Atlantis Exists (and it’s Shitty)

The tree-lined avenue that leads to the South African Atlantis is called the Malmesbury Road. In 1931, it was built using poor white labour – a work-for-soup deal, designed to counter the worst privations of the Great Depression. That same year, Harvard Business School came over to do a study on this innovative scheme. They took their findings back to America, and one year later, FDR had repackaged the Harvard study as The New Deal. It’s a very influential strip of tarmac.

These days, along it, some sixty kilometres from Cape Town, lies another attempt at social engineering, this one much less successful. When it was developed in 1977, the town of Atlantis was meant to be Apartheid’s answer to Milton Keynes. A planned community, exclusively for ethnic Cape Coloureds (as they are called in South Africa). Built from scratch. Its inhabitants bussed in, incentivised to re-settle there from homes in Cape Town with bold promises. The town planners were confident that it would, by 2010, enclose half a million people. It would be a gleaming hub of racially-segregated industry, a testament to the potency, the workability and the general fairness of the government’s policy of Separate Development – cleaving society apart into race-based economic zones.

It didn’t turn out like that. Now, Atlantis rusts inelegantly seven days a week. In the late 70s its gridded streets were mapped out into two neatly set zones – a residential one, then, a mile away, preformed industria: vacant streets, plumbed and electrified, just waiting for factories to be dropped on them. The point of Atlantis was to move heavy industry out of the centre of Cape Town, while simultaneously moving the Cape Coloured population away from the white playground of the CBD: creating a “home of their own” for the Coloureds, while ensuring that the factories had a ready supply of cheap manual labour.

To get the place off the ground, the government launched a slew of incentives, including luring in factories, via an elaborate system of relocation tax credits. But then it all unravelled. The tax credits became unaffordable. Fresh industrial land was zoned in places closer to Cape Town. The petrol price jumped, making transport costs untenable. The whole thing fell off a cliff.

These days, population has levelled out around 100,000 and unemployment has maintained a remarkably constant 40 percent. Rates of foetal alcohol syndrome are also consistently amongst the highest in the world. The gangs are so vicious you might as well just kill yourself now rather than risk stepping onto their territory. The Saturday we turn up, the town is still chittering about Friday night’s two homicides.

“They were gangsters,” Barbara Ras declares, sat drinking Coke in the living room of her tiny green house on the perimeter of the town. She has her ear to the ground, out here – she used to be a gangster too, after all. “One of them was with The Mongrels. The other with The Rastas. They were both hits. The thing that’s changed since my day is that back in my day, this was all about gang fights – quarrels over territory. Now, it’s just organised crime. Pure and simple.”

Like a lot of reformed characters, Ras’ route out was G.O.D. A bunch of happy-clapping types knocked on her door one Sunday morning. She was high. They told her Jesus loved her. She instantly melted. “For me, it was when they gave me a hug. That was the thing. To have another human being show affection for you – it was something I’d never had.” And like a lot of reformed characters, she still simply can’t stop babbling about the man above – whatever tangents the conversation takes, always returning to her Jesus-shaped themes. “I would fight. The girls in the gangs – there weren’t many – most of them wouldn’t fight. Most of them were there to keep the weapons; I was fighting. I had the guts to stab somebody. And I had the guts to keep your gun while it was still hot. I was committed. And I did earn my respect through that.” She whips up her t-shirt sleeves to reveal a slender, over-inked tattoo. “This was the last gang I belonged to – the 77s. They had all done murder. My husband was one too…” He’s still your husband? “No. I divorced him, then I married him again, and I divorced him again because I caught him committing adultery.”

Ras was the daughter of a preacher, and got mixed up with the wrong boys, gradually drifting down the mandrax-encrusted dark side of Cape Town’s ganglands. “You have a different mindset when you’re in that sort of situation – it’s about surviving, day to day. I was comfortable with the guys – I was the only female in the group.” She points back at her tattoos. “My eldest daughter wanted me to remove that tattoo. It’s a lot of shame for the kids, you see, because the other kids see it, and they tease them in school.”

These days, Ras is a local councillor who also runs a safe haven for abused women and kids. Despite becoming part of government, she still has a certain healthy disregard for the pigs. “I don’t work with them. I will never work with them. They have double standards. They will pull you down and fight with you, but they will take your money too.” Indeed, they’ve not always been able to protect her from her many enemies. “The house we’re in now was petrol bombed five years ago. They threw it through the back, because they were unhappy with me: the shelter I’d established on what had been an old shebeen and drug den.” So she called up her pals. They came through in massive numbers from her former gang stomping grounds in Bonteheuwel. Soon, there were 20-odd cars parked up outside her home filled with grizzled out-of-town gangsters. So, rather than come down and take a look, the cops called her on the phone to ask what was up. “I told them – if you can’t protect me, then I need to do what I can…” Still there’s no let-up. “You know, they poisoned my dogs last week. Killed them, two of them.”

Her old gangland buddies can only do so much, though she stays in touch. “Many of them are dead. The rest are still doing it. They’re old now – they’d like to get out, but what else can they do?”

She brings in the boy who lives next door, who looks about 15, but is apparently 20. Shy, vacant, he has the pixie ears that mark out those afflicted by foetal alcohol syndrome, the mild form of brain damage that boozing mums gift to their unborn kids so regularly out here and is easily enough to make a journalist put his camera back in his pocket. “I went to fetch him three weeks ago out of Allandale Prison. He was 17. He was at school. Then he got involved with tik [crystal meth]. So then he was involved with a murder and went to jail. He was looking at what was happening. But he didn’t help do it. It was just that he didn’t squeal – he couldn’t ‘cos his life was in danger… He can show you some of the marks… show him what they did.” Awkwardly, the boy peels down the rim of his tracksuit pants to reveal a stringy mess of white scars running down the top of his thigh. “They beat him in prison. He was alone in the holding cells, and they got hold of him,” she continues. “I tell you – what you’re looking at here is a broken person.”

The boy makes no notice that he has understood any of this, standing sheepish in the corner of the room, eyes downcast. “A lot of things unimaginable happened to him in jail. But nobody’s helping him through all of that. Everybody’s drinking. His mother is drinking. His grandmother is drinking. His whole family has fallen into alcohol. There’s no one to tell him how special he is just because he’s human…”  She goes on, matter-of-fact, while the manboy still stands morosely in the corner. “He broke in twice at my place. At the very place where he was being helped! Where he could have a cup of tea or a piece of bread anytime! In the end, I withdrew the charge, because we made a deal that he would return the stuff he took.” She offers obscure thoughts on what needs to happen to the boy next. “He must be hypnotised. So that they can figure out where it all went wrong for him…”

Hypnosis may not be enough to figure out what went wrong with the rest of the town. As the recession has curled its cold grip around the place, even some of the few factories keeping Atlantis ticking over are dying. Now the government is once again looking to see what it can do with the place. Over the upcoming year, they’re going to be giving away the vacant industrial plots, with the proviso that companies must either build factories on it within two years or lose their claim.

Of course, it doesn’t all have to end with the town’s gradual slide back into barbarism. It could go out with a bang. A bright yellow pamphlet pinned to Ras’s fridge advises what to do in the event of Armageddon. Duck, cover, stop, drop, roll, look both ways, that sort of thing… The town, see, is within the 16km blast radius of the coastal Koeberg Nuclear Power Station. Atlantis sinks? Irony would probably cover it.