BY HEINRICH BOHMKE
DURBAN — About 40 kilometres outside Durban is an industrial and farming node called Hammarsdale. It appears suddenly at the end of a short rural road just off the N3 freeway and consists of a grid of streets forming 16 blocks. On each block, huge warehouses and factories sit, ringed by serious fences. Half these factories will never retrench again. They are already boarded-up. The security guards wear purple berets and are armed with shotguns.
Apart from two petrol stations, a funeral parlour, a take-away joint, a department store and a dilapidated clothing union office, there is nothing else in the formal economy of Hammarsdale. In the informal economy, there is a fruit and muti [traditional medicine] market adjacent to the taxi rank. Ultra-informally, there are grandparents' pensions, stock theft, pilfering and prostitution, mainly at the freeway truck stops.
No workers live in Hammarsdale. Workers' houses and shacks are 5km further inland, in the sprawling township of Mpumalanga. This township used to be situated in the former apartheid-era KwaZulu bantustan where political conditions rendered the labour it produced much cheaper than that of Durban.
During the early 1990s, Mpumalanga was the site of violent clashes between the anti-apartheid militants of the African National Congress (ANC) and members of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), which ruled KwaZulu and was led by apartheid-collaborator Chief Mangosuthu "Gatsha" Buthelezi. Hundreds of people were killed.
In those years, walking in Unit 3, an ANC stronghold, would have meant death for community leader and former IFP member Sipho Mlaba, he assured me. The same would have applied had Maxwell Cele, a former ANC activist, set foot in the IFP-controlled Unit 1.
However, since 1994 these old wounds have been healed. Nowadays, Mlaba and Cele move everywhere together. They are comrades. But the peace is gone. Once again there are rows of armoured personnel carriers patrolling Mpumalanga. Tear gas and bird-shot are being fired and the youth are setting fire to barricades. Still, South African Broadcasting Corporation radio refers to residents as "running amok" and politicians talk about "agitators" and threaten "clamp-downs".
Just as the apparently "passive" residents of the predominantly Indian Durban suburb of Chatsworth so militantly resisted evictions by the Durban city council (known as Durban Unicity) last year, so too Mpumalanga has offered fierce opposition to the ANC-controlled local government's electricity and water privatisations.
Poor people are being forced to pay for social services managed by for-profit companies everywhere else in South Africa with little protest. What gives in this township? An even more enigmatic question is, how has this struggle been sustained for so long? It is an isolated, money-less, unheralded struggle whose demands are pure and simple and, given the dominance of free-market political discourse, easy to caricature.
Refusing to pay
The Mpumalangans are not quibbling about the price of necessities, they are refusing payment. They don't care about "cost recovery", they are creating, if not liberated, then at least, de-commodified zones. As such, their struggle echoes with the noises of an uncompromising, revolutionary past. However, the enemy is no longer a race but an economic policy. Who said two-stage theory was dead?
Currently, residents pay a flat-rate for the water services. Durban UniCity has tried to attach water meters to each private pipe and charge for water from public taps. The people of Mpumalanga know what this means. When electricity meters were installed in 1997, few people could afford the bills, particularly during the brisk midlands winter. Mlaba maintains that there was a direct increase in crime after electricity meters were installed, with the unemployed having to steal for the cash needed to buy energy.
Indeed, it was when Mlaba caught a 7-year-old last year trying to leave the shop he owns with a kilogram of shop-lifted sugar-beans that began Mlaba's remarkable conversion from a Durban councillor to community activist and intractable foe of his former colleagues.
Mlaba walked with the child to the shack where the child's mother lived. She was sleeping. Mlaba insisted that she wake and explain why she was neglecting her thieving child. Her reply jolted him: "Baba Mlaba, I was so hungry and there is no food so I just decided to sleep."
After surveying the bare hovel, Mlaba left both Sipho and the beans in the shack and went back to his shop depressed and embarrassed. It was at about this time that the council decided to install water meters in Mpumalanga.
At first, the people sent delegates to ask for assurances that the indigent would be exempt from having to pay. According to Cele, they were laughed at by City Hall.
The Mpumalanga community reacted with a vengeance, ripping up the meters and chasing the contractors away. Running battles were fought with police. By the third day, the biscuit-coloured gadgets used to attach the water meters lay strewn throughout the township. Mlaba told a reporter that he supported what the people were doing as they had no money to pay. His comments made headlines.
As he was a city councillor, Mlaba was hauled before a disciplinary meeting where he was required to sign a code of conduct outlawing any statement that went against council policy. To his eternal credit, Mlaba resigned rather than sign.
Maxwell Cele has a history of struggle that was earned during the days when South African Communist Party stalwart Harry Gwala still stomped about the Natal Midlands. Cele took the initiative of meeting with his old foe, Mlaba, during the first round of meter protests last year and suggested that they work together. Harried out of the ANC for this decision, Cele denies that he is a new kind of community leader: "No-one is in charge of the protests, except the anger and hunger in every person."
Before long, the Durban council stopped sending contractors in. Things returned to normal. Cele ascribed the backing-off of the ANC-dominated council to "electioneering". "We were still comrades before the December 5 municipal elections, but now we are consumers again", he said.
Fierce resistance
Over the last few weeks, the new UniCity council has been installing water meters once more. Again residents have resisted fiercely, ripping up the water meters. Ten-thousand people have attended rallies; the speeches are hot and the demand steadfast: free essential services for the poor.
But the repression has also been harsher than ever. The army has been called in and meetings have been "banned". The superintendent of the Mpumalanga police station reported frantic calls by city councillors demanding that the local stadium be blocked-off as a meeting point. Mlaba and Cele have been deemed worthy of personal attack, being branded "counter-revolutionaries". "Everybody in Mpumalanga can see, the real counter-revolutionaries are in this government", Cele laughed.
On April 29, a mass meeting was held outside the heavily guarded stadium to protest the installation of water meters. Revolutionary songs were sung ("Mbeki, you're messing up the country") and privatisation was loudly decried. It was, however, unlike all other protests in Mpumalanga.
Professor Fatima Meer, from the Chatsworth-based Concerned Citizens Group, was in attendance and she gave a rousing speech. Also on the platform were activists from the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee and community leaders from Umlazi.
The large army and police presence did not deter speakers from forthright statements. They viewed the government's continual demand for payment for every bit of dignity and citizenship they receive to be an attack on them, the poor. They promised to respond in kind. This response, Meer said, would no longer be isolated to Mpumalanga or Chatsworth but would be something concerning the poor across the province and country.