Somewhere to live in dignity

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Somewhere to live in dignity

The North Coast cane land was seized and should be redistributed to increasingly frustrated informal settlers
October 19, 2005

By Raj Patel

Drive down the North Coast and you will see acres of land. It is land that has been seized by sugar barons, cultivated by blood and sweat, made legal by the language of colonialism’s civilising mission.

Today, the land is parcelled into golf-courses and gated estates, made legal by the conquest of the constitution – private property is sacroscant. But its consequences are no less bloody. For all over Durban, amid the jails of gated communities are the thousands of people locked out of the land, locked into poverty. And they have had enough.

Over the past few months, communities around the country have erupted in protest, and all with a similar fundamental claim – that they are tired, after over a decade of democracy, of waiting for the government to treat them with respect.

Respect has certainly been lacking in the way the eThekwini Municipality has dealt with Durban’s poorest. In the case of Kennedy Road in Clare Estate, the closest that the informal settlers have come to housing is a vague promise to be relocated to Verulam, far from their work, schools, hospitals or indeed anything else.

They are the lucky ones. Informal settlers in Quarry Road, half a kilometre away, were punished for asking for permanent housing by having their toilets removed.

A central demand from informal settlement residents has been for somewhere to live in dignity. At a community meeting in Kennedy Road on September 7, Cosmos Bhengu, an informal settlement resident, asked Derek Naidoo, the Deputy City Manager, the key question: “Why, when there is plenty of vacant land around, does the municipality want to relocate the people to Verulam?”
Vacant land Naidoo said “the problem is that Moreland owns the majority of the land”.

When asked whether the municipality was considering expropriation, Naidoo’s response was: “We are looking into it.”
Moreland is the property development arm of the Tongaat-Hulett group.

Today, they advertise that they have “turned sugar cane into some of the sweetest and most desirable property developments in South Africa and we’re proud of it”. Yet the group’s history provides little source for pride. The original wealth of the Tongaat-Hulett group comes from the sugar barons who colonised the land in Durban, and who brought over large numbers of indentured labourers from India in order to work it.

Sir James Liege Hulett, a minister for native affairs at the turn of the century, was directly responsible for mass relocations. The Hulett family fortune swelled through apartheid and was largely untouched by the democratic dispensation.

Indeed, it put them in a strong position to expand in the post-apartheid transition – the ready access to finance enabled the Tongaat-Hulett group to become one of eThekwini municipality’s elite investment partners.

The relationship between business elites and city managers has given the word “transformation” a rather unusual twist. As you approach the road to Zimbali, you will see people dressed in Zulu regalia, giving out pamphlets to buy land at the estate. The Zulu warrior tradition has indeed been transformed.

There is profit to be made from all this. Yet as the Morelanders complain about their lot, and whitewash their past, the less-landers’ demands become more acute.

The residents of the informal settlements are asking for somewhere with toilets. They are asking for an end to decades of dispossession.

Contempt

In recent protests, informal settlement residents have been demanding the resignation of their councillors, but amid chants of “Viva, ANC, viva”.

Perhaps this is because they remember a time when the ANC was ready to listen to them. In a 1993 press release, the ANC called “on all people living in squatter areas to make their voice heard! ‘Your problems are my problems. your solution is my solution’ says President Nelson Mandela”.

Today, the city’s attitude towards this very same group of people is one of contempt. Some municipal officers do not even feel that the informal settlers are competent enough to have organised their own protests.

These civil servants are seeking a mysterious third force on which to blame the uprisings, just as they seem to be searching in vain for land in Durban.

Recently, the government has issued orders for the compulsory purchase of farms, over howls of protest from the farmers. The howls from Moreland will undoubtedly be louder. They’ll boast their job creation, and trumpet a handful of rich Indians and Africans on their board.

But when all but the very richest Indian, African and coloured people in this city have been harmed, it is hard to justify the continued ownership of large chunks of land by a “colonial power”. Better that it should be redistributed to the city’s poorest.

Raj Patel is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Civil Society.