Atlantis in the Western Cape … a town that once seemed lost but now is slowly finding itself again…
About 50 km from Cape Town, past Koeberg’s towering Nuclear Power Station is a turnoff, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. It heads towards a town called Atlantis - a place many call “the lost city” – like the mythical continent after which it was named.
Atlantis was created in 1976 as an apartheid guinea-pig town – an experiment to test the Nationalist Party’s decentralization policies and to develop dormitory towns that would serve as reserves of a cheap, coloured workforce for industries in rural areas. The incentives offered by the regime to textile, automotive, steel and clothing companies included substantial wage, housing and transport subsidies. Companies were also given relocation funding, which meant that not only were they encouraged to move but were actually being paid to do so. And the carrot used to lure coloured communities away from the city of Cape Town and into Atlantis included the promise of housing and job security.
Although the experiment was not entirely successful - sixty to eighty percent of the hundreds of businesses which moved to Atlantis were not labour intensive - these rural industries served as the lifeblood for a community cut of from other major metropolitan centres. But once apartheid crumbled, so too did the pillars propping up Atlantis. The subsidies ended, the distance from Cape Town took its toll and as factories moved back to the city, closures, liquidations and retrenchments became the order of the day. Along with poverty and unemployment came crime, sexual violence against women and children, gangsterism and drug abuse.
Although a smattering of the 95 factories that closed down have since returned they employ a very small percentage of the town’s residents. Today the Atlantis population exceeds over 100 000, with unemployment at well over 53%. Those who manage to find work spend more that 20% of their income traveling by bus or taxi.
But Atlantis refuses to sink into a morass of despair. Thrown together by the economic ambitions of a former regime and manipulated by the seemingly empty promises of politicians, the community is determined to transcend the oppression of its past and resist any manipulation of its future. Community forums, NGOs and individuals are galvanizing the local community into action through a process of locally-driven development, both economically and psychologically. They are carrying the torch for a new Atlantis. And at the fulcrum of this renewed spirit of activism is a community radio station that has become not only the heartbeat of Atlantis but its voice of hope, as well.
Lost and Found is produced by Hazel Friedman and was filmed by Japan Mathebula.
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