When in Dunoon - Travel Journals

It feels like a sietch. The cloistered air. The humidity, the smells of houses and bodies packed too close together. There's so little room to plant here, in Dunoon. Someone needs that space to put up another mjondolo (shack/shanty.) The places of communion and engagement are the watering holes that don't really sell water. you're fucked if you think you'll get your self a non-alcoholic beer.

The drain's mouths are open and they drool malodourously  nito the semi-paved streets.

I do notice a lot of Temporary autonomous Zone traits in this town. No police station. No bank branches or ATMs  until you cross the M5 to Milnerton. Speaking of Milnerton, that's where the nearest pig farm is. I mean police station. Any way, this town speaks loudly to me of neglect and ruinous policy from the Western Cape government. But there is potential here. Subconsciously (sometimes automatically) and actively, these people live anarchic lives. There is a community college here. The teachers are people who's roofs I shared and words I ate. They collect their own garbage here, using a system that needs no go-betweens and government mediation. There is no Commissioner of Oaths here. The contracts they  partake in are mostly self-created and self-sustained. The government services there are water and electricity and even that's not to be found everywhere.

Something about the abject poverty has moved the minds of these people from pitiful to hardened self-sufficient bodies. The learned i met there, were well learned.  Funny thing is, there are huge petrol silos and building supply warehouses and companies just across the road. Mega-industria aren't too far too. Just a ew hundred meters and if you stand on the tallest shack, they are easy to see. The developments that happen around Dunoon never happen inside Dunoon. And development is a very verbose term for what actually does happen in Dunoon.

As expected, there are small gangs there, protecting a corner they deem theirs. There's a small entrenched Rastafarian community. Dancehall and Reggae can often be heard, filtering through cardboard walls and hovering over tin roofs like ganja smoke.

Best believe there;s no room to bathe. Buckets and basins for us, then.

In a taxi, as I looked at Table mountain, on my way tp the inner city, I even thought about grabbing 101 people from Dunoon and occupying the base of it. I know just the spot I wanna occupy. I even started reading Ecology and Permaculture literature, looking for a water and a food discipline for mountain-bound people. But I was having moses dreams again.

I looked back to where Dunoon relatively was, and I thought to my self: maybe the Chaotic Front could have a home here... Maybe it already does.