Traci Kwaai has always been deeply connected to the land and the sea along the False Bay coast in Cape Town. As a sixth-generation fisher in Kalk Bay, she wants to make the marine environment and fishing accessible again.
Nestled between the mountain and the sea, Kalk Bay has always been an important place for the local fishing community. The extension of the railway line from Cape Town in 1883 quickly turned it into one of the biggest fish markets on the Cape Peninsula.
With the enactment of the Slums Act in 1934, and the brutality of racial segregation, the community lost access to the sea’s bounty. The act enabled municipalities to forcibly remove people living in areas designated as slums, part of a broader system of urban control where slum clearance was linked to spatial reorganisation and allocation of land along racial lines.
After resistance and protests by the Kalk Bay community, the Kalk Bay Housing Scheme was approved in 1938. As a compromise, the “Fishermen’s Flats” were built in the 1940s, tucked away behind shops and restaurants. A small group of descendants still live in these flats. Kwaai grew up there but now lives in nearby Clovelly.
In 1967, Kalk Bay was declared a whites-only suburb under the Group Areas Act. Thousands of families who made their living from fishing were forcibly removed to places such as Steenberg and Retreat down the line, and to other parts of the Cape Flats.
This had a devastating effect on many fishing families, says Kwaai. “People had to travel by train to come in, and that was when there weren’t cellphones and weather apps.” Sometimes people would leave their homes and not be able to go out to sea because the southeaster was blowing.
“You’ve spent this train fare ... or you’ve come to sleep in a family member’s house on the floor, hoping that you can go to sea the next morning, and then you can’t go to sea and you must just go back home tired and with less money than you had,” she says.
Apartheid also declared some beaches off limits to coloured people. “We were harvesting in St James and Danger Beach, and suddenly we didn’t have access to those spaces or those beaches. We lost that part of ourselves.
“We lost that important indigenous practice that kept us connected to the sea, taught us what reciprocity meant and taught us about custodianship,” she says.
Today there is a different kind of exclusion happening, an economic one. Gentrification along the main road and beachfront is rife, says Kwaai. According to Property24, the average listing price for a three-bedroom home in the village is about R10m, making it unaffordable for most people. In 2018, the suburb was declared “one of the coolest” in the world by Forbes magazine.
This is one of the reasons Kwaai’s work is important. “With gentrification, with restaurants being built all along the beach area and restricting us again, this is like modern-day apartheid,” she says.
One of Kwaai’s initiatives is The Sea Is in Our Blood, a photo exhibition that acknowledges displaced and erased memories of the original communities who lived along the False Bay coast.
Kwaai says the exhibition at the Olympia Gallery includes images of the local darts and rugby club, a big thing in the community at the time. It features photos dating back more than 100 years.
“This is why it’s important. It’s about creating spaces of belonging, not just for the Kalk Bay community but also for people of colour who come to Kalk Bay who didn’t know there was an indigenous community,” she says. “I wanted it to feel like you were inside a family member’s home, where you have these pictures that are beautifully framed.”
The exhibition went up two days before Christmas last year. For Kwaai it felt like an early present. “I love how people come down to the wall and say: ‘Oh, that’s my uncle.’”
She says getting all the photographs was a long process and it was important to gain trust. “There is something extractive in the work that I’m doing, even though the work is for us, for all of us.”
Another of her projects is The Walk of Remembrance in the suburb. Through this, she takes groups to landmark sites and explains their significance. She emphasises that it is not a normal tour.
“We’re not here picking apples and drinking wine. We’re sitting with stories that are uncomfortable,” Kwaai tells the FM. “We’re making the waters muddy, we’re sitting with hard conversations, difficult conversations, but it makes the work powerful and it mends the spaces where we work, where communities like mine don’t own land.”
Kwaai’s involvement in the community doesn’t end there. She also started the Fisher Child Projekt, a nonprofit that aims to educate young people about the ocean.
“We show them how to harvest, we do beach cleanups. We teach them about plastic pollution and microplastics. We do a lot of educational stuff. We teach them to snorkel so they can connect to the ocean again.”
She talks proudly about some of the children in her group who have gone on to get qualifications in free diving. “They started scared and now they’re confident … It feels good to work in my community,” says Kwaai.
We lost that important indigenous practice that kept us connected to the sea, taught us what reciprocity meant and taught us about custodianship
— Traci Kwaai
Kalk Bay harbour was one of the stops for minister of forestry, fisheries & environment Dion George during his April “Fishing for Freedom” tour, where he met small-scale fishers and harbour stakeholders.
He says fishers raised concerns about poaching, gear storage and licensing. “We are committed to working alongside communities, not above them. The people who fish these waters must be at the centre of how they’re governed,” he said.
The purpose of the tour, according to the department, was to “strengthen policy, rebuild accountability and unlock opportunity” in South Africa’s working harbours.
Another of Kwaai’s initiatives focuses on bringing together virtual reality and augmented reality technologies for a multimedia storytelling experience. This is an oral storytelling archive of a small South African fishing community. The project aims to preserve heritage for a community whose livelihoods are threatened by a lack of access to marine resources and to make these stories accessible.
Kwaai says there is not a lot of fish left in the ocean because of overfishing. This, she says, is down to human greed.
“If you were to get the oceans healthy again and make sure that fish stocks recover, you would need to give all those quotas to small-scale fishers. That is the only way you are going to save the sea.”
Kwaai says they were taught from a young age how to harvest in a way that protects the ocean. “If it’s smaller than your hand, you put it back,” she says.
Small-scale fishers, especially on the West Coast, are getting paid so little because they don’t have access to resources, she says. “They don’t consult fishers when they are making laws about quotas, about areas for harvesting,” she says, adding that small-scale fishers should also have access to the full value chain, including processing.
“You have trawlers that are catching fish while the fish are migrating to breed, so the stocks are never replenished. These are the challenges, and then there’s global warming [and the] drilling for oil and gas.
“On top of all that, restricted access has taken away our culture and our heritage.”
For Kwaai, the sea is in her blood, and she wants to make sure future generations also get to experience it.
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