Abahlali baseMjondolo to March against racism, evictions and forced removals

13 September 2024
Abahlali baseMjondolo press statement

Abahlali baseMjondolo to March against racism, evictions and forced removals

Abahlali baseMjondolo will be marching in Ballito on Monday 16 September 2024 at 10 am. The march will begin at the Shaka’s Head shack settlement and end at the offices of the KwaDukuza Municipality in Ballito. We are marching against militarised ‘raids’ on our communities, against forced removals and for collective land tenure and access to services. We are marching against segregation and racism.

At the end of apartheid many of the rich people in Durban fled north to the gated communities in uMhlanga. They have continued moving north, and now many of the very rich live in gated communities in and around places like Ballito. At first these gated communities were mostly white. Now there are many black people living there too.

Instead of using progressive and democratic urban planning to build more just cities many of the ANC elites moved to join the rich whites in the gated communities. These gated communities are now given special treatment by the ANC government. This is not hidden. In KwaDukuza they were even exempt from loadshedding!

It is not enough for the residents of these gated communities that they have used their wealth to separate themselves from the rest of the people. They also demand that the poor not be allowed to live near to their gated communities, on what they call ‘prime land’. They want to use both their private wealth and the power of the state to enforce segregation.

They have militarised private security with armoured vehicles, and even a helicopter, that are tasked with stopping ‘land invasions’ and that, working with the police, ‘raid’ our communities.

The KwaDukuza Municipality is openly working with the rich to remove poor black people in Ballito and Umhlali. The ratepayers’ association and the ANC led municipality are working together to evict poor black people, to destroy our homes and communities.

They say that our presence reduces the value of the land, as if value is just a question of the price of the land and has nothing to do with the value of land for the human beings who live on it. They say that we must be removed because we are a health hazard as we must use the bush to relieve ourselves whereas the obvious solution to the lack of sanitation is to provide sanitation. They say that we are ‘chasing tourists away’. The strong element of racism driving all this is often openly displayed on the social media used by the white residents of the gated communities. The black elites who live in the gated communities are silent about this racism.

The KwaDukuza municipality and the owners of the gated communities are, working in partnership, aiming to remove the residents of the Shaka’s Head settlement to Vlakspruit, which is 15 km way, where they can be hidden from the eyes of the rich. At the moment residents of the settlement can walk to work. If they are forcibly removed they will need expensive transport to get to work, and there is nothing in Vlakspruit other than an old cemetery. A total of 980 households are facing an apartheid style forced removal to Vlakspruit. The matter is currently in the Pietermaritzburg High Court.

We are being treated like sub-humans, like animals. For thirty years we have been told that we are not good enough to live in the cities and that we must be taken to the human dumping grounds where there is no work, schools or services. Now we are told that we are not good enough to live on the ‘prime land’ near to the gated communities outside the cities.

We are good enough to wash the clothes, clean the homes, raise the children and keep the homes and families of the rich safe but we are not good enough to live near to them. When we are not at work, working for them, we must be far away, we must be invisible. This is exactly the same logic as apartheid.

In 2024, more than thirty years after the first democratic election, poor black people
continue to face systemic and at times violently enforced segregation from an alliance between the white elites who believe that they are the only ones who are human beings and the ANC.

The right to access the cities was denied to black people by the apartheid government. This continued after apartheid under the ANC who forced large numbers of people out of the cities to the human dumping grounds beyond the urban peripheries. Now private power, using violent and militarised private security companies, is also trying to enforce segregation.

Even though apartheid was ended its practices have not ended. The urban poor and working class build the cities and the gated communities outside the cities and yet we face brutal evictions from the cities and from the ‘prime land’ near the gated communities.

When the Freedom Charter declared that ‘South African belongs to all who live in it’, it did not say that parts of the country only belong to the rich. All of South Africa belongs to all who live in it. Rights that can only be realised with money are not real rights, they are fake rights.

We are marching to stop the violent and militarised ‘raids’ by private security and the police. We are marching to stop evictions. We are marching to demand collective tenure and for the provision of basic services such as water and sanitation. We are marching against the racism of the white elites and the collaboration with that racism by the black elites. We are marching against the dehumanisation, oppression and repression of the poor.

Thapelo Mohapi 084 576 5117
Mqapheli Bonono 073 067 3274
Ongama Mncamela 073 922 2546