Cape Town - Housing activist group Reclaim the City and an organisation called the Yes Men held a rally outside the Civic Centre on Monday afternoon.

Called “#natsneverdierally”, the activists hope to use the event to raise awareness of City policies they say are increasingly similar to those of the National Party under apartheid.

The activists were dressed as zombies.

“Forced removal then, mass eviction now. Group Areas then, relocation camps now. And so on. We’re back and it feels great,” said Nataniël Krokodil, an organiser of the rally.

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Housing activist group Reclaim the City and an organisation called the Yes Men used the event to raise awareness of City policies they say are increasingly similar to those of the National Party. Video: David Ritchie/African News Agency

Co-organised by Reclaim the City and world-renowned activists the Yes Men, the rally aims to highlight the claim that apartheid-era approaches to housing and urban planning are alive and well in Cape Town.

Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men said: “We’d never thought about addressing apartheid because we’d thought it was dead. Zombies are the perfect symbol for bad ideas from a political party that everyone thought was long in the grave.”

The Yes Men is an activist group that is known for using humour and subterfuge to expose dark truths about major corporations and governments, with a focus on misbehaviour stemming from bad economic theories.

They’ve tackled Dow Chemical stock with its fake admission of responsibility for the Bhopal Catastrophe, embarrassed the US Department of Housing and Urban Development for its destruction of good public housing, and exposed the economic misdeeds of dozens of other corporations, parties, and agencies.

“When Reclaim the City told us what’s happening in Cape Town, we thought the world ought to know that former National Party members are back in power, and that apartheid ideas are posing as sensible economic policy,” said Jeff Walburn from Yes Men.

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Housing activist group Reclaim the City and an organisation called the Yes Men used the event to raise awareness of City policies they say are increasingly similar to those of the National Party. Video: David Ritchie/African News Agency
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Housing activist group Reclaim the City and an organisation called the Yes Men used the event to raise awareness of City policies they say are increasingly similar to those of the National Party. Video: David Ritchie/African News Agency
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Cape Argus