BRIT ABROAD: WHAT PETE’S LEARNING FROM LIVING IN MANENBERG

‘My life in Manenberg is richer, elicits more joy and has a purpose much greater than anything else I’ve experienced,’ says Brit Pete Portal who has lived for over 10 years in this Cape Town community that he describes as traumatised, neighbourly, disillusioned, vibrant, challenged and resilient | Photo: Leentjie du Preez

The middle child of a museum curator mother and educator father, Pete (39) grew up in London and Sevenoaks in Kent. His schooling at Westminster Abbey Choir School and Tonbridge School was followed by degrees at Edinburgh University and King’s College London. He’s married to Sarah, they have two children aged three and one, and they all live in Manenberg

‘When I was 15, my friends and I made false IDs, did a pub crawl down Sevenoaks High Street and ended up fighting in a kebab shop. A guy came out of the corner of the shop and split us up.

My mom thought I was going off the rails a bit and sent me on a Christian youth camp. As I got on the bus, I realised the guy ticking off names was the same guy who’d broken up our fight a week earlier. My heart sank from embarrassment, but my spirit kind of leapt. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you this, but I think I knew God was on my case.

At the camp, I saw a bunch of teenage leaders who were comfortable in their skins, secure in their identity, and kind. I heard a very simple gospel message preached, that Jesus was real, he knew everything about me and didn’t count any of it against me. That my insecurities could be redeemed and that there was a purpose for life beyond myself. Seeing how the lifestyle of the teenage leaders aligned with the message being preached was compelling. I was the easiest convert ever.

A young Pete in England with his parents and sisters, a few years before the fight in the kebab shop 😉

After school, I wanted to experience the world, but the normal British gap year of getting drunk in Australia didn’t seem particularly creative, so I taught English to theological students in Indonesia. Afterwards, I went to Edinburgh Uni and studied religious studies because I figured that faith and intellect needn’t be opposites. There, I was invited by a Christian Union friend called Andy on a mission trip to Paarl, a small town outside Cape Town.

I said no because I thought I was going through a cool phase and didn’t want to do anything connected with Christian Union. A shoulder op also stood in the way. Andy suggested I try to change it, not something that’s easy in the NHS, but I called the surgeon’s secretary. She asked why I wanted to change it and when I told her my plans for a Paarl mission trip, she said she was a Christian, and she was from Paarl! ‘Forgive me for saying this,’ she said, ‘But I think God is probably saying, go!’

So, in some way, I think God hijacked me and got me to come to SA. I packed up my T-shirts like a classic Brit abroad, thinking a South African winter would be hot. It wasn’t. We arrived in July 2007, and honestly achieved little of lasting worth. We visited Drakenstein Prison intending to share the gospel with prison gangsters through volleyball. It turned out that they didn’t want to play volleyball, and we were useless at it. We wore T-shirts with bible verses on them. Think of all the cringe factors that you would put together in a caricature of clueless students abroad, and that was us.

Top pic: Pete on his first mission trip to Cape Town. ‘Think of all the cringe factors that you would put together in a caricature of clueless students abroad, and that was us,’ he says. Bottom pic: Making South African friends several years later 

Once we realised volleyball was a waste of everyone’s time, we simply sat and chatted with the prisoners. Guys with ‘F*** THE WORLD’ emblazoned on their foreheads told us of the heinous crimes they’d committed. But they also told us their back stories of grinding poverty, systemic injustice, neglect, abuse. We heard the same stories of trauma in a church youth group we connected with there. I was like, ‘What the hell is this? Is this the equality that Mandela’s democracy bought? It’s still so segregated. Why can’t I see anyone protesting about it?’ I’ve subsequently realised that many people here are giving their lives to pursuing racial equity and justice, but I couldn’t see past the glaring issues back then, and the situation wound me up.

Two of the more intense types in our group set up a 24-hour prayer room in our accommodation, where we ended up weeping and crying out for these people in round-the-clock prayer. I’ve recently been learning about travailing prayer and I think it’s what we were doing by accident. It’s a kind of cry to God of despair that you are offering to Him in tears and utter powerlessness. Like the Israelites calling out to God in slavery, Hannah in the temple crying out for a child, Jesus weeping over Jerusalem. So even though we didn’t achieve much on that trip, I think it was very formative for all of us. In my case, I believe God formed in me a particular heart for young men who feel they have no option but to join gangs and take drugs.

 easy prey

I went back to uni obsessed with South Africa. After graduating I worked in children’s TV for a few months and, after fundraising like mad, came back to South Africa in 2009 with Andy, a volunteer visa and enough funds to last a year. We joined a South African NPO called Fusion in an area called Manenberg.

While on the one hand Manenberg is a thriving community of neighbourliness and vibrancy, there’s no escaping the fact that it faces many challenges. It was established during apartheid for people the regime deemed ‘coloured’ or mixed-race, who were forcibly removed from their homes and left on its raw and dusty land. Just over 3km² and 20km out of town, it has a population of around 80 000 and poor services, facilities and policing. Part of the sheer injustice of it was that households and neighbours were deliberately split up, producing many traumatised and disillusioned families who couldn’t always care well for their sons and grandsons. In turn, these guys became easy prey for gangsterism and drug abuse.

‘While Manenberg is a thriving community of neighbourliness and vibrancy, there’s no escaping the fact that it faces many challenges,’ says Pete. ‘It was created by the apartheid regime for people to live in whom it had forcibly removed from their homes, deliberately splitting up households and neighbours. This produced many traumatised and disillusioned families who couldn’t always care well for their sons and grandsons’  | Photos: Freddie Reed

‘Manenberg homes are often small and crowded, so life is lived on the streets: kids playing, people sitting and talking. It’s hyper-local,’ says Pete | Photos: Leentjie du Preez (top) and Bev Meldrum (bottom)

Fusion’s vision was to support anyone moving out of gangsterism and drugs. For the first year we focused largely on relationship building. We drove into Manenberg from the suburbs, played with kids, interacted with people and prayer-walked hundreds of hours on the streets. Manenberg homes are often small and crowded, so life is lived on the streets: kids playing, people sitting and talking. It’s hyper-local. A trip to the beach is only an annual treat for many. It’s a worshipping community, with no atheists that I’ve met. It’s about 60% Christian, 40% Muslim. Unemployment among Manenberg youth is shockingly high.

As our group walked and prayed, we interacted and began to learn the rhythms of community life: the call to prayer on a Friday, the different school uniforms of the kids walking home, bin day for a certain corner of Manenberg, the unexceptional things that make up the fabric of a community.

As Pete and his colleagues walked and prayed in Manenberg, they began to learn the community’s rhythms | Photo: Freddie Reed

Before long I started to feel that it wasn’t cutting it to drive into Manenberg every day and hand out hugs, sandwiches and opinions, then drive home again to a leafy suburb. After a year, Andy returned to the UK, and it felt like a no-brainer for me to move in with some of the young men we had met. To see if we could establish a kind of brotherhood that could replace the counterfeit brotherhood of gang life.

If I moved in, I also reasoned, I’d need the local community to help me, rather than the other way round, and this would create reciprocity and relationship. No one in Manenberg could care less if you have a degree. If you can’t hang a door, wire a plug or mix cement, none of which I could do, you just look pathetic, which I definitely felt. And so in I moved, and bridges began to be built. I moved into a maisonette in the heart of the territory of a gang called Hard Livings.

Although I’d been mugged and robbed on that university mission trip to Paarl, I was clueless about what I was getting myself into by moving to Manenberg. I started off living with a guy, D, and we managed to wean him off heroin for a while, but his mum was dealing heroin from their home so it was like striking a match in the wind.

Pete’s first home in Manenberg, in which he lived with ‘D’ | Photo: Bev Meldrum

Before the year was out, almost everything I owned had been stolen from my house by various people. Then, while I was reversing my car into my car port, a bunch of guys pointed a gun at me and took my wallet and phone. It was a horror show. The one thing I had left was my laptop. I wrote on it, ‘God, I’m completely done. If you want me to do this for the rest of my life I’ll do it, but would you just give me a wife to do it with?’ I closed the laptop and went away for the weekend. Three hours later I met Sarah.

When I first saw her, she was sitting with a group of friends who were all listening intently as she talked. I remember thinking, ‘Who is she?!’ I managed to get to chat to her and was very taken by her physical beauty, intellect, compassion, refusal to toe the party line and anger about inequality. There was a synergy we sensed and voiced over so many things, even over wanting to adopt children because of all the tiny humans in the world needing parents.

I rather awkwardly arranged a dinner date with Sarah, but before we even entered the restaurant, D called, crying, to say he felt close to relapsing, and could I come home? So I drove Sarah into Manenberg to see how he was. Sarah seemed fine about it. Only later did I learn that she’d never been to Manenberg before, knew various people who’d been killed or beaten up there, and was really scared the whole time.

Three hours after praying for a wife to help him with his work in Manenberg, an exhausted Pete met a young woman called Sarah. An ‘awkwardly’ arranged dinner date with her ended up being an emergency dash to Manenberg to support D. Sarah didn’t let on that she’d never been into Manenberg and was really scared 

I was completely obsessed with Sarah and we started going out. A month into our relationship, her mom Diana discovered she had breast cancer that had metastasised. It was devastating. I spent a fair amount of time with Diana at the hospice and started to twig about the timing of the prayer I’d prayed about finding a wife and meeting Sarah. I was able to tell Diana that we were chatting about getting engaged and she was stoked. Very sadly, she died soon after.

So there was me feeling like a failure in my Manenberg life and Sarah in her grief being told by a counsellor not to make big life decisions, but five months after her mom died, we got married! What a companion to have by my side. We lived in Cape Town’s southern suburbs for a while, then went to London to do master’s degrees to help us with our work in Manenberg. When we returned we both felt God calling us to buy a house in Manenberg with some money Sarah’s mom had left her, and to live in it with young men looking to change their lives. 

We bought a ‘renovator’s dream’, two three-bed dwellings with a shared wall, on the edge of Manenberg rather than the centre of gang territory to prevent our residents being targeted. We moved into it in 2014 and did a crowd funder to renovate it as it was crumbling. Hundreds of people donated all kinds of amounts from R100 [US$6] upwards and we raised enough to turn it into a welcoming home for guys trying to leave gangs and drugs behind. Friends and well-wishers donated beds and furniture.

Above: Sarah with mom Diana, whom she lost to cancer not long after becoming romantically involved with Pete. Below: Despite advice from a counsellor not to make big decisions for a while after losing her mom, Sarah married Pete five months later | Bottom photo: Rebecca Groves

A house in the street where Pete and Sarah bought a home after feeling God calling them to live in Manenberg with young men looking to change their lives. A crowdfunder and furniture donations enabled them to transform their crumbling purchase into a welcoming home for former gangsters

We called the house Cru62 after God’s redemptive promises in Isaiah chapter 62. In the early days, Sarah, D (who’d now been clean for two years) and I ran the house with six residents. It was slow and brutal, with knife fights and drug smuggling. We were constantly putting out fires, breaking up fights, giving lifts, running after people. We lived in the back home and the young men lived in the front home with a supervisor. You could hear everything through the walls all night long. We never switched off. It was very wearing but we saw emotional and spiritual growth in these guys that we hadn’t experienced before when working nine to five with the NGO. So, it was glorious as well as brutal. Guys coming off drugs and finding God became the norm.

Cru62 residents on a Manenberg evening. In the early days Sarah, Pete and D, who had now been off drugs for two years, lived in community with six young men | Photo: Freddie Reed

Sarah with some of the Cru62 guys

As far as I can tell, the main reason the guys want to come out of gangsterism and drugs is exhaustion. If you can get them one on one, they’ll often open their hearts and cry. They’re waving a white flag and saying, ‘I give up, this sucks.’ I’ve never met a happy gangster. The first couple of weeks in Cru62, they generally just sleep. For many it’s the first time in ages they can sleep in a bed without a gun under their pillow, waking up at every bang in the street. Being addicted to a drug with ever-diminishing returns is also exhausting. I think there’s so much for us to learn from these guys because many of us, too, are addicted to habits that offer diminishing returns, such as endlessly scrolling our phones for dopamine hits.

Talk to any guy about why they joined a gang, and they’ll tell you it’s about security and belonging. We all want these and if I’d grown up in Manenberg, I’d probably have looked for it in those same places. The trouble is that when you join a gang you’re selling your soul, so you’re not ultimately getting security. I think that at Cru62 you can sleep not only because you are recovering from the paranoia and exhaustion of continuous trauma but  because you recognise there’s a safety, an authenticity in the air.

Above: Pete in front of the Cru62 house. ‘I’ve never met a happy gangster,’ he says. ‘I think there’s so much for us to learn from these guys because many of us are also addicted to habits that offer diminishing returns, such as endlessly scrolling our phones for dopamine hits’ | Photo: Leentjie du Preez

At Cru62, our community model resembles both the gang model and the old monastic model in that it involves rites of passage and growing into a place of greater responsibility. In a gang, if you’re a young guy, you follow the older guys who show you how to use a gun, and you work your way up through the gangs by shooting and killing people. At Cru62, you work your way into new stages of discipleship through monthly markers. First you get a bracelet, then a T-shirt, then a tracksuit, plus increased responsibility as you go.

‘At Cru62, our community model resembles both the gang model and the old monastic model where you work your way up,’ says Pete. ‘In a gang, you work your way up through killing people. At Cru62, first you get a bracelet, then a T-shirt, then a tracksuit, plus increased responsibility as you go’

After five years we were running at full capacity with seven guys who were actually staying rather than running away, and we were having to turn away tearful gangsters knocking on our gates and saying, ‘We’ve heard we can get free here, can we come and live with you?’ A church in the UK gave us money to buy a building nearby and we crowdfunded to do that up, too. One of the first Cru graduates is currently living there with his wife, daughter and brother.

What we later learnt is that early recovery from drugs with people around who care for you is the easy bit. The hard bit is reintegration back into normal life, working night shifts packing groceries in a depot where no-one cares about you. So there are often relapses. Someone once asked what our success rate was, and Sarah said it was 100%. I thought, ‘What is my wife on?’ But she said, ‘God never asked us to get people off drugs. He asked us to move into Manenberg, to open our home to those seeking help they can’t get anywhere else, and to love them as best we can. We’ve done that for each one of them, so if that’s the goal, the success rate is 100%.’

Sarah: ‘God never asked us to get people off drugs. He asked us to move into Manenberg, to open our home to those seeking help they can’t get anywhere else, and to love them as best we can’ | Photo: Rebecca Grove

It was so liberating for me to realise that I wasn’t actually in control of the decisions people make, that I couldn’t invade another person’s will. Finally I understood that not even Jesus could get his disciples to do what he wanted. The pressure was off. What a huge gift.

I now see success as being not how many people have stayed clean, but am I being faithful to what I believe is my contribution to the world? When we do see fruit at the house, it’s probably just as much because of a faithful praying auntie, or because someone making astute policies in government years ago sowed a seed we’ll never know. I think we’re all part of a cosmic story. The world feeds us a mythical, individualised version of success, but in fact we control very little.

We started Tree of Life, a church and NPO, in Manenberg in 2013. It has 12 staff members, some of whom grew up in Manenberg and others who have relocated here. We all have our stories of trauma, healing and God’s faithfulness that reflect the cultures we grew up in. When things get challenging, everyone’s stuff comes out, so the staff are often our primary ministry as we all muddle along together. A young staff member who’d come out of gangs and drugs got caught in crossfire and began tearing up with the trauma of it. He said, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I never used to feel like this when I was a gangster’. I said to him, ‘I think this is what happens when God replaces your heart of stone with a heart of flesh. You begin to feel again.’

A Tree of Life staff party. Pete and Sarah were part of a team that started Tree of Life Church and NPO in Manenberg. It now has a staff complement of 12, some of whom grew up in Manenberg while others have relocated there. ‘We all have our stories of trauma, healing and God’s faithfulness that reflect the cultures we grew up in,’ says Pete

Lows during my time in Manenberg have included death threats, including some from some loose-cannon young gangsters. We spoke to one of their leaders and he was very apologetic. It sounds like a dangerous thing to do, but we’re not running drugs, we’re not threatening someone’s turf, we’re simply trying to work for the prosperity of the community. Gang leaders are often just older versions of the same guys we’ve got in our house.

In addition to the guys’ home, we run a home called Basila House for women who’ve come out of abuse and the addiction that they fell into in order to cope. Life can be chaotic here at the best of times. Sometimes it’s young children who haven’t yet learnt healthy boundaries. Other times, being on the edge of one of Manenberg’s most contested gang territories, it’s people testing their guns out on the perimeter wall.

a slice of hope

And yet it’s a little piece of heaven on earth and one of my current joys is going round there and experiencing the sense of freedom, lightness and laughter there. Women there are healing from abuse and violence that may have started very early in their lives, safe from abusive relationships and addiction. Their kids are growing up with emotional and physical needs met, there’s a garden with herbs, fruit and well-tended grass, a classroom, a prayer room. Nothing broken, nothing missing: the definition of the Hebrew shalom. A slice of healing and hope right on the edge of violence.

Tree of Life set up Basila House in Manenberg for women who have come out of abuse and addiction. ‘One of my current joys is going round there and experiencing the sense of freedom, lightness and laughter there,’ says Pete

Another joy is watching guys into whom you’ve invested everything you’ve got begin to pass on what they’ve learnt and live it out. There’s nothing better than that. Changed lives and relationships are all I’ll ever take with me when I die.

Initially, I only moved to Manenberg for two years and I think for a long time my mom thought it was a glorified gap year, and maybe I would go on to be a human rights lawyer or something. She does worry about us all, but she and my dad and my sisters have stayed with us in Manenberg and my dad came to a worship event that we did at the church. Despite him being used to rural Anglicanism, he called it ‘astonishing’. He even teared up.

Some people like to turn what we do into a kind of exceptional thing but this honestly romanticises what we do. It’s often pretty banal, we’re not dodging bullets all the time especially as we’ve got kids now and make different choices. Hearing gunshots never becomes normal, and often moves me to pray, but when a gun fight starts up, I stay home and catch up on admin or clean the house.

we all long to get applauded

I do think the world has become sick by pursuing the wrong type of success. There’s such a need to be seen and admired. Jesus talks about it as gaining the world but losing your soul, whether you’re flagging up a curated life for others to see, the number of zeroes in your bank account, or virtue signalling. We all long to get applauded by the world, and we’ve become a deformed version of who God created us to be because the only frame of reference we have is whatever culture currently admires.

Being interviewed for this article brings that very danger. Just because I live in Manenberg doesn’t mean I’m any better than other people. I’m still as conceited and selfish as anyone else. At the end of the day, it might seem unusual for someone not born in Manenberg to choose to move here. But the fact is there are 80,000 people living everyday life here, many of whom aren’t in gangs or on drugs, who’ve learnt to live with resilience in what can be hard circumstances. To us it was a logical step to live alongside our friends, community and workplace, and to make conscious choices to go against the racial segregation that persists despite the dismantling of apartheid.

Pete: ‘Some people like to turn what we do into a kind of exceptional thing but this honestly romanticises what we do. Being interviewed for this article brings that very danger. Just because I live in Manenberg doesn’t mean I’m any better than other people. I’m still as conceited and selfish as anyone else. There are 80 000 people living everyday life here who’ve learnt to live with resilience in what can be hard circumstances’  | Photo: Leentjie du Preez

I go through times of discouragement but I feel more convinced than ever about what we’re doing and the need for it. Jesus talked about life in its fullness coming when you orientate your life toward God and for others. Increasingly, I’m realising that to be true. Despite the “inconvenience” of where I live, the relentless traffic, even Manenberg being one of the few places in Cape Town where you can’t get things delivered to your home, my life here is richer, elicits more joy and has a purpose much greater than anything else I’ve experienced. It’s like God’s prescription for human flourishing.

beautifully ordinary

Our team at Tree of Life realised the other day that we’re kind of living in the prayers we prayed 15 years ago. It feels really ordinary. The banal, boring stuff is still there: unprompted calls from telemarketers, bad drivers, sickness. But I think there is something quite beautifully ordinary and incremental about this life. The changes are unshowy, tiny, easily missable, but the prayers we prayed for our journey in Manenberg are being answered.

When Sarah and I started the process of adoption, we prayed that our social worker wouldn’t hold our life choices against us, namely that we were living with a bunch of guys coming out of gangs and drugs. But it turned out she’d seen a film we had made about a guy called Maruwaan who came off drugs at Cru62, and she said she was all for us. We had an agonising wait, but eventually Simi came to us aged nine months and our son Luca at five months.

Sarah with Maruwaan, a former Cru62 resident. When the Portals started the adoption process they were concerned that living with guys like Maruwaan as they came off drugs would put them at a disadvantage to adopt. However, it was because their social worker had previously seen a video about transformation in Maruwaan’s life that she recommended them as adoptive parents

Becoming a parent has been glorious. My angst over “ministry success” has been redefined entirely. Now if there’s a runaway or something going on, I’m like, ‘I’m sorry, I’m putting my kid to bed.’ The joy and the delight of being their parents is just an inestimable privilege. Everyone tells me over and over again to remember how quickly it goes, and in the hard times I have to remind myself of that! But it’s happening already. Suddenly, you look around and your daughter’s memorising the words to songs. Luca still wakes a bit through the night and when he’s not sleeping it’s draining but I’m sure we’ll look back on this and only remember the affection and tenderness of it.

The Portals went through an agonising wait for their children, Simi and Luca. But becoming a parent has been ‘glorious’, says Pete | Photos: Leentjie du Preez

Pete with Waydin, one of Cru62’s first graduates. ‘Despite the “inconvenience” of where I live, my life is richer, elicits more joy and has a purpose much greater than anything else I’ve experienced. It’s like God’s prescription for human flourishing,’ says Pete | Photo: Leentjie du Preez 

The Portals with some of their ‘beautiful network of friends’ in Manenberg. ‘It would be easy for someone to say, “Oh no, not another one of them,” says Pete. ‘And hands up, I’ve got to own it! But 16 years into my time in Manenberg, there is actually some fruit.’ From left to right: Simi, Sarah, Kiyano, Ziah, Waydin, Michaela, Luca and Pete. Waydin and his wife and family live on the Portals’ property | Photo: Leentjie du Preez

We recognise that if living in Manenberg was having a significantly negative effect on our children for whatever reason, we’d have to make choices differently, because we’ve seen people throw their kids under the ministry bus, which can result in kids growing up traumatised as well as angry with God. But this isn’t going to be our default setting. All of our closest friends and most of the godparents to our kids live in Manenberg, and we now share our home with one of the first guys who came through our programme many years ago, as well as his wife and child. If we were ever to move out of Manenberg, we’d be moving away from this beautiful network of friends.

Sarah and I cope with the challenges of our choices in various ways. Like the Tree of Life staff members, we have a monthly counselling session. We make sure we value the beauty of Cape Town and try to enjoy it whenever we can. There’s a trail run in Newlands Forest that I love doing in the shade in summer that gives me much joy. I run, think, drink from the stream, and pray. Swimming in the ocean and weekends away with friends are great, too.

healing centre for the whole of Manenberg

We’re keen to start a healing place, for many more Manenberg residents, that doesn’t require you to be coming out of drugs, crime or abuse. We’d like to offer the whole community what we’ve learnt in the men and women’s houses, plus after-school classes for kids, grief and family reconciliation support, a social enterprise start-up space, a safe place for people of all ages to come and hang, and for 24-7 prayer to be offered there night and day. The possibilities are almost endless.

We’ve found a former tavern built by the apartheid regime that we want to buy. Such buildings were often constructed as a containment strategy to keep whole communities addicted and politically lethargic. It’s a double storey, bunker-type building with a car park in an accessible part of Manenberg that doesn’t shut down during gang fights. It’s been used for other things since apartheid days but it’s now needing work. We’ve had it checked out structurally and would love it to reach its full potential.

‘We’re keen to start a healing place for many more Manenberg residents,’ says Pete. Tree of Life is fundraising to turn this apatheid-buiilt former tavern into a centre for the whole community. ‘Such buildings were often constructed as a containment strategy to keep whole communities addicted and politically lethargic, ‘ says Pete. ‘The redemption of space this would represent would be really beautiful.’ | Photo: Leentjie du Preez

On 27 September 2024, we started a 45-day crowdfunder to raise R4 million [176 000 pounds] to buy it. We’re asking for people who can donate to give what they can, and for people who can’t give to share our link. Thundafund told us this would be the biggest once-off crowdfunder in South Africa over such a short period, which is quite exciting. It’s a big ask but If we don’t raise the whole amount through the crowdfunder, we believe God has plenty of other means to provide for our needs. But it would be very cool if we raised the whole amount now so we can get going with the vision! If we get more than R4 million, the extra will go into renovating the building. We’ll probably call it Manenberg Healing Centre.

redemption

Doing this would represent a redemption of space, I think, which would be really beautiful. I believe that when things that represent pain or oppression become redeemed and life-giving, it’s classic God. He can make all things new.’

On 27 September 2024, Tree of Life started a 45-day crowdfunder to raise R4 million [US$233 000] to buy the former tavern. If  successful, this would be South Africa’s biggest ever short-term crowdfunder. If any extra money is raised, it will go to renovating the building which, while structurally sound, is in need of work  | Photo: Leentjie du Preez

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