http://www.capeargus.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=5117053

Revolt a symptom of historical pain

August 08, 2009 Edition 1

Josette Cole

There are moments in one’s life, especially in the life of a political activist, social historian and, community development practitioner, when you are challenged to make a choice about where to focus energy.

After several years of still being active but somewhat publicly “silent”, I have decided to become a bit more publicly vocal, adding my voice, shaped and influenced by three decades of continuing commitment to attain political, social and economic justice, to the many voices (some old, some new) aired in the media on our country’s complex and sometimes contradictory political and civic affairs.

Doing this is not something I take lightly, given the cut and thrust of South African political life, especially in the political and socio-economic quagmire of the Western Cape, the place where I was born and will, most probably, die.

So where to begin? I guess with some thoughts on one of the central news stories of the day – service delivery protests and growing evidence of a largely dysfunctional local government system.

I am one of a rare breed of South African citizens, the kind who never gets totally surprised or depressed by the ins and outs and contradictions of national, provincial or municipal politics, wide scale generational (chronic) poverty, political tendencies, or social trends.

What surprises me more is that it has taken so long to occur. I know from my own work and experience of my beloved country just how deep-seated the anger and rage is.

What we must never forget is that while our experiences of life under apartheid may be different, with perspectives shaped by our own circumstances – political or self-imposed exile, prison, actively fighting the apartheid government on the streets, part of implementing the apartheid government’s policies or in its security apparatus, a citizen or businessman or woman sitting on the fence or one of the many who either buried their heads in the sand, a bottle of wine or a bottle of Klipdrift – we are essentially a wounded nation and in need of deep healing.

Touch the pain and you unleash a rage that runs like a red thread and festering sore, manifesting in “xenophobic” attacks, militant labour strikes, and increasingly violent service delivery protests.

Understanding or unravelling some of what is going on, getting to the root causes of current events, demands remembering and, linking, the past to the present. Let’s start with revisiting a story, entitled “Backyarders and politics behind violence”, in Weekend Argus last Saturday, about the recent protests in the Masiphumelele settlement located along Kommetjie Road.

This is the community that first evicted “foreigners” from their homes at the start of last year’s “xenophobic” attacks and then publicly apologised and re-embraced those evicted back into the area.

Reasons given for the protests range from what a local ANC spokesperson describes as the pent-up frustration of more than 4 000 backyard shack dwellers facing eviction from the area to make way for new housing development to the City of Cape Town’s mayco member for economic development and tourism, who views the protests as “politically motivated and part of continuing destabilisation of the Western Cape by the ANC”.

This is a rather strange view on the ANC’s political strength in a province where the party’s election defeat resulted in the removal of the ANC’s entire provincial leadership by the NEC, a public admission of the party’s disconnection from its political and social base.

But the voice that really got my attention in the article is that of former National Party member, now the DA’s chosen chairman of the Western Cape’s parliamentary portfolio committee for community safety, Mark Wiley.

He tells readers that the “community (has) grown from 100 people to 25 000” in the last 20 years, that “any government in the world would struggle to cope with a population explosion like that” and, that “resorting to violence would not attract overseas donors”.

Oh, my word, where does one begin to respond? I guess by going back to the beginning.

Let me explain why I say that history (and memory) matters.

Masiphumelele is not the result of a random act of settlement history in the City of Cape Town.

It is the outcome of a long and bitter struggle for the rights of black people, most of whom worked in the South Peninsula, for the right to live in what was then a prescribed “white” Group Area.

Left with no alternative, people lived in makeshift zinc and wood homes in the bushes in and around the Noordhoek/Kommetjie area for many years.

The issue came to a head in April 1986 when the then owner of Dassenberg Farm in Noordhoek, where most people lived at the time, threatened the people with eviction.

How do I know all of this? Because at the time I was the director of the Surplus People Project (SPP), an NGO that actively and publicly supported the rights of black people to land and housing (tenure) in the province.

The very same Wiley just happens to have been one of the people more vociferous about the need to remove the “Noordhoek Squatters” from the area.

There followed a brutal and military-style forced removal (complete with helicopters) that relocated the entire community, in army trucks, to the dumping fields of a then very barren Khayelitsha (late 1987).

Wiley certainly did not oppose this removal. Within months the people organised their own bakkies and kombis, moving back en masse during one night to a piece of publicly owned land across the road from the former Dassenberg Farm site.

In 1989, after raids by the government’s Squatter Prevention Unit and running court battles against eviction orders, residents were offered land in the area, thereby becoming the city’s first recognised “black spot” in a white Group Area. In the early 1990s, through a process of local-level negotiations between the community and the Cape Provincial Administration, the community agreed to relocate to the site where they live now.

It was one of five sites (Site Five) they investigated with the support of NGOs like the Development Action Group and SPP and subsequently renamed Masiphumelele.

Given this community’s deeply politicised settlement history why in the world would I be surprised to learn that families are actively refusing to move to far away Delft?

What surprises me is why whoever came up with this option expected more than 4 000 families living in the community to acquiesce and quietly relocate. Also, how recycled politicians like Mark Wiley just keep turning up, even still setting up Joint Operation Centres to “protect police living in Masiphumelele and members of political parties other than the ANC”?

When is the penny going to drop? Touch a pain that runs deep and has not yet healed and you will unleash our people’s rage and anger.

The time is long gone for the arrival of a more nuanced, historically informed, and sensitive development approach and practice on the part of politicians, planners, and public officials trying to address the challenges of post-apartheid social and community development.

History tells us that those who choose to ignore, or write themselves out of, this country’s deeply traumatic social history, do so at their own peril.

# Josette Cole is a former UDF activist and director of the Surplus People Project and is the founder and chairwoman of the Mandlovu Development Trust. She is the author of Crossroads: The Politics of Reform and Repression.