Category Archives: Helen Zille

The Nomzamo Eviction: A Potential Turning Point?

http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/2041

The Nomzamo Eviction: A Potential Turning Point?

Richard Pithouse

The destruction of the Nomzamo settlement in Lwandle, Cape Town, has received an extraordinary degree of political and media attention, much of it noting the illegality and brutality of the eviction, and much of it sympathetic to the occupiers.

Evictions, generally illegal and frequently violent, have been an everyday part of actually existing modes of urban governance in post-apartheid South Africa. Most of the major cities have units maintained for the sole purpose of mobilising state violence, usually unlawfully, to combat land occupations. But despite the routine violence and illegality of these actions, as well as their striking resonance with images from the past, they have, in practice, been broadly accepted as necessary and legitimate actions by both the ANC and the DA, as well as much of the media and civil society.

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De Lille: In memory of Tatane, we call on you to account for police violence in Cape Town

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De Lille: In memory of Tatane, we call on you to account for police violence in Cape Town

Friday the 13th of April 2012
Press Statement by activists in support of Andries Tatane

It is exactly one year since the South African government murdered teacher and activist Andries Tatane.

Today we are holding a surprise funeral procession inside the Cape Town Civic Centre. At exactly 12pm, we will walk together inside the Civic Centre and lead a funeral procession in honour of Tatane and the other hundreds of people who die at the hands of the SAPS every single year.

We will call on Patricia de Lille and her cabinet to come down from her office and join the funeral procession and pay her respects to our fallen freedom fighters.

We will also call on her to attend our memorial service for Tatane and other victims of police violence which will be held in Mandela Park (Khayelitsha) on the 22 of April 2012. At this memorial service, communities from all over Cape Town will be asked to come forward and testify about their own experiences with the police.

It is clear now to many that it is not only the individual actions of police that are violent and vicious, but the administration of all three tiers of government which sanction and often even instigate such violence.

At the national level, the militarisation of the South Africa Police Service is one example of this.

Here in Cape Town, the DA-led government is equally complicit. For example:

* The weekly harassment by the Anti-Land Invasions Unit and the Metro Police against the Symphony Way Pavement Dwellers after their brutal eviction in from the N2 Gateway in February 2008.
* The attack on the community of Hangberg authorised by Helen Zille where hundreds were shot with rubber bullets and three residents each lost an eye (September 2010)
* The violent eviction of thousands of landless people from Swartklip field in Mitchell’s Plain (May 2011)
* The shooting and arrest of peaceful protesters at Khayelitsha Hospital and the deployment of the South African Army to intimidate protesters (January 2012)
* The pepper spraying, assault and arrest of peaceful protesters on the Rondebosch Common (January 2012)
* The murder of Zamuxolo Zozo of Nyanga in police custody (January 2012)

These are just some of the more well-known examples of police violence and brutality in Cape Town.

Our politicians must be held to account for condoning violence against the people of this country.

For comment about today’s action and the memorial on the 22 April, please contact:

Anele @ 0834472939 or alternatively 0795125677

Hellen Zille: Artificial borders and racism are inseparable, your refugee label is equal to racism

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http://mpbackyarders.org.za/2012/04/03/hellen-zille-artificial-borders-and-racism-are-inseparable-your-refugee-label-is-equal-to-racism/1

Hellen Zille: Artificial borders and racism are inseparable, your refugee label is equal to racism

3 April 2011
Statement by the Mandela Park Backyarders

The recent statement made by Helen Zille which refers to Eastern Cape migrants as refugees and her subsequent justification of the term, illustrate her failure to understand how apartheid has misguided not only those blacks who were and continue to be oppressed, but also privileged white people.

On Sunday, Zille appeared on Radio Zibonele in Khayelitsha saying that she was not aware that her statement would create anger and frustration amongst black people.

This explanation by Madam Helen is quite similar to the common excuse of a school child who is warned by his/her parents not to wear school shoes after school hours. Yet, despite the warning, the child continues to wear his/her shoes and later, when confronted by the parents, claim that they just did not know what would happen to the shoes.

A similar situation occurred with Martinicans who, as a colony of France before the World War 2, considered themselves French and attempted to deny themselves their own ethnicity and race. But French sailors and officials saw them through the lens of racial prejudice thereby making it impossible for Martinicans to truly ever be equal in the eyes of the French.

Madam Helen no different from French sailors. We need to remind Madam Helen that before European outcasts and refugees colonised Africa and other parts of the world, there were no such name calling that sought to humiliate one because of his/her place of origin. It was the Europeans created artificial borders in Africa, dividing up the continent and confining blacks in Bantustans in South Africa and elsewhere thereby turning them into refugees in their own country. Artificial borders and the bifurcated state were accompanied by racism.

So it is in this context that we should look at the term ‘refugee’ which informed Madam Helen’s comments and by which she has insulted black people. She continues to look at black people through the lens of artificial borders that perpetuates racism and division in our country.

Zille’s was a reckless and a racist comment. It can easily lead to black on black violence such as what we have seen recently in Grabow.

To us, Zille’s comments brought back memories of the Afro-phobic attacks of 2008 but this time invoking such phobia between people already living in South Africa.

Rumours even abound in our township that Madam Helen was also alleged to have said that Eastern Cape migrants who left Cape Town during their festive holiday should be forced to remain in Eastern Cape in order to minimise influx. We wish to remind our fellow poor citizens that this alleged statement targets black migrants in ways reminiscent of 2008.

To us Madam Helen did not have to declare herself a racist in order for her to be one. By tracing back our history and where we come from we can safely arrive at the conclusion that artificial borders and racism are inseparable. By invoking artificial borders and divisions amongst blacks, no matter their ethnic background, Zille is invoking racist prejudice amongst South Africans

Therefore, we call on the people of South Africa to demand an apology from Helen Zille.

For more information contact Loyiso @ 0737662078 or Slulami @ 0736200781

Open Democracy: The Cape Town model, state violence and military urbanism

http://www.opendemocracy.net/christopher-mcmichael/cape-town-model-state-violence-and-military-urbanism

The Cape Town model, state violence and military urbanism

Christopher McMichael, Open Democracy, 5 January 2012

Lead by the pugnacious Helen Zille, the Democratic Alliance is South Africa’s official opposition party and the governing party of the Western Cape, the only one of nine national provinces not under the control of the ruling ANC. Despite recent successes the party has failed to win substantial support among South Africa’s black majority, due to a widespread perception that, notwithstanding its meretricious rhetoric of an ‘ Open Society’, the party remains a bastion of white privilege. Further scepticism has been created by the parties’ aggressively neoliberal policies which propose to reduce the country’s already partial post-apartheid social welfare system . However, the DA is hoping that the increasingly overt internecine fighting with the ANC will alter South Africa’s political landscape to give it a credible chance of becoming the ruling party by the end of the decade. With the ANC beset by corruption scandals, a growing intolerance for political dissent and the seeming inability to robustly tackle growing levels of social inequality, the DA is attempting to position itself as a pragmatic and efficient government in waiting.

Central to the strategy is the promotion of the City of Cape Town as an exemplar of good governance. The DA’s Cape Town manifesto promotes the city as beacon of ‘world class services, order and stability’ (and by extension paints ANC run urban areas as decrepit ‘feral cities’). Notably, in a country where inequality has sustained high levels of violent crime, the DA’s Cape Town model offers humanistic sounding injunctions about improving safety through reducing historical legacies of underdevelopment, poverty reduction and ‘’violence prevention through urban upgrading’’. The DA’s official line on urban safety promises to enrol ordinary people in the improvement of the city through social crime reduction strategies: as one memorable slogan in the recent local election campaign noted "a child in sport, is a child out of court". Notably, the DA claims that its policies are linked by a concern for individual freedom and the limitation of abusive state power.

However, as the last few years have shown much of the self-proclaimed success of this model is in fact contingent on state violence and the perpetuation of a low level social war against the urban poor. Rather than an aberration this betrays a basal authoritarianism within the DA, which views the poor as targets for pacification, containment and ‘warehousing’.

Take for example the saga of the N2 Gateway housing project. In conjunction with the ANC led National government the city has attempted to move thousands of people from the city to Delft. Despite all the talk about meeting housing ‘’backlogs’’, most activists and researchers argue that the construction of ‘beautiful formal housing opportunities’ between the international airport and the city was a pretext for massive forced removals fast tracked ahead of the 2010 World Cup. Indeed, the quality of these housing opportunities was quickly revealed to people who had been moved from shack settlements into the two Temporary Relocation Areas (TRA) associated with the project. The DA managed Symphony Way TRA ( better know as Blikkiesdorp) greeted its new residents with government built corrugated iron shacks, barbed wired fencing, access control by the South African Police Service (SAPS) and regular patrols by apartheid era Casspier armed personal carriers.

The residents of the Symphony Way informal settlement were so unenamoured with the prospect of being forced into a glorified refugee camp that they occupied a nearby road in Delft for 21 months, the longest political action of its kind in South African history. And as the city was continually warned by residents this uprooting of communities has seen Blikkiesdorp invaded by gang related violence. With Blikkiesdorp as its premier dumping ground for unwanted and ‘risky’ populations, the ‘world class’ security of the city is often bought at the expense of creating insecurity on the periphery.

For example, immediately prior to the World Cup last year, hundreds of homeless people were evicted from the areas around the Greenpoint stadium to Blikkiesdorp, a sudden influx of people which seemed to bear all the hallmarks of an orchestrated clean up. The international media had a field day with this story, especially because of the camp's disturbing similarities to the titular zone of exception in the film District 9. However, the DA’s slick press cadres denied that there were any links between this and the upcoming World Cup. Indeed, when conducting research for my PhD, one City spokesperson even told me that they were not even aware of any controversy about the evictions. These denials looked slightly farcical in light of the city's public unveiling of its philanthropic sounding 'Winter Readiness Plan for street people’, which aimed to "rehabilitate" its "participants" by offering vaguely described "activities" which would keep them out of the city bowl. Coincidently, the plan was initiated a month before the World Cup and happened to fit exactly into FIFA imposed by-laws about restricting the visible presence of poverty within host cities. Most tellingly, the plan stressed the importance of ensuring that "our task is to get to people living on the streets before they acquire survival skills on the streets. Once a person survives a winter on the streets it is even more difficult to persuade him to consider getting back home." Using language that wouldn’t be out of place in the control of wild animals, the statement reveals much about the status of the down and out in the eyes of the Cape Town authorities.

The creation of a far flung prison camp, whose architecture serves as a weaponised form of containment is one thing, but the city considerably upped the ante with last year's attempt to evict the residents of Hangberg. As gruellingly recorded in the Uprising of Hangberg documentary the police were clearly told to prepare for war: without provocation the SAPS opened fire with rubber bullets, destroyed homes, beat up schoolchildren. Several residents lost eyes. This shock and awe campaign was undergird by a sophisticated DA strategy of disinformation, in which the press was assured that the police were ‘liberating’ the area from ‘ drug dealers’ and it was falsely claimed that violence had been initiated by the community.

One of the most telling scenes in the film is Zille’s petulant response to the community’s anger about this officially legislated brutality. Surrounded by her police praetorian guard she storms off when the understandably furious community refuses to accept a pious lecture about their own best interests. Among activists Zille has become notorious for this kind of behaviour, with radical community groups who deviate from the official agenda set down in meetings accused of undermining ‘development’ through talking ‘politics’. As seen in Hangberg, this rapidly transmutes into the vilification of protest as ‘criminal’. The DA script entails a division between the ‘deserving poor’ who want development and ‘troublemakers’ who make the cardinal sin of demanding to be engaged in the political process.

The violence at Hangberg was so extreme that containing the negative publicity proved a challenge even for the party’s finely honed techniques of reality management. At a local election meeting this year I saw a normally slick councillor reduced to half-baked evasions when the issue was raised. After mumbling something about a ‘tragic misunderstanding’ his conclusion was "you know how the police get in these situations". While the level of state violence unleashed was perhaps exceptional, this kind of militarised policing is not. As an aspirant ‘World City’, the DA has managed Cape Town by drawing on a transnational repertoire of what Stephen Graham calls the new military urbanism : ‘crowd control’ which aligns ‘non-lethal’ weaponry with hyper aggressive tactics and campaigns of media dissemination. While this is initially tested on groups which the state considers marginal it may quickly become the norm. Indeed, the party’s official security policy reveals an eagerness to rollout such ‘first world security measures’ if in power, from mandatory prison labour to the pre-emptive identification and tracking of ‘potential’ criminals. To this end, Cape Town’s central business district (CBD) has seen the establishment of a CCTV network of Orwellian proportions whose surveillance footprint far exceeds any other city in the country. However, this funnelling of resources into the CBD stands in strong contrast to the epidemic violence in the sprawling Cape Flats to the south east, in which children have exhibited signs of post-traumatic stress comparable to a warzone.

As the party supporters are quick to point out, ANC dominated councils in other cities have engaged in similar actions, from orchestrated attack on the shack-dwellers' movement, Abahlali base Mjondolo in 2009 to last year's dramatic upsurge in recorded cases of police brutality. Indeed, it can be argued that this is a problem which transcends parties as urban authorities’ efforts to create sanitised world class cities fuses with historical legacies of authoritarianism. Despite the troubling developments, post-apartheid South Africa has a vibrant civil society which continually exposes and challenges these abuses. However, the nature of our recent past means that ordinary South Africans must be continually vigilant about the application of state power, especially when this is glossed in a packaged coat of ‘’international best practise’’.

Thus, despite the service it pays to liberal platitudes about an open society, the DA’s approach to Cape Town's ‘peripheral’ areas and populations appears to replicate a governmental strategy of disgusting inequality by force and lashing out at society’s most vulnerable. As Jean Pierre de La Porte has put it, the DA’s Cape Town model is divided into a Manichean “world of orderly haves and embarrassing have-nots, mocking the weak has become acceptable, since their own failure to be prudent and follow the rules has brought their every misfortune upon themselves – the vulnerable are dunces’’. Under Zille’s botox hardened smile lies a ready resort to the fists of iron which fortify this divide.