Cissie Gool was a legendary political activist in Cape Town. She helped found the Non-European Unity Movement—a group of black (read also coloured) activists, who actively campaigned against the country’s racist government in the mid-20th century. Her father, Abdurahman, founded South Africa’s first national-level black political organization, the African People’s Organization. Mr. Gool also became Cape Town’s first black city councilor in 1904 when some classes of black people still had a vote. Cissie herself became a city counselor in 1938 until 1951. By then the government struck coloured representatives from elected office and stripped coloureds of the right to vote. She represented District Six, a cosmopolitan, mostly working-class coloured ghetto on the edge of the city center. She also lived there. After the white supremacist National Party gained power in 1948 it quickly made laws to prevent the “mixing” of the “races.” This included destroying communities and neighborhoods like District Six. Footnote: the “liberal” City of Cape Town stood by doing nothing. Cissie died in 1963.

By the beginning of the 1970s, District Six was reduced to rubble, its residents dumped in dormitory townships across the Cape Flats. Some were lucky to relocate to Woodstock, the next suburb over from District Six. Despite apartheid, Woodstock developed a reputation as a defiantly mixed neighborhood, not just racially but also because of the different economic classes of people living there. Most of its poor, black, and coloured residents were renters. It stayed like that until the advent of democracy in 1994. Fast forward to the present when Woodstock became the subject of gentrification. Food markets, new high-rises, and Airbnb apartments began to dot the suburb. It was not long before working-class residents of the area were being squeezed out by greedy landlords. The same began to happen in other neighborhoods with working-class black and coloured residents abutting downtown Cape Town, such as Bo-Kaap and parts of Sea Point.

The Cape Town City Council, controlled by the white-led Democratic Alliance (DA), openly sided with gentrifiers. The DA also did not have a policy for any affordable housing in areas close to or in the city center. This is when many of the coloured residents voted for it. The main opposition party in the city, the ANC, which governed nationally and held the mayoralty during the early 2000s, is riven by factionalism and hardly has time for residents’ struggles. Cape Town has a deep tradition of social movements and it was one of these, Reclaim the City (started by activists with backgrounds in the ANC and the post-apartheid AIDS movement), that began to organize these residents and introduced a new strategy: occupation. In 2018, Reclaim the City began a series of occupations of public facilities, including an abandoned state hospital in Woodstock. The new community called itself Cissie Gool House.

In the media, and for the middle classes occupation is mostly about breaking the law (and attendant anxieties about crime). But what happens inside a housing occupation? The filmmakers Dylan Valley and Annie Nisenson made No Place But Here, which first came out in 2023, and has been doing the festival rounds. In this interview, Dylan and Annie talk about housing struggles in South Africa and about why they decided to use VR or 360 media to immerse the viewer inside the occupation as well as challenge gentrification and the capitalist logic of home ownership.