Category Archives: Thembinkosi Qumbelo

The Housing List versus the Death List

The Housing List versus the Death List

We are supposed to be living in a democratic country, a country of justice, a country where everyone should be treated as one. Yet there is a huge inequality. That inequality is economic, it is spatial and it is political. We remain divided into rich and poor. We continue to be allocated to different kinds of places that are meant for different kinds of people with different kinds of opportunities, different kinds of lives and different kinds of rights. We continue to be divided into those that have the freedom to express themselves and those that face all kinds of intimidation and repression if we commit the crime of telling the truths about our lives.

For the poor this country is a democratic prison. We are allowed to vote for our prison warders and managers but we must always remain in the prison. We must remain in silence when our shack settlements are illegally destroyed leaving us homeless. We must remain in silence when we are forcibly removed to transit camps that are only fit for animals but not for people. We must remain in silence when we are told to return to Lusikisiki or taken to human dumping grounds far outside the cities. We must remain in silence when we are threatened, beaten, shot and killed. The politicians think that when we refuse to be silent, and when we resist repression, they can silence us by throwing some meat at us. After all these years they think that we are dogs. We are not dogs. We are people. We will continue to rebel until we are treated as human beings.

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SACSIS: There Will Be Blood

http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/1794

There Will be Blood

Richard Pithouse

Nkosinathi Mngomezulu was shot in the stomach on Saturday morning. He was shot at the Marikana land occupation at Stop 1, Cato Crest in Durban during an eviction. He's currently in the Intensive Care Unit of King Edward Hospital. His comrades fear that he may be attacked in the hospital. They've not been allowed to post their own guard but they're making sure that he's always surrounded by a large group during visiting hours.

Mngomezulu's comrades are not paranoid. He's been threatened with death if he recovers and returns home to the occupation. On the 26th of June Nkululeko Gwala, like Mngomezulu a member of Abahlali baseMjondolo, was assassinated in Cato Crest. Just over three months earlier another activist, Thembinkosi Qumbelo was gunned down in similar circumstances.

And hospital is not necessarily a safe place for someone who has crossed the ANC in Durban. On the 30th of June last year Bhekimuzi Ndlovu was shot in the Zakheleni shack settlement in Umlazi after a series of protests against the local councillor and for land and housing. The Unemployed People's Movement reported that the next day he was visited in hospital by a delegation from the local ANC. They said that they wanted to pray for him. Shortly after they left he became violently ill. The doctor diagnosed poisoning.

Murder has been part of the repertoire of political containment in post-apartheid Durban since Michael Makhabane was shot in the chest at point blank range by a police officer on a university campus in May 2000. Political killings have been undertaken by shadowy assassins since at least April 2006 when two former SACP activists were assassinated in Umlazi after supporting an independent candidate against the ANC in the local government elections. And the armed mobilisation of ANC supporters against people organised outside of the party has been given de facto sanction from the police and senior politicians in the city and the province since at least September 2009 when Abahlali baseMjondolo were attacked in the Kennedy Road shack settlement in Clare Estate.

The attack on Abahlali baseMjondolo in 2009 was also the moment when the language of ethnicity began to be openly used by the local ANC, including senior figures in the Municipality like Nigel Gumede, to legitimate exclusion and violence. Abahlali baseMjondolo, an ethnically diverse organisation, was misrepresented as an Mpondo organisation and it was made clear that this designation rendered it illegitimate. Ethnic claims were mobilised in a similar way when people were burnt out of the kwaShembe shack settlement in Clermont in March 2010 and in the repression that followed sustained organisation by the Unemployed People's Movement in the Zakheleni settlement in Umlazi last year.

Death threats are now a routine feature of political discourse in Durban. They are not only part of the arsenal of increasingly heavily armed local councillors and their committees. In September 2007 politically connected businessman Ricky Govender, a man who has often been described as a gangster, was reported to have threatened to have a journalist at the Mercury killed. He had previously been reported to have threatened to have local Abahlali baseMjondolo activist Shamitha Naidoo killed. Nigel Gumede, who chairs the housing committee in the eThekwini Municipality, has never denied the claim that he threatened S'bu Zikode from Abahlali baseMjondolo in a meeting in the City Hall in October 2011. On a number of occasions ANC members bused in to court appearances have openly issued death threats against independently organised activists.

Witnesses say that Mngomezulu was shot by a manager of the Land Invasions Unit. The police are claiming that he was shot after he stabbed one of the unit's members. Witnesses emphatically deny this. The police in Durban have been so habitually dishonest for so long when it comes to giving accounts of their own violence, and to violence against people organised outside of the ANC, that nothing that they say should be taken seriously in the absence of credible evidence. But even if Mngomezulu did put up some resistance to the Land Invasions Unit he would have been within his right to do so. We all have a clear right, in law, to defend our homes against illegal attack.

The land at Stop 1 in Cato Crest was occupied, and the occupation named Marikana, in March this year after a large number of people were made homeless as their shacks were destroyed to make way for a housing development. As has been typical for years, tenants were left homeless if they couldn't pay a bribe to get a house or didn't have solid connections to local party structures. In this case the eviction of the tenants was also given an overt ethnic inflection with politicians from the local councillor to Nigel Gumede and the mayor, James Nxumalo, openly mobilising a discourse that presents people from the Eastern Cape as alien intruders in Durban.

Some of the people that were illegally rendered homeless earlier this year had lived in the area since as far back at 1995. They had work in the area, their children were in local schools and Durban was where they were making their lives. The local ANC had told them to 'go back to Lusikisiki'. They decided, instead, to occupy an adjacent piece of land. Their shacks have been demolished on eight separate occasions, often violently, and they have rebuilt them each time. They have been to the High Court five times to request the Court's intervention against these patently unlawful evictions. The Municipality has brazenly violated all of the assurances it has given the court, as well as three court orders.

People who have tried to defend their homes have been beaten and shot with rubber bullets. When they have gone to the streets they have been arrested and beaten in the local police station. When the court ordered lawyers from both sides to meet at the Marikana land occupation on Tuesday last week to identify which shacks were protected by its orders, local ANC members were mobilised by the local councillor to disrupt the process. Intimidation, including death threats, made the process mandated by the court impossible.

This drama is not simply about the state using violence to try and sustain the duopoly that it shares with the market with regard to the allocation of land. It's also about protecting the interests of the ruling party. Party supporters have built shacks in the same area without consequence. These are political evictions. And politics is being openly mediated through ethnicity. Mpondo people are being presented as having no right to this city and the Zulus amongst them as disloyal. S'bu Zikode from Abahlali baseMjondolo has concluded, “To the smug politicians in their suits in the City Hall, and their thugs hunting us in the shacks, you are not a proper human being if you are not Zulu and if you are a Zulu living and organising with Mpondo people then you are not a proper Zulu.”

For Zikode the democratic pretensions of the Durban ANC are bogus: “The City Hall is red with blood.” But on Monday last week Abahlali baseMjondolo brought its own tide of red shirted resolve to the City Hall in an impressive march. The movement has 1 560 members in good standing in Cato Crest and its members from across the city are holding meetings at the Marikana occupation, cooking together and rebuilding the shacks after each demolition.

Zuma's increasingly violent and predatory state has its firmest urban base in Durban. But despite the authority that the ANC wields in this city its power is not exercised with patrician assurance. On the contrary the scale and intensity of political violence here far exceeds that of any of the other major cities. The law remains an important terrain of struggle in Durban but neither it nor the Constitution offer any guarantees. The local state and the local party are both willing to crush dissent, perfectly lawful dissent, with violence. The silence of higher authority has served to sanction this violence. Nonetheless it is here in Durban that the most sustained popular resistance to the brutality and venality that has seized hold of the ANC has been organised. There has been remarkable innovation, tenacity and courage from below. The future remains unwritten but it seems certain that there will be blood.

Open Democracy: Twelve bullets in a man’s body, twelve more in a collective fantasy

http://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/richard-pithouse/twelve-bullets-in-man%E2%80%99s-body-twelve-more-in-collective-fantasy

Twelve bullets in a man’s body, twelve more in a collective fantasy

by Richard Pithouse

Cities have emerged as a key site of popular struggle in post-apartheid South Africa. But with the ANC responding to independent organisation in an increasingly violent and repressive manner the future of these struggles is deeply uncertain.

On the 26th of June, James Nxumalo, the African National Congress (ANC) Mayor of Durban and Sibongeseni Dhlomo, the chairperson of the ANC in Durban, addressed a public meeting in the Cato Crest shanty town. During the meeting Dhlomo threatened Nkululeko Gwala, a central figure in recent mobilisations against evictions and ANC capture of local housing allocations. Dhlomo used idiomatic language but it was clear enough to his audience that his words amounted to a death threat. Gwala was well aware that the threat was serious. After all, it was just over three months since another activist, Thembinkosi Qumbelo was assassinated in the same neighbourhood. Qumbelo was shot while watching a football game in a local bar.

Gwala had joined Abahlali baseMjondolo, a shack dweller’s movement, in February. Since 2005 the movement has mounted a serious challenge to the ANC in a number of shack settlements in the city and beyond. The movement emerged out of broad and escalating urban ferment.

Across the country there has been, particularly since 2004, escalating popular opposition to the ANC’s urban regime which is authoritarian, violent, spatially and politically exclusionary and increasingly subordinated to clientalism and patronage mediated through party structures. Most of this opposition is not formally organised on a sustained basis and is closer in form to what Raúl Zibechi calls a society in movement than a social movement. With the road blockade as its primary weapon it has, drawn considerable attention to the worsening urban crisis and exposed the limits of the assumption, widespread inside and out of the ANC, that the workplace is the central site, and the trade union the central organisational form, for popular political engagement.

The risks of formality

The formal organisation of popular movements carries obvious risks, including risks of bureaucratisation and co-option by political parties or the NGO/donor complex that likes to present itself as civil society. But, if popular organisation can sustain democratic practices, and enough autonomy to negotiate mutual rather than paternalistic relationships with middle class actors, it can have valuable benefits to the organisation. These include the opportunity for ongoing collective deliberation and access to the broader public sphere, in particular the African language media and the courts.

Engagement on these terrains does carry its own risks and costs, but in their absence a popular struggle is at serious risk of collapsing under the weight of violence mediated through the state or the party and, to the degree that it is acknowledged, passed off as consequent to popular criminality. It is rare for popular struggles that are not grounded in, or connected to sustained organisation to be acknowledged as political by elite publics, rather they tend to be seen as criminal or as some sort of irrational, and at times almost biological, spasm of fury. But even when popular struggles are recognised as political they tend not be able to win the right to represent themselves in elite publics without sustained organisation and run the risk of being subjected to largely speculative interpretation by ‘experts’. The result is that, to appropriate Jacques Rancière’s words, “only groans or cries expressing suffering, hunger or anger could emerge, but not actual speech demonstrating a shared aisthesis”.

Attacking the political

Since its founding Abahlali baseMjondolo has often been held in contempt by the ANC, as if it were plainly illegitimate for poor people to organise themselves outside of Party or civil society projects that, like Slum Dweller’s International, are as attractive to the World Bank as they are to the ANC. The party has frequently alleged that the movement is a plot on the part of foreign intelligence agencies. All kinds of rumours have been circulated. They are mostly predicated on the assumption that that the ongoing organisation of poor people is de facto evidence of conspiracy, assumed to be both external and malicious, and must have been achieved by both white agency and large splodges of wonga rather than the courage and commitment of shack dwellers.

Similar rumours have had currency in some currents in NGO based civil society which have been equally unwilling to recognise popular political agency. This misrepresentation of popular political innovation as consequent to conspiracy, sinister and, in the case of the ANC, anti-national, holds grave consequences. Like others poor people’s movements that have ebbed and flowed since the turn of the century, Abahlali baseMjondolo has been subject to systemically unlawful and violent repression at the hands of the state.

This came to a head in 2009, when John Mchunu, notorious hard man who had joined the ANC from the Zulu nationalist movement Inkatha, was the ANC Chairperson in Durban. During his time in Inkatha he had been described as a ‘warlord’. In September 2009 Mchunu warned the ANC’s Regional General Council of “the element of these NGO [sic] who are funded by the West to destabilise us; these elements use all forms of media and poor people. We know them very well; we have seen them using their power at Abahlali baseMjondolo.”

Two weeks later a group of men, armed and drunk, and identifying themselves as both ANC and Zulu, launched an attack on the movement’s ethnically diverse leadership in the Kennedy Road settlement who they described, falsely, as all being part of the Mpondo minority. As the night wore on they went from house to house destroying people’s homes and threatening to kill both Abahlali baseMjondolo members and Mpondo people while requests to the police for help were ignored. It was only after some hours when some residents began to defend themselves that the state stepped in with armed force. It quickly moved to impose an unelected ANC leadership on the settlement. No attempt was made to offer any sort of security to members of Abahlali baseMjondolo under attack or to their families and homes. Willies Mchunu, a senior ANC politician, declared that the government had “moved swiftly to liberate a Durban community” and the party declared that it had summarily disbanded the movement. After the attack twelve young men, all Mpondo, and all linked to the movement, were arrested and spent almost a year in jail.

For months local ANC supporters continued to openly destroy and loot the homes of Abahlali baseMjondolo members on weekends with absolute impunity. Death threats and violence by party members, and torture at the hands of the police, was used to try and coerce witnesses into inventing some evidence against the twelve young men who had been arrested. But when the matter came to trial, the state’s case was so bad that the judge threw it out of court without the defence even having to answer the case brought against them.

Twelve bullets

Nkululeko Gwala knew this history very well. He knew that there had recently been an assassination in Cato Crest, that threats from the ruling party’s Durban chairperson were not to be taken lightly and that it was possible for political violence to be exercised against activists with impunity. He must also have known that political assassinations have become common within the ANC, particularly in KwaZulu-Natal. But Gwala decided not to flee Cato Crest after the threat from Dhlomo, the ANC chairperson. That night, perhaps signalling his refusal to be cowed, he went to a local bar to watch Brazil play Uruguay in the Confederations Cup. Unlike Thembinkosi Qumbelo he didn’t end his days in a bar watching football. He was shot twelve times on the walk home.

Abahlali baseMjondolo would not have survived the repression of 2009 without access to international activist solidarity, and connections to the local media and pro bono legal support that had been developed via years of day to day organisation. And without the contacts that the movement has developed in the media over the years they would not have been able to counter the ruling party’s spin on Gwala’s murder as effectively as they did. But although organisation has enabled what the ANC would prefer to represent as criminal to appear in the elite public sphere as political, the fact remains that with important exceptions, middle class South Africa just doesn’t give a damn. Abahlali baseMjondolo members in Cato Crest continue to be subject to credible threats from local ANC leaders and are also being targeted for eviction by the municipality.

In principle all South Africans inhabit a Constitutional Democracy. In practice there is a graduated system that offers democracy, shrinking but certainly extant, to the middle classes, strong representation within the party for the loyal factions of the working class and a toxic mixture of patronage and repression for the poor. Party cards and fealty to party bosses are increasingly required for access to what support the state does provide; opposition, especially if organised outside of the ruling party, is increasingly met with violence. The bulk of the middle class, including many NGOs, academics, journalists and commentators, implicitly accept the graduated political system that the ANC has created. Many grassroots militants have concluded that while lines of solidarity, which are sometimes vital, can be forged across class there will be no way through this crisis without an organised challenge to the state and civil society from below.

Under apartheid the division of society in terms of what the late Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot called “an ontology, an implicit organization of the world and its inhabitants” took a fundamentally spatial form. After apartheid the ANC has taken some steps to deracialise elite spaces. But in the countryside the Bantustans remain neo-Bantustans, formally governed on a fundamentally different basis to the rest of the country. And in the cities the shack settlements are governed on a fundamentally different basis to other urban spaces. Here the rules are, in practice, often worked out with little regard for policy or the law.

Before the end of apartheid shack dweller’s struggles were usually subsumed under a nationalist struggle, or opposition to it, that tended to disavow the particularity of the shack settlement as a site of habitation and struggle. It was often assumed that the urban question would be automatically resolved by the success of the national struggle. With every day that people continue to make their lives amidst shit and fire, every eviction, every beating, every case of torture and every murder that assumption becomes ever more fantastical

Daily News: KZN protest leader shot 12 times

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http://www.iol.co.za/dailynews/kzn-protest-leader-shot-12-times-1.1538500#.Uc0-ZfkwfUU

KZN protest leader shot 12 times

By NKULULEKO NENE

Durban – A Cato Crest man who led protests in the area this week over the allocation of RDP houses was shot 12 times – just hours after a high level ANC delegation met with angry community members.

Nkululeko Gwala, 34, had told the Daily News during the week and two hours before he died, that he was afraid he would be killed. He was shot by two men as he made his way home at about 10.30pm.

This is the second killing related to the allocation of RDP houses in the area since violence first flared up in March. Thembinkosi Qumbelo, the leader of the Cato Crest Residential Association, was gunned down on March 15 by four gunmen. No arrests have been made.

The latest killing came just hours after eThekwini mayor, James Nxumalo and Health MEC Dr Sibongiseni Dhlomo – who is also chairman of ANC in the city – met community members at the Cato Crest Community Hall to discuss rising tension in the area during which two local councillors’ offices were torched.

Speaking to the Daily News before his death, Gwala said he did not want to attend the meeting because he feared he might be killed.

He said the main reason he had led the protests this week was that councillors were giving low cost houses to politically connected people.

“People should get houses because of merit and not politcal affiliations,” he said.

“If they say I am guilty of leading the protest then that is fine because I am doing it for the rights of people.”

He was dead two hours later.

Long-standing tension over the allocation of RDP houses intensified this week after land invaders, evicted from their shacks, blockaded part of King Cetshwayo (Jan Smuts) Highway on Monday morning.

This morning, his girlfriend, Thembi Mazubane, 42, said he was ambushed by two men who were later seen running away from the scene.

“After Qumbelo’s death, two women jokingly said I must buy black panties and bras in preparation for mourning. I believe that those who shot him also murdered Qumbelo. He (Gwala) had been receiving death threats since the protests started,” she said.

Addressing community members on Wednesday night, Dhlomo slammed police for not stopping the mob that went on the rampage in the area. He said police did nothing to stop the violence or arrest offenders.

The offices of ward councillors Zanele Ndzoyiya and Mzimuni Mnguni were torched on Tuesday night and Vusi Mzimela (Bellair) Road and King Cetshwayo Highway had been blocked with rubble and burning tyres.

“I am going to have an urgent meeting with (MEC for Community Safety and Liaison) Willies Mchunu to vent our unhappiness on how police conducted themselves during the protests.

“We hear that police accompanied the hooligans while they were destroying properties. We urge the community not to rely on police, but be protective of this area and its infrastructure,” said Dhlomo, who was addressing Cato Crest residents at a special meeting on Wednesday.

He appealed to the community not to allow hooligans to stand in the way of development. “Otherwise, the budget set for building homes in the area will be taken elsewhere,” he said.

Nxumalo was among the speakers at the meeting, which was attended by thousands of residents. He also criticised the police, calling them incompetent.

Nxumalo referenced Gwala – who had been mentioned by several residents – in his address to residents, telling them that he knew him from their home town, Inchanga, and that he had come from a “good home”.

Nxumalo appealed to people to be patient as the shortage of land hindered development. However, he said there were other housing projects, such as Cornubia, where they could be housed.

Mnguni said it was disappointing to see infrastructure being destroyed and development halted because of a few unruly people.

Police confirmed Gwala’s death and said they were investigating.

Nkululeko Gwala Murdered in Cato Crest

27 June 2013
Abahlali baseMjondolo Press Statement

Nkululeko Gwala Murdered in Cato Crest

uNkululeko Gwala

Last night Nkululeko Gwala, an Abahlali baseMjondolo member, and a well known and respected housing activist, was murdered in Cato Crest. Twelve shots were fired. The style of this assassination is very similar to the assassination of Thembinkosi Qumbelo, also a well known housing activist (but not an AbM member) who was killed in the same area on the 15th of March this year. There are also strong similarities to the attack on our movement in Kennedy Road in 2009.

 

 

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