Richard Pithouse, Durban
On October 21, 16 shacks burnt down in the Kennedy Road shack settlement in Durban. One-year-old Mhlengi Khumalo was very badly burnt. He died the following night. This was the third conflagration that month. The fire started when a candle was knocked over. If the installation of electricity to the Kennedy Road settlement had not been halted, these fires and Mhlengi's death could have been avoided.
Until 2001, pre-paid electricity metres were being installed in shacks. To get electricity you needed to pay R350 (A$70) and to be able to represent your case. According to S'bu Zikode from the Kennedy Road Development Committee, "It all depended on who applied. If you seemed ignorant because you can't speak English you were just told to wait outside."
However, the African National Congress-controlled Durban City Council has since informed Kennedy Road residents that there is a "new policy not to install electricity in informal settlements". The council's electrification policy openly states: "Because of the lack of funding and the huge costs required to relocate services when these settlements are upgraded or developed, electrification of the informal settlements has been discontinued."
More than 70 people with receipts for payments for installation have received neither a refund nor electricity.
The Kennedy Road settlement has been in open revolt since March 19 this year when 750 people blocked a major freeway and held it against the riot police for four hours. There were 14 arrests. On March 21, 1200 people marched on the police station where the 14 were being held to demand that either they be released or else the entire community be arrested because "if they are criminals then we are all criminal". The march was dispersed with beatings, dogs and tear gas.
The immediate cause of the road blockade was clear. The Kennedy Road settlement had consistently been promised, over many years, that a small piece of land in nearby Elf Road would be made available for the development of housing. The promise had been repeated as recently as February 16. The development committee had been participating in ongoing discussions about the development of this housing when, without any warning or explanation, bulldozers began levelling the land. A few people went to see what was happening and were shocked to be told that a brick factory was being built on the land, by a private company believed by some to be connected to the local councillor.
They explained their concerns to the people working on the site and work stopped. S'bu Zikode explains: "The next day the men from the brickyard came with the police to ask who had stopped the work. So, on Saturday morning [March 19] the people woke us. They took us there to find out what was happening. A meeting was set up with the owner of the factory and the local councillor, but they didn't come. Then the police came. Then the councillor phoned. He told the police, 'These people are criminals, arrest them.' Then the people blocked the road."
The road blockade was followed by two legal marches. The first was more than 3000 strong and the second more than 5000. They both demanded the resignation of the ward councillor, the ANC's Yacoob Baig, and the delivery of the promised land and housing. Eventually, deputy city manager Derek Naidoo, another ANC member, arrived to inform the community that their settlement had been "ring-fenced for slum clearance" and that "the city's plan is to move you to the periphery".
Naidoo came under sustained questioning. Where will we work? Where will our children go to school? What clinics are there? How will we live? It was put to Naidoo that this was the same as apartheid: black people were being pushed out of the city. Naidoo said that if people didn't like it, "they should go to the constitutional court". He kept saying that there was no land. Cosmos Bhengu pointed out that there was in fact plenty of land around. Examples were cited. Naidoo said that the land belongs to Moreland, a private company. Moreland, the largest landowner in Durban, owns the sugar plantations to the north, which were seized by colonial conquest, held through the 1906 Zulu rebellion via a series of massacres, worked by indentured labourers from India and are now being sold off to the rich with colonial-themed gated suburbs, shopping centres and office parks with sea views.
Revolt of the betrayed
This is a revolt of the betrayed. The ANC has consistently legitimated its power, including its power to demobilise popular militancy by invoking its "liberation movement" traditions, in the name of the poor. This is not always done via abstractions. Concrete promises have been made to specific communities. After the ANC's first electoral victory in the province of KwaZulu-Natal it promised that, as its first priority, "The ANC will, together with our people, address the concerns of the poorest of the poor living in squatter camps like Kennedy Road, Lusaka and Mbambayi".
People come to Durban's shack settlements because opportunities to find work or develop livelihoods, and to access decent education, health care, cultural and sporting facilities, are extremely limited in rural areas and small towns. Although there is tremendous suffering in shack settlements they are also a space of hope.
The Durban municipality estimates that more than 800,000 of the city's 3 million inhabitants live in "informal settlements". The city council's policy is to consider all attempts to create new settlements as illegal land invasions. People erecting new shacks risk criminal charges and the city aims to demolish all new shacks. But it is not only new settlements that are subject to armed attack by the state. The council also seeks to prevent people living in established settlements from developing their shacks into more formal structures. The council threatens to, and quite often does, demolish shacks that are developed.
More than 70 settlements are to be subject to "slum clearance" and "relocation". The council has reneged on promises to provide basic services like electricity and water in settlements, and has removed existing services, especially toilets, from some settlements in a clear attempt to force people to accept "relocation". The city council says that it has already relocated 7000 families and aims to build 400 houses a month to continue the relocations.
This policy is officially celebrated as progressive and exemplary, but this ignores two key continuities with apartheid. First, it is a clear attempt to regulate the flow of poor African people into Durban. Second, the new houses for those "relocated" are being built in areas, in the manner of colonial and apartheid-era townships, far away from the city.
The colonial and then the apartheid-era South African city was conceived as a "modern space" and a white space in which Africans had to be carefully contained or removed and barred. But in the 1980s the apartheid state — occupying Namibia, at war with the national liberation movement in Angola and putting down bitter township rebellions across the county — lost the capacity to completely regulate the movement of Africans. People were able to flood into the cities, seize land in defiance of the state and found communities autonomous of the state.
The struggle continues
But now the state again has the resources, including crucially the political resources, to do what it wants. And clearly it wants to return to the colonial vision of the "modern" city. Of course, the contemporary South African city is no longer conceived as a white city. But it is conceived as the bourgeois city. A policy that aimed to integrate the city would require the appropriation of privately owned land and, in particular, the former sugar cane plantations now being developed into gated communities for the rich by the likes of Moreland. This would not only require a direct conflict with capital. It would also require a direct challenge to the anxieties and prejudices projected onto shack dwellers by the white and black middle classes — prejudices that often repeat precisely the stereotypes directed at all black people by white racism under apartheid.
On October 4, more than 1000 people, more or less the entire population of the small Quarry Road settlement, marched on their ANC councillor, Jayraj Bachu, demanding his resignation, the return of their toilets and the provision of land and housing within the city. Two days later, a meeting of 12 settlements was held in Kennedy Road. There were 32 elected representatives there, 17 men and 15 women. They agreed that they will not vote in the coming elections and that they will stand together and fight together.
Each settlement now has a weekly meeting and representatives from each of the 12 settlements meet every Saturday. On October 29, hundreds of people attended an all-night memorial service for Mhlengi Khumalo in Kennedy Road. On November 1, 5000 people from Kennedy Road, many armed, marched to the disputed land, chased off the security guards, faced off with the police and took down the fences.
A new movement has emerged in these slums. But Mhlengi Khumalo is gone.
[Visit the Centre for Civil Society's website at <http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs> for updates on the struggles of the poor in South Africa.]
From Green Left Weekly, November 9, 2005.
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