Eerste River Relocation

In mid-2021 the Western Cape High Court (case 6132/2021) heard PRASA’s application to evict an informal settlement that had grown since 2016 along the Cape Town Central Line railway in Langa, and had by then moved directly onto the live tracks themselves — the reason the line had been unable to run past Langa since November 2019. PRASA’s own court papers describe this as one of fourteen similarly-occupied PRASA properties across the Western Cape at the time, and record that some residents told PRASA’s board they had paid around R9,000 each to unknown third parties for “sites” in the area — sales PRASA says it never authorised.

Under the eviction law PRASA was proceeding under (the PIE Act), the residents couldn’t lawfully be moved without alternative land being found first. After more than a year of searching (a multi-agency working group had been meeting on this since mid-2019), PRASA identified two adjoining parcels — 24 hectares in total, meant to house around 3,360 dwellings — on a farm just south of Eerste River station, land that had itself been rezoned in 2017 as part of the De Wijnlanden Estate’s own spatial development framework.

Because the identified land sat inside its own development area, the De Wijnlanden Homeowners’ Association took the lead role in responding — its board engaged its own lawyers, sent formal letters to PRASA, the City and the Province demanding a clear response on the facts and timeline, and kept its lawyers on standby to seek a court interdict if a workable alternative wasn’t found. PHORA joined the effort on Penhill’s behalf, and its own contribution centred on the petition itself — designed and launched by PHORA, growing from under a thousand signatures on its first afternoon to over 4,000 within a week — alongside escalating the matter directly to the City and the Mayor’s office. Both worked alongside the wider Eerste Rivier Community Pressure Group, which coordinated the response across all the affected neighbourhoods.

Worth setting out plainly, since it’s easy to lose in a dispute like this: PRASA wasn’t acting arbitrarily. Its Central Line carried some of the poorest commuters in Cape Town to and from job opportunities in the city, and the occupation had cut services entirely past Langa for over a year, with electrified services only partially restored in February 2021. PRASA’s board had visited the site itself in January 2021, and its media statements at the time explicitly urged residents to leave voluntarily and peacefully rather than face a forced eviction, while it worked to actually locate suitable land rather than simply evicting people onto the street. The land it settled on came with real trade-offs of its own — not enough to house everyone displaced across all its Western Cape sites, and, as it turned out, awkwardly placed right against an existing residential community’s own development plans.

The opposition worked, and quickly. By 20 September 2021 — roughly two and a half weeks after the petition began — the City and PRASA had met and PRASA agreed to drop the Eerste River site from consideration, opting instead to look at other parcels it held elsewhere. When PRASA went back to court that November for more time on the broader Langa eviction, it explicitly cited ongoing consultation with receiving communities (this one included) as the reason, and the court granted an eight-month extension.

The Eerste River site was never developed. By late 2022 PRASA’s planning had shifted to the Philippi Horticultural Area instead, and the relocations that eventually went ahead in December 2023 took place at Philippi’s Stock Road station — not Eerste River.

Further reading: Daily Maverick, 26 November 2021 · GroundUp