October 28, 2005 10:59 AM
If you live in a place called Cotswold Downs in Hillcrest and work in a place called Derby Downs in Westville you are safe. But if you live in a township called Mandela Park in Khayalitsha, or a settlement called Lusaka in Reservoir Hills, the state may well come for you, with men with guns and dogs and tear gas, and throw you out of your home or just flatten it.
Yesterday, a tragic and, in fact, pitiful scene unfolded a stones throw from the occupation of Councillor Jayraj Bachu’s office. The smalll Lusaka settlement (around 50 shacks) received a final eviction notice. The notice, in suitably Orwellian style, came with a large logo in the centre of the page featuring the flag, celebrating figures (rock art style) and the words “10 YEARS OF FREEDOM SOUTH AFRICA 1994 – 2004”. At the bottom of the page the legend “WE CARE, WE BELONG WE SERVE” appears in bold and in the bottom right corner stick figures appear to be doing a Mexican wave under the slogan “BATHO PELE – PEOPLE FIRST”.
Many of the people in Lusaka have been allocated ‘houses’ out past Mount Moriah. People are saying that the ‘houses’ are the inhumane one room RDP houses which have now been divided into two with thin partitions so that 2 families have to share one house. We’ll go and look at the houses this afternoon and report on the exact conditions. People do not want to move to these ‘houses’ because they are far, far away from work, opportunities for livelihoods, education, health care and so on. They are approaching this forced removal as a cataclysm. Other people are ‘not on the list’, will not be given ‘houses’ on the Metro’s periphery and will now be rendered homeless.
The Lusaka settlement choose not to join the march on Councillor Bachu on 4 October saying that “apartheid is over we don’t need to toyi-toyi now.”
Right now (10:00 a.m. Friday, 28 October) shacks are being broken down by labourers under the protection of highly armed men from the Metro’s armed wing. Some people broke down their own homes yesterday in anticipation of today’s assault with a view to being able to save the building materials and secure their property. Others stayed. Right now shacks are being demolished with people’s possessions still inside. Lusaka residents are begging for legal and political support. But it is too late. They have lost. They only viable struggle at this point is for people to be allowed to remove their possessions from their own shacks before they are destroyed by the Metro.
Fazel Khan is there right now. His phone number is 0845778627.