay resident, Mymoena Poggenpoel, 67, said they started negotiating with the City of Cape Town around the 1990s for about a year to purchase the seven blocks of 55 flats so that the families could own them. The process took seven years and thereafter, the families were made homeowners.

Poggenpoel’s father was a skipper and fisherman and so was his father.

She continues this legacy and owns two vessels and provides employment opportunities.

She said, now what is needed in Kalk Bay is affordable housing.

“All I want to see is affordable housing so that our people that couldn’t afford to buy here and that weren’t allowed to buy here would be able to come back, especially our fishing industry.”

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Cape Argus

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