People living on Table Mountain reveal hidden community on the slopes

A new article in Daily Maverick’s The Storied Mountain series has shed light on the lives of people who have quietly made their homes on the slopes of Table Mountain.

The piece follows two individuals, Anselm Sauls and Fozia Kammies, who lived for more than a decade on the mountain, sheltering behind bushes and relying on a nearby stream for water.

The story forms part of a wider series exploring the layers of life, history and ecology connected to what many know simply as Table Mountain.

A different view of the mountain

Journalist Don Pinnock said the series changed the way he saw the landmark.

“I live next to the mountain, have for many years, and suddenly I sort of flipped over the series looking at the mountain or looking at the city from the mountain in a way.”

While many residents see the mountain as wild and potentially dangerous, Pinnock said the people living there see it very differently.

According to the two residents he interviewed, the mountain represents safety.

“That mountain is their safe space. They love it. They’re up there, they know how to live in it,” Pinnock said.

From their perspective, it is the city below that poses the greater danger.

They occasionally go down into Cape Town to ‘scuttle’ for work and to shower, but otherwise remain on the mountain.

Living in the bush

The pair showed Pinnock where they lived during his visits.

Their shelter was hidden in thick bush, where a fallen log formed a natural cover over a small space.

“They’ve got everything there,” he said.

However, when Pinnock returned later to take more photographs, the pair had disappeared.

“They were gone; they’d been evicted.”

Evictions and displacement

Sleeping on Table Mountain is technically illegal, and park rangers regularly move people off the slopes.

Pinnock said rangers face pressure to act because fires sometimes start on the mountain, posing a serious risk.

“There are among them people who will get stoned, get drunk, light a fire, go to sleep, and suddenly you’ve got a disaster.”

Still, he said the people living there often struggle to understand why they are chased away.

“They say, well, what are we doing wrong?”

A hidden community on the mountain

According to Pinnock, the two residents knew several others living on the mountain, forming a small but largely invisible community.

“They know each other,” he said.

Some even view living on the mountain as preferable to building shacks in the city.

Finding them again

After the eviction, Pinnock eventually managed to track the pair down again at another location.

He is now trying to help Kammies replace her lost identity document.

He also discovered that a small angel ornament left behind in the bush was connected to a church initiative that supported people living on the streets.

A long journey back to Cape Town

Pinnock said the pair’s resilience stood out during his conversations with them.

At one point, they travelled to Johannesburg, but when things did not work out, they returned to Cape Town on foot.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he said.

“They walked to Cape Town.”

To listen to Pinnock on CapeTalk’s Good Morning Cape Town with Lester Kiewit, use the audio player below: