Overview

Every weekday morning, roughly 80,000 vehicles push northwards along a 3-kilometre stretch of elevated dual carriageway that hugs the northern flank of Devil's Peak. Most drivers know it as the fastest way into Cape Town's CBD from the Southern Suburbs. Few pause to consider that the road they are speeding across was, for a few extraordinary hours in March 1960, the most politically significant stretch of tarmac in South Africa.

Philip Kgosana Drive, formerly De Waal Drive, was renamed on 12 October 2017 by the City of Cape Town. The name honours Philip Ata Kgosana, a 23-year-old University of Cape Town economics student who, nine days after the Sharpeville Massacre, led between 30,000 and 50,000 protesters along this route to demand the abolition of South Africa's pass laws.

The renaming was unanimous in council, yet quietly controversial in parts of the city. This article tells the full story: the man, the march, the road's century-old origins, the modern commuter economics, the politics of the 2017 decision, and the landmarks still visible along the route today.

Philip Ata Kgosana: From Makapanstad to the front of history

Philip Kgosana was born on 12 October 1936 in Makapanstad, a village in the former Transvaal (now North West Province). He arrived in Cape Town in the late 1950s as a first-year economics student at the University of Cape Town, penniless and living in a migrant labour barracks in Langa, sharing a cubicle with a factory worker. His early rent was paid by a donation from the white liberal politician Patrick Duncan, son of a former Governor-General.

By January 1960, at age 23, Kgosana had been elected regional secretary of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) for the Western Cape. He dropped his studies to focus full-time on politics. Three months later, following the arrest of more senior PAC leaders after Sharpeville, he became, in the words of journalist Tony Heard, "for a day, the most powerful black leader in the country."

Kgosana was not a career politician in the mould of Mandela, Sisulu or Sobukwe. He was, by every serious account, an accidental leader, thrust into a moment. That he handled that moment with the discipline he did, following PAC President Robert Sobukwe's strict instruction of non-violence, is the reason he is remembered at all.

The Langa March: 30 March 1960

The march was not planned for that morning. It was spontaneous, triggered by pre-dawn police raids in Langa and Nyanga, where officers broke into migrant workers' rooms, beating and arresting men who had been participating in a PAC-led anti-pass strike. Residents began gathering, angry, before daybreak.

Kgosana was trying to evade arrest elsewhere in the township that morning. When he heard of the gathering crowd, he rushed to join them, famously wearing a pair of distinctive blue shorts, his student attire. Within hours, what began as an angry township gathering had become a column of men marching the 12 kilometres from the townships along the N2 and then De Waal Drive into the centre of Cape Town.

The numbers

Estimates of the crowd vary, historians typically cite a range of 30,000 to 50,000 protesters. The South African History Online archive settles on "between 30,000 and 50,000". By the time the column reached Caledon Square, approximately 15,000 were crammed into the square itself, with the remainder waiting on De Waal Drive and the approaches. At its peak, this represented nearly the entire Black population of Cape Town at the time.

The pivotal hours

At Caledon Square, the situation was unstable. Commanding officer Colonel Ignatius "Terry" Terblanche had been ordered by Minister of Justice Frans Erasmus to open fire. Instead, according to the Sunday Times' detailed 2017 obituary, Terblanche fell to his knees in the police station and prayed. He then walked out unarmed to find Kgosana, reasoning that opening fire would make "all hell break loose."

Terblanche asked Kgosana, "as gentleman to gentleman", to quiet the crowd. Two of Kgosana's lieutenants lifted him onto their shoulders. Using a police loudhailer, he asked the marchers to be silent, then to disperse peacefully. In exchange, Terblanche promised Kgosana a meeting with Erasmus at 17:00.

De Waal Drive: A colonial infrastructure project

The road that now bears Kgosana's name was built four decades before he walked it. Sir Nicolaas Frederic de Waal served as the first Administrator of the Cape Province from 1910 to 1920, following the formation of the Union of South Africa. He commissioned the drive that would carry his name in the early 1920s as an elevated, grade-separated route to connect the growing suburbs south of the city with the CBD, bypassing the slower Main Road (now the M4).

The engineering ambition was serious for its era. The road was cut into the northern face of Devil's Peak, tracing the mountain's slopes to create a scenic commuter corridor. It opened up the Southern Suburbs, Rondebosch, Claremont, Newlands, to faster motor-car access to the harbour and the city.

Who was Nicolaas de Waal?

Before his administrator role, De Waal had been a journalist and Chief Scout of the Cape Province. He was active in Anglo-Boer War reconciliation efforts, a moderate in the divided politics of the time. His other legacies in Cape Town include De Waal Park in Oranjezicht, established by his father David de Waal in 1881 with the deed stipulation that dogs should always be allowed to run off-lead, a freedom the park's dogs still enjoy today.

De Waal was not, by the standards of his era, an overtly ideological colonial figure. That complicates the renaming narrative: he was not a Cecil Rhodes, not a Hendrik Verwoerd, not a figure whose legacy is dominated by the apparatus of racial oppression. This partly explains why the 2017 renaming generated louder opposition than other Cape Town street renamings.

The march route and the modern road

Below is an interactive map layering the 1960 march route, the modern Philip Kgosana Drive, and key landmarks connecting the two. Click any marker for historical context, use the toggle buttons to show or hide layers, and zoom in to see where the gold 1960 march line overlaps exactly with the dark blue modern-day road section.

The gold line traces the 1960 march path from Langa to Caledon Square. The navy section is the ~3 km of M3 that bears Kgosana's name today. Click any marker for detail; toggle layers via the buttons.

What the road carries today

Philip Kgosana Drive is the most congested section of the M3 corridor, which itself is one of Cape Town's three primary commuter arteries (alongside the N1 from the north and the N2 from the east). The reason is geometric: the M3 narrows as it approaches the CBD, funnelling all Southern Suburbs traffic through Hospital Bend and onto PKD.

Who uses the road?

The daily PKD commuter is an identifiable demographic: residents of Rondebosch, Newlands, Claremont, Bishopscourt, Wynberg, Constantia and Tokai driving north into Cape Town's CBD, V&A Waterfront or Green Point commercial districts. These are, by Cape Town's standards, some of the most expensive residential suburbs in the country. Philip Kgosana Drive is therefore, incidentally, the main commuter artery for some of South Africa's highest-income households.

The property corridor: who lives above and below

Philip Kgosana Drive does more than move traffic, it divides Cape Town's social geography. Directly above the road on the slopes of Devil's Peak sit Vredehoek, Oranjezicht and Upper Gardens, some of the most sought-after residential real estate in the country. Below the road, toward the harbour, sit Zonnebloem (formerly District Six) and the CBD, areas with very different histories.

The suburbs flanking Philip Kgosana Drive, Vredehoek, Oranjezicht, Upper Gardens and Zonnebloem to the north, and Rondebosch, Newlands, Claremont heading south, are where Cape Town's property market has consistently outperformed the national average over the past decade. Median prices in Bishopscourt regularly exceed R18 million; Constantia tracks around R12m; Newlands around R9m; Vredehoek and Oranjezicht between R6m and R8.5m depending on the street and view.

The 2017 decision and its politics

The proposal to rename De Waal Drive came from Tony Heard, former editor of the Cape Times, who had witnessed the 1960 march as a young reporter. Heard formally proposed it in 2007, during a city-wide dialogue on renaming streets, but the proposal was blocked at the time by the City's policy against naming roads after living persons. A renewed proposal was announced on 30 March 2016, the 56th anniversary of the march.

On 24 August 2017, the full Council of the City of Cape Town voted unanimously to approve the rename. The ceremony was held on 12 October 2017, Kgosana's 81st birthday, with Mayor Patricia de Lille (herself a former PAC member) unveiling the new signs. Members of the Kgosana family, the PAC, Langa community leaders and retired Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane attended.

The opposition

Opposition came principally from the Freedom Front Plus (FF+), with Western Cape leader Dr Corné Mulder calling the rename "scandalous" and pointing out that De Waal himself was not a controversial colonial figure. Mulder also argued the City should focus on the water crisis (Day Zero was then looming) rather than renaming costs. News24's coverage at the time captured a broader current of letters-to-the-editor questioning whether the original name needed replacing at all.

Supporters countered that the rename was not about vilifying De Waal but about elevating Kgosana, whose name had no public presence in the city that had arrested him. The fact that the road was the literal path of his march made it geographically specific in a way few commemorative renames are.

Legacy, commemorations and the Kgosana family today

On 30 March 2016, a year before his death, a 79-year-old Philip Kgosana retraced the 12 km march at the head of a small procession. The 2016 walk doubled as a protest against what Kgosana called the ANC government's failure to address the needs of South Africa's poorest, a stance that defined his late-career politics. He died 13 months later, on 19 April 2017, before seeing the road renamed.

His son Mohlabani Kgosana said at the time that his father had been "deeply honoured" by the 2016 renaming proposal and that the family fully supported it. Other members of the Kgosana family attended the 2017 unveiling. The Pan Africanist Student Movement of Azania (PASMA) at UCT continues to hold annual memorial services for him.

In November 2019, Unisa conferred an honorary doctorate on Kgosana posthumously, recognising his contribution to the liberation struggle.

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