​Last night, 26 June 2017, protest action in Joe Slovo in Milnerton resulted in the burning of the City of Cape Town’s Joe Slovo community hall. The hall has been severely damaged and will be closed until further notice.

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The fire damage is extensive, resulting in almost all of the ceiling boards in the main hall being destroyed. These are now littering the floor of the hall. This is particularly hard to swallow when just yesterday the Recreation and Parks Department finished extensive repairs to all ceilings boards and doors in this facility after years of motivating for the funding for these repairs.

 

No room within this facility was spared in this act of violence. The main hall and kitchen have both sustained substantial fire damage. Even the storeroom of the facility was burnt down, along with all of the recreation equipment stored within it. 

Just last week this hall was humming with children at a series of Youth Day programmes and we had weeks of holiday programmes planned for winter. Now we have had to remove staff from the facility. This is extremely discouraging for our recreation staff. The City has spent years transforming this hall into one that the community can be proud of, where in any given week nearly 2 500 children and youth visit the centre for recreation programmes.

Regular programmes at the facility include aerobics, basketball, drama and crèche programmes. The centre also had a very popular gym.

The nearest community halls are the Summer Greens Hall and the Milnerton Hall and the City’s Recreation and Parks Department will accommodate users of the Joe Slovo Hall at these centres as far as possible.

 

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