National Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu recently admitted that the state won t be able to house everyone by 2014 (the fantastical date set for the eradication of shacks ) but that the state could eradicate informality by that date. In other words they can, she thinks, get everyone out of shacks and into transit camps. Transit camps take the form of government shacks (corrugated iron sheds), large tents (circus or wedding tents) in which people live in large numbers segregated by gender and smaller family tents as in Ash Road.

In KwaZulu-Natal every disaster (fire, flood etc), most of which are due to the refusal of the state to provide services to settlements like drainage, electricity etc, is being misused to force people into tents or government shacks. People are also been forced into transit camps when a settlement is cleared and there are not houses for everyone on the list. (People not on the list are just left homeless)

People s material conditions are pretty much always much worse in transit camps than they were in shacks. Their social conditions, especially when they are forced into gender segregated accommodation as in Jadhu Place, are also much worse. One therefore wonders what the purpose of the transit camps is. Here are five guesses:

1. Because of their patently temporary nature they very successfully weaken people s hold on the land.
2. They make it more or less impossible for people to appropriate water and electricity.
3. They make it impossible for people who have held a piece of land for years to decide to make space for new arrivals and therefore cap the numbers of poor people living in the cities. (A kind of influx control)
4. Open resistance to the state (and local elites in alliance with the state) becomes much harder when one is living in such a precarious way at the pleasure of the state.
5. The state, in its colonial, apartheid and post-apartheid incarnations, has just never been comfortable with urban proletarian autonomy. Getting people firmly under control is sometimes just an end in itself.

The net result of the transit camps – a radical reduction in people s autonomy and a major increase in subjection to state surveillance, exclusion from services and political repression.

Richard