STORY 57
Next time you drive west on the N2 from Somerset West toward Cape Town, pay attention to the moment the road changes. One minute you are at traffic lights, weaving through intersections. Then you cross the R44 interchange near Somerset Mall and suddenly you are on a proper dual-carriageway freeway, wide lanes, no intersections, no traffic lights, smooth and fast all the way to Cape Town.
Most people assume that is simply how the road was built. It is not.
Before the freeway existed, the route between the Helderberg and Cape Town ran along the R102 — the old coastal road that preceded the N2, slower and more intimate with the landscape it crossed, the road that generations of Helderberg residents used before the engineers arrived with their bulldozers and their ambitions. The R102 is still there, running alongside or beneath the freeway in places, its original alignment visible in the frontage roads that line it.
The N2 arrived in the late 1960s and early 1970s, part of one of the largest road-building programmes in South Africa’s history. The vision was a modern national artery connecting the Cape Peninsula with the eastern regions of the country. The section approaching the Helderberg was constructed to full freeway standard, two lanes each way, proper interchanges, the infrastructure of a national road built for the long term. The plan was to continue eastward through Somerset West and beyond Sir Lowry’s Pass.
Building a road requires workers and workers require somewhere to live. One of the principal contractors involved in major road construction during this era was Savage and Lovemore, one of South Africa’s leading civil engineering firms. To house the workforce, temporary construction camps “padkampe” were established near the works. One such camp stood at Eerste River. For a few years it became a community of its own: hundreds of workers and their families, children enrolled in the local school, money spent in local shops, temporary houses on land that would revert to other purposes when the contract ended. Then the camp disappeared. The road moved on. The workers followed the next contract. The temporary houses were removed. The local school that had briefly benefited from the additional enrolments eventually closed. The “padkamp” at Eerste River existed for a few years and then ceased to exist, leaving almost no trace, one of the invisible communities that roads leave behind them as they move through a landscape.
And then the freeway reached Paardevlei. And stopped.
Paardevlei was not empty land. It was a settled community that had grown up around the AECI explosives factory over decades, families who had lived there for generations, who had built their lives in the shadow of the factory and the surrounding infrastructure. The freeway that was supposed to continue eastward through Somerset West would have cut directly through that community. The planners expected this would happen. The community decided otherwise.
In an era when government planners were not known for accommodating local objections and when the apartheid state had shown a comprehensive willingness to demolish communities that stood in the way of infrastructure projects, the people of Paardevlei resisted. The details of that resistance are not fully recorded in any public archive. But the result is recorded in concrete and asphalt every time you drive the N2 through Somerset West.
The freeway ends at the R44 interchange. It has ended there since the 1970s. Every Helderberg resident who has ever sat impatiently at the N2 traffic lights through Somerset West, calculating the extra minutes the intersections add to the journey to Cape Town, is experiencing the legacy of that decision.
Beneath the modern asphalt, much of the original concrete roadway poured more than half a century ago still lies intact. The road that was supposed to go further sits under the surface of the road that was actually built, its ambitions preserved in the material it was made from.
Roads shape communities. Everyone knows this. But sometimes communities shape roads. The people of Paardevlei stopped a national freeway with their presence and their refusal to move.
They won. It is worth knowing that.
Between You and Me:
Every Helderberg resident who has ever sat at the N2 traffic lights in Somerset West wondering why there is no freeway through the town is sitting with a question that has an answer. The answer is that the community that was in the way refused to move and the road stopped. I find this quietly extraordinary. The apartheid state was not known for its sensitivity to the wishes of communities it had decided to relocate. And yet here is the traffic light. Here is the intersection. Here is the evidence, in asphalt and frustration, that sometimes a community’s refusal to move is simply more powerful than the road that was coming for it. The commute is longer. The community is still there.
Historian – Harmen Bockelenberg
Next week: the day the mountain became a racetrack — the Gordon’s Bay hill climb and the film that almost disappeared.
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