Category Archives: Hangberg

News 24: Hangberg protest documented

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http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Hangberg-protest-documented-20101102

Hangberg protest documented

Hlengiwe Mnguni, News24

Cape Town – On September 21, the community of Hangberg on the slopes of the Sentinel mountain in Hout Bay was catapulted into the spotlight when an operation by the City of Cape Town to demolish illegally built homes quickly degenerated into a violent confrontation between the police and residents.

The events of that day are portrayed in The Uprising of Hangberg, a documentary by Aryan Kaganof and Dylan Valley, which they say aims to tell “the other side of the story”.

In an interview with News24, Valley said his interest in the Hangberg saga had been piqued after fellow filmmaker Kaganof – who happened to have lived in the area for some time in the past – told him there was something wrong with the way that the community had been portrayed in the media by the City of Cape Town and Western Cape Premier Helen Zille.

“He said there was something very wrong with the picture. That community is not the way they were portrayed….violent hooligans.

“We needed to tell the other side of the story,” Valley said.

And the story, as told by the residents – sometimes though tears, sometimes through laughter and sometimes through sheer defiance – is a complex one that spans allegations of human rights abuses, service delivery issues, lack of media representation, questions of identity and land ownership, party politics, the divide between the rich and the poor and human dignity.

Urgency

Valley said although the film, which has been shown in Hangberg and in venues around Cape Town, is still “a work in progress” it is important that it be put in the public domain as soon as possible.

“Media reports don’t show the urgency of the situation. There’s also been misinformation on the part of the City [which] slings mud at them [the Hangberg community] so nobody cares,” Valley told News24.

One point of focus on media “misinformation” involves how the City of Cape Town apparently incorrectly identified a number of people who lost their eyes when hit by rubber bullets during the violent standoff as having provoked the police into retaliation by throwing rocks.

“I was just shocked at the basic human rights violations from police,” said Valley as he recalled accounts made by some residents in the documentary.

Despite all the upheaval on the mountain, Valley said he was heartened by the warmth of the people as he interacted with the community while making the documentary.

“I was impressed by the solidarity…by how people helped each other in the area… the sense of community….at how nice and normal everyone was.

“They don’t want anything else [but land]. They don’t want a house or a job. They don’t want violence. Nobody wants that. People want basic human rights and to live where they want to live,” he said.

Opposing views

Community leader Greg Louw – who also shot some of the footage for the documentary – said he, like a number of other residents present at one screening, was pleased that the truth about Hangeberg had been told.

“The documentary brings out the truth about what exactly happened here. We are hoping the documentary will bring out the truth about non-delivery,” he told News24, adding that the police’s actions on September 21 were “uncalled for and inhuman”.

But the view of what is wrong in Hangberg as captured in the documentary could not be more different from that still held by the City of Cape Town and Zille, who also features on clips of news interviews and on footage of the community meeting that broke down a few days before the violent confrontation.

Instead of a community standing in solidarity against the demolition of their neighbours’ homes, the City and Zille see a community in the grip of “a rise of a criminal settlement” which unsavoury elements want to turn into a “police no go zone”, according to City of Cape Town Mayoral Committee Member for Safety and Security, Alderman JP Smith.

Asked whether he had seen the documentary, Smith said he had not, but that a colleague had.

“It sounds painfully like a pre-election roadshow,” he told News24, accusing Louw of heading an anti-DA operation in the area.

“I doubt that it’s a sincere attempt at telling the story,” he said calling the documentary one-sided with a jaundiced slant.

Pure error

Asked about the revelations made in the documentary that some of those who had been identified as having thrown rocks before they were shot at by police were wrongly identified, Smith said there had been no sinister motives on the City’s part.

“When the photographs were brought in, we did so in good faith,” he said adding that it was pure error on their part.

Sixty-two people were arrested on September 21 while an unconfirmed number of residents and 15 metro police officers were injured.

On October 11, the sheriff of the court handed out notices to certain Hangberg residents informing them about a high court application by the City of Cape Town to evict them from the Sentinel.

The matter has been postponed to November 29 to give the parties a chance to find a solution out of court.

According to the notices, 54 structures have been erected illegally on a firebreak and on a nature reserve and will have to be demolished as they pose a fire risk.

– News24

Who shot first? The Uprising of Hangberg

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Click here for more information on this film.

http://impendingboom.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/who-shot-first-the-uprising-of-hangberg/

Who shot first? The uprising of Hangberg
October 27, 2010

“Who shot first?” That’s the pivotal question in Dylan Valley and Aryan Kaganof’s The uprising of Hangberg , screened last night at Labia on Orange.

The documentary presents overwhelming evidence that metro police used unwarranted force when they arrived in Hangberg on Tuesday, 21 September, to demolish informal houses built on a fire break.

The film uses a series of interviews to argue that the police violated standard procedure by aiming at people’s heads. A number of bystanders lost an eye as a result of rubber bullets. One of them describes to the camera how they aimed at his face at close range.

The impression I got from the media a month ago was quite different. I knew that clashes between the police and Hangberg residents took place but it seemed to me that the law was sorting out a group of troublemakers. To get an impression of how the same event can be portrayed in different accounts, compare this article with this one.

It’s an issue of objectivity and it’s hard deciding from whose side to see it. Valley and Kaganof portray the police as the aggressors while most of the news articles I read portrayed the protestors as the guilty party. This series of photographs on news24 is more sympathetic to the police. Notice for instance how the caption for image 11 states that “the policed fire[d] rubber bullets in retaliation”. The Uprising of Hangberg shows that residents retaliated with rocks after being shot at.

At one stage in the documentary, they slow down footage taken moments before the police started firing. We see people walking down the hill to meet the police. They do not appear hostile and they are not throwing rocks. The footage cuts then, for some reason, to seconds later. The police are firing rubber bullets and residents are running in different directions. It’s not clear whether the editor removed the in-between footage because it weakened the “police shot first” argument, or whether it was lost because the camera wasn’t recording.

What does seem clear though is that the police arrived with a hostile attitude. The documentary shows a series of witnesses that say the police used abusive language. A pregnant girl is shown crying because a police officer slapped her. A 14 year old boy alleges that police assaulted, detained and threatened him with a firearm aimed at his balls.

The documentary asserts that Helen Zille should be held responsible for the human rights violations that took place in Hangberg. It ends with a call for her to step down as premier of the Western Cape. If more people see “The uprising of Hangberg” it could be a serious blow to her reputation. It could be her Fahrenheit 9/11, though that didn’t stop Bush from getting reelected.

I’ve been a Helen Zille supporter for the last few years, but it’s hard for me to reconcile the events of Hangberg with her image as a champion of justice. An interview shows that she’s taken quite a dismissive stance to the issue. She argues that it’s actually a small group of Rastas causing trouble and preventing peaceful negotiation. When she said this, it reminded me of an angle the apartheid government used to take. They used to say that township protests are caused by a small group of communist agitators that do not reflect the will of the people. We now know that that was propaganda, but it’s an argument that can be quite appealing.

It’s easier for us to dismiss the brutality if we say that they’re just a bunch of Rastas, drug dealers or “zimbabwean style land grabbers”. But the documentary gives reason to believe that it’s not just criminals, but a whole community that is upset. In one scene, the filmmaker proves that residents who lost their eye were falsely labeled as rock-throwing protestors. He shows a newspaper article that erroneously identifies people with eye injuries as rock-throwers in another photograph. The director seeks out the rock-thrower and injured man to show that they are completely different people.

I’m worried, however, about ethnic mobilization in the film. Some of the residents argue that they have a right to live there because they are Khoisan and the land belongs to their forefathers. In the same way that the Afrikaners created the mythology of the Great Trek to claim ownership of the land, one resident says he has a right to live on Hangberg because the mountain resembles the face of his ancestor. I realize that this sort of thinking can inspire people, but I don’t think it’s right way to go.

When residents assert ownership based on an ethnic identity and proudly say that they’ll only leave to the graveyard, it gets dodgy. That type of thinking leads to the type of conflict seen with Israel/Palestine. Hangberg should be an issue of human rights not ethnic rights. The events that took place on 21 September may be investigated and declared a violation of human rights, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Update: For more on the “Khoisan nation” idea, as well as its flaws, read this piece by Patric Tariq Mellet http://cape-slavery-heritage.iblog.co.za/2010/01/02/khoe-and-san-survivalists-and-khoisan-first-nation-revivalists-navigating-the-difference/

Business day: Voices of poor must be heard

The Hangberg community is politically divided and has not taken a collective decision to join the PPA or any other organisation.

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=124776

Voices of poor must be heard

THE increase in township service delivery protests across SA, and their tendency to descend into chaos and violence, has generally been interpreted as a wake-up call for the tripartite alliance

THE increase in township service delivery protests across SA, and their tendency to descend into chaos and violence, has generally been interpreted as a wake-up call for the tripartite alliance, which dominates government in most parts of the country.

Yet there is little evidence that rising unhappiness among the African National Congress’s (ANC’s) natural constituency is translating into electoral losses on any meaningful scale. Where the ANC has lost ground in local government by-elections, this has largely been a result of the consolidation of opposition support and low African voter turnouts, rather than a mass defection of traditional ANC supporters.

While it is clear that the swing vote among Cape Town’s coloured population lost faith in the ANC following the disastrous mayoral tenure of Nomaindia Mfeketo and removal of Ebrahim Rasool as premier, this was never an established ANC constituency. Opinion polls show that although African voters’ perception of the Democratic Alliance (DA) has improved over the years — leader Helen Zille scores highly on efficiency and incorruptibility — that has not meant many new black votes for the party.

While the DA seems likely to continue making gradual progress among minority groups and the emerging black middle class, liberal hopes that widespread disenchantment following 16 years of African nationalist governance would prompt the masses to buy into the DA’s concept of the equal opportunity society have not yet been fulfilled. Rather than seek alternatives to the ANC within the multiparty system, there is a countrywide trend away from engagement with elected representatives and administrative structures and towards forming unaffiliated community-based organisations and pressure groups with little interest in elections.

The implication for the ANC is that while its control over the levers of power and patronage is not under immediate threat, it finds itself under attack on a broad new front that ranges from street protests and barricaded roads to sophisticated legal challenges undertaken on communities’ behalf by nongovernmental organisations in civil society.

Whereas the alliance partners have traditionally had an iron grip on poor African communities in urban areas, their alienation due to widespread corruption and a general lack of accountability has resulted in this control being gradually lost. The ANC’s attempt to capitalise on the recent clash between the Cape Town authorities and residents of Hout Bay’s Hangberg community was rebuffed, for instance, with residents preferring to protest, march, litigate and eventually negotiate under the banner of the Poor People’s Alliance, a coalition of independent social movements including the Landless People’s Movement, the Anti-Eviction Campaign, the Rural Network and Abahlali baseMjondolo.

The latter grouping, which represents shack-dwellers and has its origins in KwaZulu-Natal, has a history of going head-to- head with the government over service delivery issues, having clashed violently with the ANC in Durban’s Kennedy Road settlement a little over a year ago after successfully challenging the constitutionality of the KwaZulu- Natal Slums Act. The ANC did not take kindly to its authority being questioned, ensuring that Kennedy Road was “liberated” from its elected representatives.

Abahlali has also been responsible for a series of protests over slow housing provision in informal settlements around the country, most recently in Cape Town. These often involve disruptive street barricades, the stoning of cars and chaotic marches, with police invariably resorting to rubber bullets to disperse the crowds.

It has become a case of neglected and deprived communities versus the establishment, regardless of which party is in office, and politicians across the board seem at a loss as to how to respond, other than with force.

Having been rebuffed by the Hangberg community after it tried to hijack a protest march organised in the wake of a violent clash with police and council officials intent on breaking down structures built illegally in a firebreak, the ANC and its allies are now on the warpath against Abahlali in Cape Town too. Union federation Cosatu released a statement earlier this month condemning its methods and calling on “progressive” residents to “distance themselves from mindless violence and calls for chaos that harm the poor and working class and their organisations”.

The DA cannot afford to indulge in schadenfreude though. As much as the growth of organisations such as Abahlali is putting the ANC on the spot, the phenomenon is a clear indication that our democracy is not working for everyone, and this is bad news for all South Africans. The political establishment as a whole needs to engage with alienated poor communities and find some way of ensuring their voices are heard, including reviewing the electoral system to make elected representatives more accountable.

The growth of groups such as Abahlali baseMjondolo is a clear indication that our democracy is not working for everyone

The Uprising of Hangberg

http://www.hangberg.co.za/

THE UPRISING OF HANGBERG is a documentary on the human rights violations in Hangberg, Cape Town created by internationally acclaimed filmmaker and artist Aryan Kaganof, Dylan Valley, the award winning director of Afrikaaps, and community representative Greg Louw.

Through stark, often shocking footage and interviews they explore the aftermath of the recent police brutality on the Hout Bay community. Moving from character to character, perspective to perspective, the film is a complex and moving portrait of parallel lives thrust into violence.

At once a disturbing document and a powerful rallying call for citizen activism, it is the story of a people on a pivot point between existence and non-existence. Marginalised by society, attacked by the very system they voted into power, maligned in the media, there is only one thing for them to control: the telling of their own story. THE UPRISING OF HANGBERG thus becomes more than just a war story, its an intimate portrait that engages the complexities of identity as they meet with race, place, nationality, memory and the legacies of apartheid and forced removal.

Sowetan: Poor need city housing

http://www.sowetanlive.co.za/news/2010/10/13/poor-need-city-housing

Poor need city housing

HOUSING experts and civil society groups have slammed the government over the lack of low-cost housing in city centres.

The poor have to endure “sweat, beatings, arrests, lies, water cannon, live ammunition and even death” to get well-located land for housing, said Abahlali Base Mjondolo president Sbu Zikode, a panelist at a high-profile conference dubbed “Re-imagining the city: New urban order” being held in Cape Town this week.

The three-day conference, organised by the Development Action Group (DAG), brought together 40 international and local experts on urban land management and civil society organisations.

Zikode said: “It is nice to imagine a city where no one lives like a pig in the mud; where everyone is safe from fires, abuse, police raids, disconnections, evictions and political attacks.

“But land and housing are the most urgent problems in our cities and there is serious difficulty in resolving issues.

“This discussion can only begin once those who do not count begin to count. We decided long ago not to accept a situation in which some people talk about the poor and even for the poor without ever speaking to the poor.”

Zikode said while the work of intellectuals, town planners, engineers, architects and related professionals was critical, they had to work with the poor in mind.

DAG chief executive Kailash Bhama said: “The last two weeks in Cape Town have been unsettling for all South Africans, rich and poor.

“We have been painfully reminded by the unrest in the settlement of Hangberg … that land and its location . is important in the delivery of low-cost housing.

“But in South Africa the majority of low-cost housing is located on the fringes of cities where land is cheaper.

“This perpetuates urban sprawl, weakens the fragile livelihoods of the poor and entrenches inequality.”