Update: 29 April 2013 10:18 p.m After massive pressure from comrades at the police station the police agreed to release the two arrested comrades at around 9:00 p.m.. At the same time shacks were rebuilt on the newly occupied land.
Update: 29 April 2013 4:18 p.m Two hundred comrades have barricaded the police station. Others are defending the occupation and rebuilding. The Police Commissioner has said that they are being used by the third force.
Saturday 27 April 2013
Unemployed People’s Movement Press Statement
The UPM will Protest on Monday With or Without the Permission of the Makana Municipality
In July 2011 Jacob Zuma was given the freedom of Grahamstown and Raglan Road, the main road leading into the township, was renamed as ‘Dr Jacob Zuma Drive’. Before Zuma came to Grahamstown the Mayor, Zamuxolo Peter, told the people that they must stop demonstrating and struggling because the President is coming. He said that the President will meet them and that he will give them sanitation, electricity and houses. He said that if there are protests they will make the President angry and he will decide not to bring development to Grahamstown.
But Zuma came and went and nothing was done. In 2012 people continued to put pressure on Peter and he was forced to go back to the people. This time he didn’t tell them that they must remain quiet because Jacob Zuma was coming to sort out their problems. This time he said that the reason why people were poor was that we are not educated and that if we want electricity and houses we must go to school so that we could get jobs and then afford these things. He said nothing about the state of education in the Eastern Cape, the rate of unemployment or the colonial history that made the poor to be poor. He made it clear that he thought that our poverty was our fault and that we deserved to be living as we are.
Every time that people organised, protested or expressed their anger and pain they were told that they were being used by white academics who wanted to overthrow the ANC, install the DA in power and return the country to apartheid. The idea that people who are poor and black cannot think for themselves or organise themselves or even recognise their own oppression is a colonial idea! But here is the ANC repeating exactly the same insults to our people as the colonialists! Jacob Zuma is given the freedom of Grahamstown but the freedom of the black poor is denied and we are insulted.
On Tuesday last week the Unemployed People’s Movement held a mass meeting in the eThembeni shack settlement. At this meeting the people said that they wanted written commitments from the Mayor in terms of when sanitation and electricity would be provided. They also said that the deadline for providing these services must be the end of June or, at the latest, the end of July. They elected a delegation to go and meet the Mayor. They met the Mayor and the Municipal manager the next day.
The Mayor and the Municipal Manager said that there is no problem in providing these services but they are busy with the freedom of the city by which they meant that they are busy with the changing of the name of Grahamstown to Makana. Our delegation was told that we must come back on Wednesday next week. We went there on Wednesday this week but there was no Mayor. We then signed and submitted a permit to picket on Monday. That was bared. They even refused to acknowledge in writing that they had received the application to protest. We were told that we must give them seven days notice if we wanted to organise a protest. This denial of our right to protest has no basis in law. Last time we wanted to organise a protest – it was against police brutality – it was also banned. That time we were told that one of our comrades was on a national list of dangerous people provided by Crime Intelligence to all municipalities and that no protest where anyone on that list might speak would be allowed to go ahead with the riot police being present. We had to go to court to have that protest unbanned. When it went ahead there were riot police from across the province.
The people are determined to demand the written commitment from the Mayor to provide these services. We refuse to allow the Municipality to deny us our right to protest and so we will be protesting, peacefully, with or without their approval, on Monday.
At the same time car guards and car washers have been harassed in the streets. A sign went up in High Street saying that car washing is banned and the car guards and car washers were being seriously harassed. The municipality was trying to force them off the streets. A meeting of the car gaurds and car washers was held and it was decided to collect rubbish and drop it outside the banks and the municipal offices as a form of protest. This was done on last week Thursday. The protestors were arrested but the UPM mobilised to challenge the police on the arrests and eventually they called in the Municipal officials to resolve the situation. It was agreed that there would be a meeting the next day and everyone was released from custody. At the meeting on Friday it was agreed that the car guards and car washers could continue to work while another meeting was arranged. On Tuesday there was a meeting with the police and the municipality and they were told that they could continue to their work but they must work for the police as informers and that they will be paid for this by the state. They were told that they must tell the police who is breaking into cars and who is selling drugs to Rhodes University students.
About five years back two guys, who were also car guards and car washers, were beaten by Hi-tech and white students at Rhodes after it was said that they were selling drugs and breaking into cars. These two guys were killed. Recently another car guard was beaten by Hi-tech and dumped at the Matyana River. No one has been arrested although this man was savagely attacked. Hi-tech is seriously brutal. Some students made a film about this. It is at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ZKqMrmNG6ZU
Unfortunately the film doesn’t address the question of racism but it does show the thuggery of Hi-tec.
It is clear, therefore, that the car guards and car washers will only be allowed to engage in their survivalist activities if they agree to serve the interests of the middle class.
Between 1811 and 1812 the Xhosa people living between the Fish River and the Sundays River were driven off their land by Colonel John Graham. Their homes were burnt, their crops destroyed and there was indiscriminate murder. John Craddock, the governor of the Cape Colony who had put down anti-colonial rebellions in Ireland and India before coming to Africa, wrote back to London that the Xhosa people had been driven off their land with ‘a proper degree of terror’. The people driven off their land were not poor. They had land and they had cattle and they had gardens. This is why Abahlali baseMjondolo always stresses that the poor were made to be poor by the same system that made the rich to be rich.
No one in their right mind wants to live in a town named after a murderer. But the Mayor wants to change the name of this town without doing anything to change its neo-colonial nature. Most black people continue to live a desperate life here. Unemployment is sky high and so is corruption in the municipality. The Mayor will not give us toilets, electricity, houses or even allow us the right to organise and protest freely and yet we are told that we will be freed by changing the name of this town from Grahamstown to Makana! In fact they intend to use Makana’s name to disguise the fact that they are nothing by a comprador bourgeoisie managing a town in which most black people are living hopeless lives.
For comment on the legalities of the right to protest please contact Jane Duncan on 082 786 3600
For comments on other matters please contact:
Ayanda Kota 078 625 6462
Ben Mafani 083 5410 535
Abahlali Want Gumede Out
The article describes how the he campaign to have Gumede fired by the Mayor James Nxumalo is gaining momentum. It quotes AbM saying that Gumedes failure to provide leadership and deal with corruption, to provide open no housing lists etc demonstrate his lack of required leadership in Human settlement. It also says that as we speak in KwaNdengezi, Uganda and Isipingo houses are being sold. It also touches on the recent AbM victory in court and the question of police brutality. Gumede’s comments are weak. He says about Abahlali that: “its now clear that this movement was formed to attack me. Its clear that the leadership of AbM has an issue with me. And that this movement is used by other people in politics to further their agenda. Why don’t they report me to Public Protector if I am corrupt? Abahlali aims at ruining my reputation.”
26 April 2013
Unemployed People’s Movement
No Freedom for the Surplus People
As the movements of the poor mourn UnFreedom Day in Durban and Cape Town we suggest the following two short readings for our comrades.
1. The first chapter from ‘The Surplus People’, a book about forced removals under apartheid, that looks at Glenmore. (attached below)
2. A UPM Press statement from last year which shows how the people of Glenmore remain oppressed today. (pasted in below)
There is no freedom for us and hence our struggle continues.
Ayanda Kota 078 625 6462
Ben Mafani 083 5410 535
5 January 2012
Unemployed People’s Movement Press Statement
Mr. Velile Mafani Will Throw Three Stones Through the Window of the High Court in Grahamstown Tomorrow
Our movement has been approached by Mr. Velile Ben Mafani. He informed us that tomorrow he will throw three stones, one white, one black, and one red, through the window of the High Court in Grahamstown. He will tie a letter stating his demands around the stones.
Mr Mafani was born in a shack settlement in Coega, just outside Port Elizabeth two days after Christmas in 1953. His parents worked on nearby farms, bought and sold produce from the farms and his mother worked in kitchens. The apartheid system did not want black people living in their own places in the cities and in the 1970s they were threatened with forced removal to the Ciskei Bantustan which was a human dumping ground. Mr Mafani formed an organisation called ‘Operation Go Nowhere’ and they organised against the forced removal. But Piet Koornhof pressured them and their struggle was defeated. On the 15th of April 1979 the police and the bulldozers came. Mr Mafani was the first to be put inside a police van. The door was closed. He couldn’t see anything but he heard the screams as the shacks were destroyed and were people loaded up on to trucks like animals to be dumped in the Ciskei. People were told that there was a Court Order from the High Court in Grahamstown ordering their eviction. They were shown the paper but they were not allowed to read it.
Three thousand people from Coega were dumped in Glenmore, near Peddie. Today it is more than two hours by car from Coega. They lost their work, their cattle and their homes. They lost everything. Soon after their arrival in Glenmore 140 people, mainly children and old people, died. There were no funeral parlours and they couldn’t afford coffins so the dead were just wrapped in blankets and buried on the banks of the Fish River.
Since then Mr Mafani has never stopped challenging and struggling for justice. When democracy came he had high hopes that the new government would be willing to work with the people that have been forcibly removed from Coega to find a solution that would restore their dignity. Nothing was happening despite all his letters so in 1996 he want to the Legal Resources Centre for help. In 1997 he lodged a land claim. He has written letters to all kinds of people. He is approached the media for help. He has approached the premier, the Special Investigations Unit, the Public Protector and the SAPS. He has knocked on every door. He has many files with letters, affidavits, medical records, court records and all kinds of documents. He has a dvd that tells the story. But none of his efforts yielded any fruit.
In May 2004 he came to Grahamstown and threw three stones through the window of the High Court, the same High Court that ordered the Coega eviction in 1979. One was white to symbolise freedom, one was red to symbolise the people that died in Glenmore and were buried in blankets on the banks of the Fish River and one was black to symbolise that he will never accept being forced to live in a dark place. He was arrested on a charge of malicious damage to property and kept in the Waainek Prison in Grahamstown from 23 May till 2 September 2004. He was released without being sentenced after it was said by Dr. Dwyer that he ‘was mentally retarded and wouldn’t understand the charges’. Later Dr. Dwyer wrote a letter saying that after getting the background he realised that Mr. Mafani was not mentally ill and that he was fit to stand trail. Mr Mafani understands the charges perfectly well. The only thing that he doesn’t understand is why his community are still being treated like rubbish after democracy.
When we heard this story we were reminded of how Frantz Fanon resigned from the mental hospital in Algeria saying that it was the system, colonialism, and not his patients that were insane. It was this realisation that made him become a revolutionary fighting to destroy colonialism. It is the system, the madness of the system, a madness that continued from apartheid and into democracy, a madness that treats human beings like rubbish, that drove Mr Mafani to throw three stones through the window of the Grahamstown High Court in 2004.
He did it again in 2007 and again in 2008. Both times he was arrested, charged, found guilty and given a suspended sentence of five years. In 2008 his lawyer said that he must knock on the right door which was the Equality Court. He started the process but then the Premier intervened and said that the case was out of the jurisdiction of the Grahamstown court and so it must be moved to Peddie. He used his own money to start the process again in Peddie. He heard nothing for 5 months, then 8 months and then the case was just stopped without an explanation.
Tomorrow, at ten o’clock, he will do it again. He says that he has exhausted all the avenues that the system provides for people wishing to raise issues with the government without success. He says that he won’t run away after he has thrown the stones through the window. He will just stand there and wait for the police to come. He says that this problem is depressing him in his heart and that he can’t spend the last years of life writing letters that bring no result.
His demands are that:
1. The people evicted from Coega be allowed to return.
2. The government exhumes the bodies of the 140 people buried in blankets on the banks of the Fish River and gives them a dignified burial.
Mr Mafani says that Glenmore is a civic prison. He says that it is suitable for cows that stay thin and graze but that neither he nor any of the other people that were dumped there are cows and it is a terrible place for human beings. There has been huge development in Coega. More than a billion rand has been spent on development there. There is a new port and factories. Mr Mafani insists that the people forcibly removed from Coega in 1979 have a right to return to Coega, to live there and to work there. The ruling party are trying to isolate Mr Mafani in Glenmore. They are trying to isolate him and are calling him names. But his courage is not failing. He says that this is a struggle that he will follow till his last breath.
Under apartheid forced removals turned people and communities into rubbish to be dumped in far away places. Today poor people are still being forcibly removed from farms and cities. People and communities are still being turned into rubbish. As the UPM we are, together with our comrades in other movements like Abahlali baseMjondolo, the Anti-Eviction Campaign, the Landless People’s Movement and the Rural Network, determined to demand that the dignity of all people in South Africa is recognised. There must be justice for all past injustices and people must never again be treated like rubbish. As Abahlali baseMjondolo say everyone must count and everyone must count equally.
The UPM is willing to support the Glenmore community in their struggle and we are willing to raise this issue with our comrades in Students for Social Justice.
If any journalists are interested in this story Mr Mafani has detailed documentation of his long struggle for justice for the people evicted from Coega in 1979.
Mr Mafani can be contacted via: 078 625 6462