Shack dwellers’ fury erupts & Faith no more: why a community revolted

Two newspaper articles on the road blockade organised by Kennedy Road residents on 19 March 2005 that lead to the formation of Abahlali baseMjondolo.

http://www.sundaytribune.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=2453595

Shack dwellers’ fury erupts

March 20, 2005 Edition 1

Fred Kockott

Amid burning car and tractor tyres and flaming, lice-infested mattresses, Durban police battled for more than four hours yesterday to disperse a crowd of about 750 protesting shack dwellers who had barricaded a major arterial route into Durban.

“We are tired of living and walking in s . . t . The council must allocate land for housing us. Instead they are giving it to property developers to make money,” said Alfred Mdletshe, pointing to a recently levelled site adjacent to the shack settlement.

Retrieving shoes he had lost while fleeing police, Mdletshe said he had been woken at 3am by organisers of the protest. He said by 6am hundreds of Clare Estate shack dwellers had barricaded both ingoing and outgoing lanes of Quarry Road adjacent to the N2 (outer ring road).

The protest caught Durban Metro police and SA police services off guard, bringing traffic and businesses at Umgeni Business Park to a standstill until after 10am.

“These people wanted to make a public statement,” said SAPS Deputy Area Commissioner for Durban South, James Sayer.

But with no response from municipal leaders, the police found themselves confronted by angry hordes.

The scene was reminiscent of apartheid-era protests – and the mood was similar, except now the target of the crowd’s anger was the ANC governors of Durban.

“People working for the government, they have nice houses, gardens, water and electricity, snazzy cars and everything, so they do not care a damn about us,” said Nhlakanipho Cele.

“We vote for a party which tells us it is fighting poverty, but look what’s happening,” added Mdletshe.

“If you are poor, it means you only get poorer,” he said.

“The rooms are hard to live in, and there are no toilets, so the bush around us is full of excrement. When it rains, there’s sewage slush all around. It really stinks,” said Mdletshe.

“And we have no protection against diseases. Those mattreses that are burning had to get burned anyway,” added Cele.

Sail roof

“I came from Mandeni, but there was nowhere I could afford to stay close to town where I work. So I built with boards and mud, and made a roof with a sail to keep out the rain,” said Cele.

Returning from Johannesburg yesterday, eThekwini Municipal Manager Mike Sutcliffe said in terms of its slums clearance programme, the municipality had committed itself to building houses at a rate of 16 000 a year over the next 10 to 15 years.

“It’s a key priority and obviously we would like to up that figure,” said Sutcliffe.

With 190 000 low-cost houses planned, Sutcliffe estimated that as many as 800 000 people currently lived in and around Durban in conditions similar to those which sparked yesterday’s protest.

Regarding yesterday’s protest, Sutcliffe said his office had not been forewarned.

“People know the rules. They must make an application to hold a protest. If a petition is provided we will respond,” said Sutcliffe.

Cele said construction preparations for the new business adjacent to the shack settlement had sparked yesterday’s protest.

“People are saying this land should be used to provide low-cost housing,” said Cele.

“But the councillor for the area, he’s a rich man from Reservoir Hills. He’s not interested in helping us.”

“I don’t even know what he looks like,” added Mdletshe.

While Mdletshe and Cele elaborated on abysmal living conditions, Sayer negotiated with leaders of the volatile crowd.

It was now 9.15am, more than three hours since the protest began.

Not far from Sayer, a woman walked passed, two large rocks in her hands.

Amid outbursts of anger, including rocks being thrown at police, people sang and danced.

Across the road, a safe distance from the crowd, Metro Police officers complained that calls for assistance from the SAPS public order policing unit had been ignored.

Standing on the median of Quarry Road, Sayer began co-ordinating the actions of a growing number of policemen summoned from Phoenix, Chatsworth, Durban flying squad, the SAPS dog unit and Durban Central.

Sayer ordered drivers of police vans to herd the crowd off the verges of Quarry Road and into Kennedy Road.

Defiantly refusing to back away from an advancing riot-control vehicle, a young woman in a blue denim skirt and red T-shirt stood at the front of the crowd, placard raised.

Two police thunder flashes exploded, startling the crowd. People scrambled up the banks of the new development site. Large rocks from recently upturned earth rained down on police.

No shots were fired in retaliation.

Punched

Furiously fighting five police officers, a protester was punched, kicked and sworn at as he was forced into a police van.

“Aaeeah!” he exclaimed as the door locked on him.

A plump, middle-aged woman defied the police with her sheer weight, refusing to stand as she was dragged across the road, the front of her legs scraping the tar.

The petite woman in a denim skirt and red shirt also fought back, resulting in a slap to her face and kick in her back as she was thrown into another van.

Noticing a large section of the crowd heading over the Clare Estate hill toward the N2 (outer ring road), a police officer yelled, “Hey, the N2’s still not closed!”

Police vans sped off, dodging traffic on the outer ring road and stopping in the emergency lane to prevent protesters from reassembling on the N2.

An hour later, Sayer was free to talk. “Things have sort of normalised. Quarry Road has reopened and there were no incidents on the N2, or any stonings of passing motorists, but we’ve still got a presence in the area,” said Sayer.

Sayer said no protesters or policemen had been injured.

“The situation indicated that we don’t use any force,” said Sayer.

He said 14 protesters had been arrested and would appear in court tomorrow charged with public violence.

http://www.sundaytribune.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=2460513

Faith no more: why a community revolted

March 27, 2005 Edition 4

Richard Pithouse

Last Saturday 14 people were arrested on charges of public violence after 750 people from the Kennedy Road Informal Settlement, in Claire Estate, blockaded Umgeni Road with burning tyres for four hours.

On Monday, Human Rights Day, 1 200 people tried to march to the Sydenham police station to demand that that either the 14 be released or else the entire community be arrested because “If they are criminal then we are all criminal”.

The march was dispersed with dogs and teargas. The 14, including two young teenagers were denied bail at a court hearing on Tuesday. The settlement remains under police surveillance.

The protest is one of the biggest and most militant to have shaken Durban in the post-apartheid era. But Durban is not alone.

Similar revolts have rocked cities and towns across the country in recent months, most infamously in Harrismith where 17-year-old Teboho Mkonza was killed by the police.

There is a sense that the poor all over South Africa are becoming increasingly frustrated with their lot. Certainly, conditions in the Kennedy Road settlement are cause for despair. Shacks cling to the side of a steep hill squeezed between the Bisasar Road dump and the big barricaded houses of Claire Estate.

Many of the settlement’s children have emaciated limbs and bloated bellies. Everyone seems to have a friend or family member who is desperately sick.

But looking over Springfield Park and through the valley cut by the Umgeni, you can see the sea sparkling in the sun. Hadedas take wing at dusk and when night has fallen an isicathimiya group sings, from a hall with broken windows and peeling paint, “We are going to heaven, all of us we are going to heaven.”

Elected and respected community representative S’bu Zikode is a former Boy Scout now working at the Petroport on the road to Gateway shopping centre.

He remembers the Scout Law and the Scout Promise. He is a quiet, conservative man who breaks off the conversation to comfort a malnourished child crying for her jailed mother.

Nonhlanhla Mzobe, also elected, is a generous woman with a sincere warmth. Together and working with others on various committees they collect food for orphans, arrange care for the sick and take all of the meetings and procedures that democracy offers them with the utmost seriousness.

They are not cynical about the promises from the people that approach them respectfully. On the contrary.

The pre-school building under the community hall is in such a poor state that it can’t be used.

But the World Bank has promised to send 50 of their children to study engineering in Uganda in return for their support for a controversial project to generate electricity by burning the methane produced from the dump.

They accept these promises in good faith. Yet they have come to share the deep suspicion in their community towards people who speak for them or of them without speaking to them.

It is even feared that the food brought to them in the name of charity may be poisoned and that legal aid lawyers will work for the state which they now believe to be a weapon of the rich. They preferred to represent themselves in court.

Bureaucracy herds, insults, exhausts and defeats the poor at every turn and the courts prove to be no exception.

On Tuesday, after returning home without the people taken by the police, Zikode and Mzobe explain that the immediate cause of the protest is clear.

People have consistently been promised over some years that a small piece of land in nearby Elf Road would be made available for the development of housing.

The promise was repeated as recently as February 16 in a meeting with city council officials and the local councillor.

They had been participating in ongoing discussions about the development of this housing when suddenly, without any warning or explanation, bulldozers began excavating the land.

A few people went to see what was happening and were shocked to be told that a brick factory was being built by Greystone, a private company, on the land. They explained their concerns to the people working at the site and work stopped. But the next day it continued and “the men from the brickyard came with the police, an army, to ask who had stopped the work”.

“So,” as Zikode explains, “on Saturday morning the people woke us. They took us there to find out what is happening.

“A meeting was set up with the owner of the factory and the local councillor, but they didn’t come.

“There was no Greystone, no councillor, no minister, nobody. There was no fighting but the people blocked the road. Then the police came. Then the counsellor phoned.

“He told the police, ‘These people are criminals, arrest them’. We were bitten by the dogs, punched and beaten.

“We have no land. Most of us have no jobs. We are just rotting here. When the police come they make fools of us. We can’t control the people – they get angry. They burned tyres and mattresses in the road. They say we have committed public violence but against which public? If we are not the public then who is the public and who are we?

“(City Manager Michael) Sutcliffe talks to the Sunday Tribune about us but he doesn’t speak to us. All they do is send the police every time we ask to talk. It is a war. They are attacking us.

“What do you do when the man you have elected to represent you calls you criminal when you ask him to keep his promises? He has still not come here. ”

Mzobe becomes very emotional. “My granny came here from Inanda dam. People were coming from all over to wash for the Indians.

“My mother schooled us by picking the cardboard from the dump. I was four years old when she came. Now my child is 15 years old. All this time living in the shack and working so hard. We are fighting no one. We are just trying to live but they say we are the criminals. We haven’t got no problem if they build just some few houses that can’t fit everyone. But they must just try.”

The anger springs from many sources though. Zikode, like many others, simply feels betrayed. “The poor,” he says, “gets more poor and the rich gets richer. And this is the government that we voted for.”

Many people in the community make the point that the meagre public resources there – the community hall, and so on – are all in steadily worsening condition. Other issues on which attempts to seek official support have been rebuffed, they say, are the lack of the municipal rubbish bags that would allow people to keep their community clean and the failure to erect speedbumps on the road that has claimed a number of children – one just a month ago.

There is also unhappiness about the pitiful condition of the tiny number of toilets. Mzobe estimates that there are five working portable toilets for 1 500 families.

And then there is the dump. Environmentalists in Claire Estate and elsewhere oppose the World Bank’s project on the grounds that the dump is causing high rates of cancer, that it smells and looks terrible and that its location in a formerly Indian suburb is a legacy of apartheid racism.

Moreover the bank plans to use the dump in its controversial project trade in carbon emissions.

In the squatter settlement there is pervasive and often highly racialised hostility towards environmentalists.

For some it is simply because the dump provides a livelihood. But over and over again the point is made that while the World Bank has come and explained what it is doing, the environmentalists haven’t.

Mzobe complains that, “We invite them to the presentation here in the hall so that we can be together. They didn’t come. They have their meetings in places we can’t go to. They don’t invite us but they always represent us.”

This is a revolt of obedient and faithful citizens – people who have done everything asked of them. They participate in every available consultative process.

They revolt not because they have believed and done everything asked of them, but are still poor. They revolt because the moment they asked that their faith not be spurned is the moment their aspirations for dignity became criminal.