Rough sleepers: The mountain keeps us

For most people, Table Mountain is a backdrop – a postcard or a hiking spot, a place to visit and leave behind. But for Anselm Sauls and his partner, Fozia Kammies, it has been home for 11 years. Not metaphorically. Literally home.

Their shelter is a hollow beneath thick bushes, tucked behind a long fallen log where a small stream threads past. It’s a place they found not by accident but almost by instinct – a place that, in their telling, revealed itself.

“The mountain protects you,” Anselm says. “The city is dangerous. Here, if you come with an open heart, nature will teach you, not klap you.”

His logic is firm, unquestioned, part spiritual, part hard-earned experience. After more than a decade living rough on the slopes above Cape Town, he and Fozia know every rustle, every bird call, every rise of wind. “Your ears open here,” she explains. “You can sleep, but you hear everything.”

Both have come a long road to reach this hollow in the trees.

From shelters to the slopes

Anselm’s life has never followed a straight line. Born in East London, grew up in Mitchells Plain, raised by a loving but complicated family with an alcoholic mother, he bounced between Cape Town and Joburg, learning trades – vinyl flooring, electrical wiring, plumbing – while trying to find a place that felt steady.

Shelters became his fallback from 2010 onward. He worked inside them, fixed their cameras, even learnt how their internal politics worked: “It’s not the rules. It’s the people. The management. Some want to manipulate you because they’ve got everything and you’ve got nothing.”

For a while he and Fozia tried to get life together in Johannesburg, but it didn’t work out, so they walked back to Cape Town along the N1 highway. Yes, you read right: walked. “It took us over two weeks,” Anselm says. “Its more than 1,000km. Fozia walked the whole way in slops. She had shoes but she didn’t like walking in them because they were heavy.”

“My feet were finished,” she admits, “but we made it.”

During Covid, Anselm found himself swept into the notorious Strandfontein homeless camp, an experience he remembers clearly and painfully. “Imagine a guy who struggles for one meal a day,” he says. “Now you put him in a tent with 1,000 people and feed him six times a day. So of course he eats... and eats. Then he gets sick, really badly sick. The things you see… the things you smell… people weren’t meant to live like that.” He stayed nearly three months.

When he finally returned to the city, dazed and exhausted, he and Fozia tried another shelter. It didn’t last. “One night I said, ‘I can’t anymore’,” she recalls. “He said, ‘I can’t anymore either’. So I told him: The mountain.”

“One of the best things she’s ever done,” he laughs. “She took me to my dream.”

Fozia’s path to the mountain

Fozia’s story begins in District Six. Born in 1974 – the very year the apartheid government began demolishing the area – she grew up in Scottsville before life spiralled into the streets. She hid on the beach in Sea Point until a woman who’d been watching her for days offered her food, kindness and a place in a shelter.

“I learned a lot in the shelter,” she says. “The rules weren’t the problem. It’s the personalities. But I progressed.” From Kraaifontein to Ceres, then back again, she built routines, friendships and skills. And eventually, she met Anselm – a wiry, talkative handyman fixing wiring in the roof.

They worked together on Expanded Public Works Programme projects, cleaning Brackenfell’s streets, clearing litter, finding something like purpose. But when the shelters became too chaotic, when the city felt too sharp and unsafe, she made her choice: “I told him, let’s go to the mountain.”

Life under the log

Their daily rhythm is simple: wake at four or five with the birds. Smoke a first cigarette, listen to the stream, check the morning for signs of snakes or scorpions. By sunrise they’re already descending into the city.

“We skarrel,” Anselm says with a shrug. “A bit of this and that. Carrying boxes for people. Helping older ladies from the college. Running to the shops. Cleaning bins for the women who work in the neighbourhood.”

People know their faces, trust them, greet them by name. Some slip them R20, others ask for a hand with small tasks. “He likes talking,” Fozia smiles. “People just start loving us. They motivate us.”

“We don’t do bins,’ says Anselm. You get people that do bins. You get people that do cans. You get homeless that drop. You get homeless that con people. You have them all on the streets. Everybody has a category.”

They shower twice a week at a facility in Woodstock. They buy what food they can, sometimes sharing bread or spare things with others. They know which street corners are safe and which will “stick you” – attack you – for simply walking past with a woman.

“Cape Town is dangerous,” Anselm says firmly. “Up here, we feel safe. But you must stay aware. Never sleep too deeply. Never forget nature will warn you – or teach you.”

Storms are hard, winter nights are bitter. Once, a tree fell directly over their heads. Another time they heard the voices of the old washerwomen – the ghosts of slaves who once laundered clothes along the river. “I heard them singing,” Fozia says. “Clear as anything. Washing and singing. I sat up – no one. Lay down. Heard them again.”

She tells the story without fear. “They look after us,” she shrugs. “The washerwomen, a boy with the flute. They’ve been here long before us.”

Philosophy of the mountain

Ask them what the mountain teaches, and their answers come fast:

“Calmness,” says Fozia.
“Awareness,” says Anselm.
“Humility,” they say together.

“You must understand who you are,” he explains. “If you come here with anger or wildness from the city, nature will smack you. But if you come humble, nature teaches.”

They live moment to moment, refusing to plan too far ahead. “If you live for tomorrow, you lose your head in here,” Anselm says. “We live in the now. Every minute. Every second.”

Yet the mountain isn’t paradise. Rangers sometimes move through, sometimes chase them off, depending on who’s on shift. “You must always be ready to move,” he says. “Half-sleeping, half-waking. Because you don’t know when someone’s going to grab your stuff and say: ‘Go.’”

Still, they return. Still, they stay.

Dreams, if life allowed them?

If someone offered decent accommodation, a safe shower, a clean bed?

“We wouldn’t think twice,” Fozia says, without hesitation. “Then I can look neat again, find work. I love working with children. I miss that.”

“And me,” Anselm adds, “I’d love to be a barista. Talk to people. Motivate them. Nobody motivated me when I needed it.”

For now, they carry the mountain with them – its calmness, its dangers, its ghosts, its protection. They know it could turn on them, or save them. They know 11 years is a long time to live under the open sky.

On Table Mountain, they’re not invisible, they’re not prey. They’re not trapped in a shelter where rules tighten like fists. They are two people carving out safety, love and meaning – in a place most people think of only as scenery.

“The mountain doesn’t belong to us,” Anselm says. “We belong to it.”

I arranged to return the following week to take more photographs, but all that was left in their green cave was a little paper angel hanging above where they slept. They had been evicted. Despite many return visits to the area, I never found them again. DM

More stories in this series:

• The flat mountain that wouldn’t behave
• What is Table Mountain? A story of Deep Time
• Hotter, drier, wilder: reinventing conservation for a changing climate
• Table Mountain’s green cloak that took 60 million years to weave
• The fluid intelligence of Table Mountain’s rivers
• What it takes to keep Table Mountain wild