Touring fire-ravaged township with strong Irish link

Letter from Cape Town: Hout Bay, a much photographed fishing village and popular tourist spot well known to Irish holidaymakers, is a 20-km drive from Cape Town in South Africa.

Surrounded by steep and rugged mountains, it is the gateway to Chapman's Peak, one of the most spectacular coastal routes in the world. Last Saturday, we watched as weekend crowds lazed on its perfect sandy beach or enjoyed calamari on the terrace of Chapman's Peak Hotel, serenaded by impromptu concerts from sequinned minstrels and young African dancers.

Hours later, however, Hout Bay was a disaster area, the scene of one of the Western Cape's most devastating fires, fanned by the strong summer south-easterly winds known as the Cape Doctor and a 40-degree heatwave. It started around midnight in the Imizamo Yethu township a few kilometres outside the town, allegedly by an unattended candle, took firefighters nearly seven hours to bring under control and on Monday morning 5,000 inhabitants were left homeless and 1,200 homes destroyed. Miraculously there were no deaths.

The blaze was aggravated by the closeness of the ramshackle shacks, surrounding pine trees and exposed electrical wires. The township - one of the most underprivileged communities in the Western Cape, which grew up around the fishing industry - is the site of millionaire Irish entrepreneur Niall Mellon's building initiative and five of the Irish houses were damaged but not destroyed. A disaster fund has been set up with Mellon pledging 250,000 rand (about €25,000) to the relief effort. All remaining trees were cut down on Monday.

Visitors to the town en route to Chapman's Peak pass the entrance to Imizamo Yethu. On Saturday morning, we took a township tour along with another couple to part of the l8-hectare settlement, home to some 20,000 people, mostly Xhosa. It was here that last November, a team of 150 Irish building workers, carpenters, plumbers, electricians and bricklayers flew out from Dublin to Cape Town and, in the space of three weeks, constructed 27 houses. These simple brick buildings, three different types, are interspersed among the corrugated iron and wood shacks in an area roughly the size of about three rugby fields.

"This is not a tour; it's an experience," said our guide, Afrika Moni, a young Xhosa sociologist and journalist from the township. "There are three communities in Hout Bay - the rich, the middle income and this is the third. I shall call it a developing community. It was originally supposed to be a model settlement on 34 acres for 455 households which were given land and serviced sites," he explained.

After l991, however, and following the abolition of Influx Control Legislation in l986, Cape Town experienced a huge increase in immigrants, mostly from the economically neglected former homelands of Transkei and Ciskei, and the population of Imizano Yethu soared. It has been estimated that 40,000 enter the Cape Town province from rural areas every year, yet there is a dramatic shortage of affordable land and housing to deal with the influx.

Afrika pointed out an area originally supposed to be a taxi site, now choc-a-bloc with shacks and sheds, some on very precarious foundations already beginning to subside. "More than 2,000 people live there with one tap and four toilets," he explained. The toilets are padlocked and each time somebody wants to use them, they must request the key from the key holder. We watched children playing along Mandela Street and a wretched dog limping along dragging half a broken leg searching for shelter from the sun. We went in to a number of the shacks, surprisingly cool inside, and met inhabitants like Christopher, an unemployed fisherman, quietly resting. In one of the Irish houses, we were welcomed by Angel and her eight children. The impressive Irish development has been hugely welcomed and lessons learned about its efficiency and speed of construction. A house is already being constructed by the locals following their example and everywhere we walked we saw the familiar green football shirts, handed out freely by the Irish workers.

Despite 65 per cent unemployment, there are hundreds of small enterprises in this tough community, like spazas, slang for shops, selling everyday necessities, hairdressing "salons", some elementary handmade crafts and a community centre cum church hall artfully constructed from containers, which was used for the setting of the movie Country of My Skull with Winona Ryder last July. In a shebeen we tasted umqombothi, a frothy mushroom-coloured home-made beer and in another house, umpokoqo, a nutritious local food which looked and tasted like yoghurt. Afrika was keen to point out the positive developments taking place in the township; a bed and breakfast was due to open soon, for example, part of an initiative called Destination Hout Bay.

Now, however, all has changed. The devastated community faces an unprecedented crisis as tents are erected to shelter those who have lost what little they had in the fire. "Lives have been shattered," says Afrika. "Nothing like this has ever happened before, but we're not looking for someone to blame because the damage has been done. There is a land crisis and a community crisis and it's up to local politicians now to find the solutions."