Category Archives: Kwanele Sosibo

M&G: Stay of eviction victory for residents

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http://mg.co.za/article/2011-04-01-stay-of-eviction-victory-for-residents/

Stay of eviction victory for residents
KWANELE SOSIBO AND NIREN TOLSI JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA – Apr 01 2011 00:00

The threat of mass evictions has been lifted from residents of Cape Town’s Joe Slovo informal settlement.

On Thursday the Constitutional Court discharged an earlier supervised eviction order handed down by the same court. The ruling allows residents to continue engaging with the government over an upgrade of the settlement.

The community, which numbers about 20 000 residents, had approached the court to fend off eviction by the state. The Western Cape and national housing departments wanted to develop the area into a public housing project.

In its June 2009 judgment the court handed down an eviction order and a supervisory execution order that insisted the state had to meet several timelines and other requirements. These included “meaningful engagement” between the community and the state over their removal and that it would provide alternative accommodation in temporary residential units of not less than 24 square metres, serviced by pre-paid electricity and with reasonable access to waterborne sewerage systems and communal ablution facilities. It required the state to provide transport for relocated residents to schools, places of work and healthcare facilities.

But the government did not adhere to the timetable regarding community engagement over relocation set out by the court. Instead, it expressed concern, about the project’s financial viability and the “social, financial and legal impact” on Joe Slovo residents of a relocation of “massive proportions” and it placed an in situ upgrading model on the negotiating table, saying that it had been “positively received by [residents] and their legal representatives”.

A full sitting of the court considered whether it was permissible for it to discharge and not vary its original order and, if so, the “circumstances in which this can be done”.

Irrelevant timetable

It found that it was “now common cause that the most likely course for the redevelopment of the Joe Slovo settlement area is in situ development” and that applicants would be asked to relocate only if new houses had been built and allocated to them.

The court found that the timetable had “become irrelevant” — there had been “little or no engagement on the relocation process” — and its stipulation of a 70%-30% split of the housing allocation in favour of residents was no longer applicable, as the government had given an assurance that the entire project would be for residents and former residents of Joe Slovo.

With these aspects of the original order having fallen away, the court found that “it cannot be just and equitable to leave [the eviction] order in place, more particularly because the order has been in suspension for more than a year”.

It discharged its original order with the exception that the developer, Thubelisha Homes, the Western Cape housing department and the national housing minister were still responsible for paying 50% of Joe Slovo residents’ legal costs.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court of Appeal in Bloemfontein this week ordered the city of Johannesburg to provide temporary emergency accommodation by no later than June 1 this year to occupants of derelict buildings facing eviction.

The city had appealed against an earlier High Court judgment ordering it to provide alternative accommodation for about 100 people facing eviction from a privately owned former carpet factory in Saratoga Avenue, Berea. The owner is private property company Blue Moonlight Properties 39.

In the judgment, by Appeal Court Judge Mohamed Navsa and Acting Judge of Appeal Clive Plasket, the city’s housing policy was declared irrational, discriminatory and unconstitutional because, among other things, it drew a distinction between people it evicted from unsafe or “bad” buildings owned by private landowners and persons evicted by private landlords for other reasons. Furthermore, it was deemed “inflexible” in not allowing for the provision of temporary accommodation for persons evicted from privately owned land, even if they were desperately poor.

The court found the city had been vague about the affordability of meeting demands for housing as it had mostly addressed the costs involved in providing permanent housing as opposed to temporary emergency housing for occupants.

The full judgment, and the court’s explanatory note, are available online here.

M&G: Violence on tape confirms police tactics

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http://mg.co.za/article/2011-03-25-violence-on-tape-confirms-police-tactics/

Violence on tape confirms police tactics

A cellphone video clip showing the South African Police Service’s tactical response team (TRT) abusing a man in Wesselton township has lent credence to widespread claims of police brutality during service delivery protests in the township last month.

The 26-second video, shot in the Wesselton’s Thusi section on February 16, two days after the protests began, shows a young man rolling on the ground while being trailed by armed TRT members, one of whom is perched on the police vehicle’s bonnet. According to the man who captured the footage on his cellphone, the youngster in the clip was coming from the nearby shops with a female friend when he was summoned to the officers’ vehicle, questioned and allegedly shot at several times with rubber bullets.

He was then forced to roll on the dusty street for a considerable distance. Except for the marked white BMW cruising behind the police officers and their victim, the streets appear lifeless, suggesting that reports of curfews and intimidation by police were not exaggerated. “They didn’t want anybody on the streets that day,” said the film’s source, who asked to remain anonymous. “That guy wasn’t the only one [who was assaulted]. A lot of people were being ejected from shops and forced to roll on the ground. My brother was sjambokked.”

Dumisani Mahaye, who was widely quoted in the press during the uprisings and was arrested on February 20 for public violence, said that on February 16, the day the footage was shot, protests had died down as people felt that their outrage had been communicated. Residents were also expecting the arrival of police commissioner General Bheki Cele, who visited Wesselton on that day.

Police brutality caught on camera

A cellphone video clip depicting the South African Police Service’s tactical response team torturing a man in Wesselton township in Johannesburg has lent weight to widespread claims of police brutality during protests in Ermelo township in February 2011.

Earlier that week more than 160 tactical response members were deployed to the township. “People were tired [because of the preceding two days of protests] but the police were out in full force, shooting anyone they saw on the streets with rubber bullets,” said Mahaye. “They were also conducting door-to-door raids. In one incident they even arrested an 80-year-old woman, who is appearing in court with us next Monday.”

Paid to initiate riots

When Mahaye was arrested on February 20, he said, he was interrogated about his role in the protests, tortured and forced to sign statements implicating ANC provincial executive committee members Lassy Chiwayo and Fish Mahlalela as the pair who had paid him to initiate the riots. In a report in City Press last Sunday, Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD) spokesperson Moses Dlamini confirmed that the institution was investigating complaints by Chiwayo and Mahlalela, who are political adversaries of Mpumalanga premier David Mabuza.

In spite of the widespread claims of torture many of the victims and detainees have not lodged complaints with the ICD, the Mpumalanga branch of which is based in Nelspruit, about 170km from Ermelo. Many cite a lack of resources as the reason, while others say that they have no confidence in the ICD.

Mahaye said that he had laid complaints of assault, damage to property and being forced to make a statement only because someone had given him a lift on Thursday. Mpumalanga SAPS provincial spokesperson Brigadier Lindela Mashigo said the TRT was deployed following damage to property and attacks on the media and on the police, which had resulted in the hospitalisation of an SAPS member.

Mashigo said police management was concerned about the video and was investigating to determine the authenticity of the footage. “If found to be true, corrective action will be taken against the member(s) involved as captured on the clip. The individual subjected to this unacceptable behaviour is urged to come forward to lay a complaint or approach the ICD.”

The amateur footage coincides with media reports that so-called third-degree methods by the SAPS are on the increase. The Sunday Independent reported last weekend that in 2009-2010 the ICD investigated 920 severe assault cases, compared with 255 in 2001-2002. The report said that the number of fatal shootings investigated rose to a record high of 556 in 2008-2009, from 281 in 2005-06. The statistics were compiled by Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation researcher David Bruce.

In a report titled “An Acceptable Price To Pay?” Bruce reports that the ICD secured 63 murder convictions between 2002-2003 and 2008-2009, 18 convictions for assault with grievous bodily harm and 12 convictions for common assault. The total number of convictions obtained for murder or culpable homicide over the six years in question represents roughly 3,6% of deaths in police hands in that period.

At least two people were killed during the uprisings in Ermelo in February. Police have confirmed that the shooting of Solomon Madonsela during a protest is being investigated by the ICD.

Click here to see the video footage.

M&G: ‘Here it is every man for himself’

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http://mg.co.za/article/2011-03-11-here-it-is-every–man-for-himself

‘Here it is every man for himself’
KWANELE SOSIBO – Mar 11 2011 13:58

Last week, when I first met Sipho Dlamini and Nomantombi Mdodana, both “temporary” residents of the Moth building in Noord Street, they ushered me into a dank boardroom before launching into a tirade about the building’s condition.

Mdodana, dressed in her security guard uniform, sat at the head of the table and spoke softly, gesturing with her hands. Dlamini kept finishing her sentences and conveyed his annoyance through the intermittent gruff boom of his voice.

In retrospect, their coordinated lecture was a way of mentally preparing me for what I was about to witness on the three floors above us the following day. It was nothing short of a mass, indefinite detention.

Since early last year more than 250 people have called this cavernous three-storey hall home. In an interim order handed down in August 2009 in the South Gauteng High Court case of Chestnut Hill Investments and Others vs Johannes Maite and Others, Judge Neels Claassen ordered the City of Johannesburg to provide temporary accommodation for more than 140 occupants of a run-down industrial building in Carr Street, Newtown.

A private property developer who intended to develop retail space ahead of last year’s World Cup had been seeking to evict the Carr Street residents since 2008. The building’s occupants, who were represented by the Centre for Applied Legal Studies, were soon joined by residents from Chancellor House and BG Alexander, a former nurses’ training college, when both these buildings came up for renovation. It brought the number of residents who eventually occupied the Moth building to well over the 147 mandated in the interim order.

The latter ordered that R1,5-million was to be paid to the city by developer Chestnut Hill Investments for the relocation to the Moth building — the first half within 10 days of the order, the rest within 90 days. Part of this second payment was to be used by the city within 12 months to facilitate job skills programmes to help the residents to find work. The residents, meanwhile, were expected to try to find employment and reasonable alternative accommodation within the same period.

Different dynamics

A note posted at the entrance of the building puts the job skills registration date at January 2011, well after the 12-month period, which began in November 2009. But Dlamini and several other dwellers maintain that no registration ever took place.

The situation in the building, especially its overcrowded third floor, which houses about half the 250 inhabitants, continues to darken. Each floor has its own dynamics, affecting how people distribute themselves in the building. With the third floor least affected by flooding, the scene and mood in this dormitory is that of an indoor refugee camp. Sheets are fastened around clusters of bunk beds to forge a measure of privacy and there are two colonies of these “tents” in an approximately 300m2 room. In the cramped and unventilated space a cast of characters clashes daily.

When I ask Sbongile Mlungwana in one of the makeshift cubicles how she relates to her ever-present neighbours, she tells me, while tending to her child, that her partner was recently released on bail for assaulting one of them.

“He was actually fighting with me over something involving the baby but then she [the neighbour] got involved and he turned on her,” she says. While her partner earns a living by tinting windows in Randburg, Mlungwana minds the baby and keeps an eye on their belongings. “This is our second TV and DVD player,” she tells me. “The theft is so bad here that you can get burgled while sleeping.”

Within earshot across the narrow passage, an excitable lay preacher-type called Nhlanhla Madi has devised a peculiar coping mechanism to “counteract the debauchery” around him. With a creased forehead he relates how he has “insulated” his walls with the word of God, referring to the black cursive scrawl adorning several sheets and posters in his quarters. He quotes an extract to that effect before adding that when he finally gets a house it will be surrounded by “the Word”, to prevent him from backsliding.

Alcohol and visitors are not allowed into the Moth building and men and women are not allowed to share sleeping quarters. But the residents have annulled all these rules, fuelling tension and antisocial behaviour. Given the environment, it is easy to see it as a case of “every man for himself”, as Bongani Nkosi does.

Between a rock and a hard place

Nkosi, a lanky young man who offers a mix of pragmatism and pessimism, believes that the residents are sandwiched between wilful bureaucratic bungling by the city and a lack of adequate pressure by the legal centre, leading to a stasis. “When people speak of our situation, none of them mentions that there was corruption involved in our relocation,” Nkosi alleges. “Part of the R1,5-million ordered by the judge was meant to go towards job skills training. Someone was greedy enough to just find us a place and be like: ‘We can let this thing play itself out for three years until it dies down.’ It’s more about people pushing paper and getting paid because of our strife.”

With a few recent judgments — the seminal Occupiers of 51 Olivia Road, Berea Township, 197 Main Street, Johannesburg vs the City of Johannesburg and Others comes to mind — placing the burden of alternative accommodation for evicted indigent people squarely on the city’s shoulders, one can easily detect staunch resistance from the city. It has shown more vigour in fighting these rulings than in finding sustainable solutions for its poor.

While living conditions in the buildings housing the applicants in the above case, which pertains to the MBV building in Koch and Claim streets and the Perm building in Claim and Kotze, were significantly better than those at the Moth, there were also persistent maintenance problems, as residents’ committee members showed us this week.

In a report dated August 31 2010 that was filed in the South Gauteng High Court this year as part of the proceedings in another eviction-related case, the city claimed that its “ability to contribute, within its available resources, to the progressive realisation of the right of access to adequate housing through permanent and temporary housing solutions, as well as to the provision of emergency accommodation, is severely constrained by the city’s manpower and funding”.

Unemployment, poverty and the continual influx of people to the city through urbanisation were mentioned as the key constraints. And there are no signs of this slowing down. According to the report, the city estimated its population growth would be 1.3% per year between 2010 and 2015.

Given the city’s recognition of unemployment as a key hindrance to its ability to increase access to adequate housing, its alleged lack of commitment to assisting with a skills training programme for the Moth building residents is perturbing.

The city’s responses to questions from the Mail & Guardian were curt and vague, with housing spokesperson Bubu Xuba saying “some residents living at the Moth building had been referred to various institutions for skills development or employment”.

Legal centre attorney Morgan Courtenay said that “meaningful engagement” between both parties, as emphasised by the courts, could go a long way to reducing the number of litigations. “The issues that arise after the placement of occupiers in emergency accommodation is unique,” said Courtenay.

“The main factor that needs to be addressed is the issue of engagement with the city. It is only through the city’s cooperation that the needs of the occupiers can be addressed. Once the litigation process has begun we unfortunately cannot deal with the city directly. We … communicate through the city’s attorneys of record. The extent of our pleas to communicate are often dealt with differently, depending on the … attorneys involved.”

The complicated solution, perhaps, lies in a more holistic approach to the problem, one that looks at the larger socioeconomic plight of the city’s indigent and sees them as a resource instead of merely a burden on its ­capacity to offer shelter.

But as the situation stands now, with scores of young and old unemployed people loitering in the corridors of these and many other such buildings, the cycle of dereliction is set to continue.

M&G: Profile of a town on fire

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http://mg.co.za/article/2011-02-28-profile-of-a-town-on-fire

Profile of a town on fire
KWANELE SOSIBO

The fear of police brutality is so tangible in Ermelo’s Wesselton township that it is hard to separate it from the blanket of coal fumes that floats in the quiet night air.

Paranoia, too, is palpable as we talk to a group of youths in a tavern in Phumula, near the epicentre of recent rioting. As they regale us with their stories, which are repeated during our stay in Ermelo, they take turns in heading to the door, making sure that no police are inching their way towards the nondescript drinking hole.

A skinny, dark-skinned kid, who calmly whips me in a game of pool later, tells me that they are being intimidated by the police. They sometimes herd locals out of taverns into the road and force them to roll home.

The obese woman behind the counter and her teenaged son eye the scene closely. The guys quickly gulp their last quart and disappear into the night. The next morning, as we head back into the township, we pass a crew of municipal workers removing damaged traffic lights on Mabuza Street. Opposite them are two armoured police vehicles parked on the grassy verge, keeping a watch on the intersection where rubber-bullet shells still litter the pavement.

The fibrous remains of burnt tyres lie in the streets like giant blemishes on a diseased skin, a metaphor for the township itself. Damage to municipal property from the town’s explosion was estimated at R350 000.

The number of young people cruising the streets, even though it is mid-week, gives the township a school-­holiday vibe. A youth we ask for directions to Thembisa, a section further north, offers to take us around.

Upliftment committees

We stop at a four-room house with coarse, greyish plastered walls on Mabuza Street, where 20-year-old Simphiwe Sibeko, a member of the Msukaligwa Community Committee (MCC), a group of upliftment committees that joined together in April last year, gives us her version of why Wesselton went up in flames. “We are fighting for jobs, nothing else,” she says, with her 15-month-old baby on her arm.

With a blanket wrapped around her torso, she reels off several common complaints — bribery for jobs, cracked houses as a result of coal-mine blasting and, of late, police who seem to fire rubber bullets indiscriminately. Outside the house where she rents a back room there is evidence of a fiery barricade, etched on the tarred street like a newly painted road sign.

“They shot at our house as well,” she says, pointing to a cracked window near the front entrance. “There were young kids standing around the yard and I was holding my baby. We had to run inside.”

She says the police are on a witchhunt and informants are helping them to compile a list of rioters. “The police come here calling out people’s names,” Sibeko says. “My uncle was detained, kicked around and tortured.”

Her zeal suggests the protests were the uncoordinated first steps of a baby learning to walk. Sibeko’s uncle, Sbusiso Sibeko, was arrested last Friday, under the pretext that he was a murder suspect. “I was beaten non-stop from Friday evening until 5.30 the next morning,” he says, speaking from a friend’s cellphone two days later. “They claimed they had footage of me committing acts of public violence but when I asked them to show it to me they refused. “They questioned me about my whereabouts and asked me to give them names of people that took part in the rioting.

“Then they said they wanted my gun. So they beat me until I told them that my father had a gun, which they went with me to pick up.” His father’s firearm was confiscated and he was returned to the police cells where he was held until the following Monday, when the charges against him were dropped. Sbusiso Sibeko claims he was severely beaten, hot water was poured on his head and he was kicked in the testicles.

Still traumatised and without a phone (which was allegedly also taken by the police), he was unsure where to lay charges, although he felt it would be futile. Nhlakanipho Dladla, a 16-year-old with a festering rubber-bullet wound on his elbow, says he and a group of friends were walking down the street from shops nearby when police tossed them into a van and drove them to the police station to fingerprint them.

Caught up in the crossfire

Further up the street in Thembisa, near the storefronts where the e.tv news crew was caught up in the crossfire, Mfanimpela Khubeka is eating chicken with some of his friends. He considers our request for a quick interview. A dark, muscular figure in canvas takkies, jeans and a matching blue shirt, Kubheka is young, charismatic and defiant. “Sure, we can talk,” he says, with a gap-toothed grin.

When I point to the police vehicles (a minibus and Casspir) in the middle of the vast tarred square, he gives them a dismissive glance: “I say whatever I want. I enjoy freedom of speech.” It’s a sunny day, so we walk across the yard and sit on the shady steps in front of Vuka Bottle Store, closed because the police, locals claim, emptied it of its stock.

“There is a curfew set for 7.30pm here,” says Khubeka, MCC chairperson. “Then they go from door to door looking for specific people.” The MCC, he says, has a mandate from the community and they engage with the mayoral council.

“Our memorandum has been growing and we are fighting against nepotism, bribery and for the mines to come up with employment strategies, skills development initiatives and youth economic development plans. We have the same manifesto as the ANC. We want a better life for all.”

Although municipal officials say they never received a memorandum from the committee, Kubheka says that he was on e.tv recently, brandishing a list of demands, dated January 27, which he says was signed by the municipal manager, Ace Dlamini.

On February 13, a day before the riots, the MCC held a community report-back meeting, which was followed later by a ward meeting in ward five, where the community began complaining about candidates being imposed on them. It seems that a combination of these two issues sparked the protests, although MCC members maintain ANC politicking is secondary.

Camp warfares

“As you know there are camps in the ANC — they want us to be involved in their camp warfare,” Kubheka says. “The community is trusting the MCC to deliver on employment strategies and other issues.” As my interview with Khubeka draws to a close, he finally reacts to the posse of young men camped around the square that doubles as a car wash. They have been tense all day but when a bulky policeman conducts a lengthy cellphone call outside the police minibus and appears to be scanning the area, they become increasingly fidgety and disperse. Kubheka and two friends follow, asking for a lift to a house down the road.

A tavern owner corroborates stories of random police searches and the “roll home” torture tactics. She complains that police have been beating grown men and now that she has cut her operating time to 7.30pm, she is no longer able to pay her suppliers every Monday.

Muzi Chirwa, the ANC regional council secretary, says he has never heard of the MCC and believes that if they exist they are allowing people with ulterior motives to hijack their agenda.

Although a lack of basic services is obvious in parts of Wesselton and would-be ANC councillors are clearly jostling for position, the way the police are said to have responded to the current crisis suggests the emergence of a repressive beast reminiscent of the National Party’s “crossing the Rubicon” days. After a day in Wesselton, one can almost picture the Groot Krokodil doing cartwheels in his grave.

Responding to allegations of police torture, Captain Leonard Hlathi, Mpumalanga police spokesperson, says: “If anyone is claiming to have been tortured, the Independent Complaints Directorate, as the watchdog of the police, is there to probe those allegations. It is no use for them to complain to the media. “All members of the South African Police Service are guided by the law and behave themselves in a manner that is responsible while carrying out their responsibilities. I know for a fact that our members have been behaving very well, even in this instance.”

Hlathi says that of the more than 120 people who were arrested in connection with the protest, all had been released and 58 were out on bail. On Wednesday he said that the situation was quiet. But the message from the MCC seems to suggest that this was just the quiet before the eruption of another storm. “We have told people to calm down because people out there know there is a place called Ermelo,” Ku­bheka says as a parting shot.

“National must come here from Luthuli House and talk to us, except for Gwede Mantashe [ANC secretary general]. He called us ‘good fools’ because he believes someone has bought us. How can someone buy a whole community?”

M&G: Dreaming of a home in a defunct factory

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http://mg.co.za/article/2011-02-18-dreaming-of-a-home-in-defunct-factory/

Click here to see a slideshow.

Dreaming of a home in a defunct factory

Kwanele Sosibo

At first, I thought the photographer and I were lost, or the story was further inside the unassuming block of flats. Even more confusing, the tall, dark and stony-faced fellow hawking fruits and vegetables outside knew the man we were looking for, but was hesitant to usher us in.

The real 7 Saratoga Avenue maintains a facade of normality by day that is quickly shed when night falls. The place we were looking for is, in fact, a much uglier sibling tucked further away from the road, with a misnomer of an address for the convenience of those who walk the corridors of power.

The residents of this defunct carpet factory lived faceless lives for years, paying rent to bogus landlords like others of their ilk in Jo’burg’s inner city, but these days they are commanding national headlines and casting an embarrassing spotlight on Johannesburg’s running battles with the poor.

Those headlines have to do with the city’s appeal — which will be heard on February 18 in a landmark case — against a court ruling last year’s that found its housing policy to be constitutionally invalid.

The city is also appealing against an order to provide the occupiers of 7 Saratoga Avenue with temporary shelter or pay towards their rental. Meanwhile, the occupiers, represented by the Wits’ Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS), are cross appealing against the eviction order served on them.

Back at “7 Saratoga Avenue”, as it is referred to in court papers, nightfall comes with the constant flicker of the billboard on top of the Ponte building to the right and, to the left, soft patches of light from the windows of the neighbouring Agin Court and the beckoning crimson glow of Hillbrow’s red-light district. The factory complex is a giant dark shadow in a city of beaming lights.

Formerly known as Kernel Carpets, this industrial haunt consists of a large garage area, which has now been filled with shacks along its perimeter, and a double-storey building that has been subdivided into smaller rooms. There are a few additional brick buildings on either side that have also been turned into housing space. A stretch of sloping, weather-beaten concrete separates the two wings.

Whereas sunset seems to bring out the freaks everywhere else in this city of the depraved, here it ushers in a sudden blackness only heightened by the paraffin lamps voyeuristically peeping out of broken and patched up windows.

Stop the untidiness

The sudden loss of light quickens the daily trolley march towards the corner of Leyds and Banket streets, where a generous urban oasis (an open manhole) supplies residents with their daily rations of water.

This quotidian ritual is better executed under a blanket of darkness when one is less likely to be noticed by the Johannesburg Metro Police Department (JMPD), disturbed by the traffic or confronted by the adversarial taxi washers who hog this everflowing source like jealous spouses.

A week ago, Busisiwe Mdlolo, whose late father once worked this yard during the factory’s heyday, had her trolley confiscated by the JMPD, along with several 25-litre plastic drums she used to collect water. She watched in dismay as they spilt their contents down the street and waved her off empty-handed.

But repossesed trolleys rank low on the list of the indignities visited on Mdlolo and her neighbours over the past decade.

A native of Nkandla, Jacob Zuma’s home village in KwaZulu-Natal, Mdlolo moved into the ramshackle brick and concrete ensemble in 2002. Then, she shared a room with her father who had remained in the yard after the factory shut down in the 1990s.

“In the ensuing years, we paid rent to quite a few landlords, into various accounts,” she recalled. “Eventually, someone came to collect the cash by hand. That’s when we saw that it was all just crookery and started withholding payment.”

All the while, nobody bothered to maintain the property. Complaints to the Rental Housing Tribunal against Northwest Estate Agents and two other entities who independently claimed rent from them amounted to nothing.

Back then, the premises had electricity and a functioning tap. Today, there is a stagnant pool of water where the tap once stood. Above it, on a dark brick wall, fading, graffiti in large block letters reads: “Yekani ubunuku [Stop the untidiness]”. Ironically, it now stands as a memento to much simpler times — before rainwater had to be siphoned off rusty gutters and collected in repurposed refuse bins.

Evicting the undesirables

It was after Blue Moonlight Properties 39 bought the premises in 2005 (it still remains unclear from whom), that the heavy-handedness began.

In 2006, Blue Moonlight launched an application for the eviction of residents, opposed by residents on the grounds that the city first had to “discharge its constitutional obligation to provide them with temporary, alternative accommodation pending ultimate access to formal housing as part of the national housing programme”.

The occupiers then brought the city to the proceedings and sought an order compelling the city to fulfil its obligation. This seems to have frustrated the owners’ plans for the property considerably. Blue Moonlight Properties’ representatives declined to comment on the issue, citing the ongoing case. Questions sent to the department of housing were not answered at the time of going to press.

The residents are less inhibited.

As Dlozi “Mranger” Thwala put it, the compound became “the police’s playground” soon after that. He said unlawful raids and illegal eviction attempts coincided with the disconnection of electricity and water.

Mranger, dressed in a tucked-in white shirt and black cotton slacks, periodically picked up a metal iron from a blazing primus stove with a folded cloth and pressed his pants on an ironing board.

The only light in this upstairs room came from two paraffin lamps placed on a dressing table positioned near a wall, giving the air inside a slightly toxic tinge. Aside from framed family pictures on a bedside table, the only picture adorning the room was a square poster of a smiling Nelson Mandela, head encircled by a greenish shweshwe design.

Mranger said that when he googled “Saratoga Avenue” he was disappointed to find a report that quoted Tokyo Sexwale accusing them of hijacking the building.

“It’s clear that whoever briefed him fed him nonsense,” he said. “The article said that we had hijacked the building and the High Court judgment had ruled in favour of the hijackers. How can you hijack a building when the people that bought it found you living there? He has never even been here to assess the situation himself. You see the politicians that we have? We vote them into power, then when they get fat, they forget about us.”

Perhaps what influenced Mranger to be a more assertive leader was the illegal eviction the people of Saratoga Avenue almost suffered in 2007. This time, the police arrived in the company of the notorious Red Ants. As the Red Ants proceeded to break windows, kick down doors and tear down rows of shacks, the residents, realising that the matter was already before the court, called their legal representative, who rushed to the scene and demanded a court order, which the evictors failed to produce.

According to several accounts, the Red Ants scurried off, one even leaving his hard hat behind in his haste.

“I decided to put up a fight because I am not an animal,” Mranger said. “If someone treats you like an animal, you have to show them your humanity. We have fought many battles here with charlatans who wouldn’t show us their title deeds. We’ve even battled the owners, even though we couldn’t afford to buy the cops like they could.

“I will rest only once I know that these people have decent alternative accommodation. We want government to give us what we fought for.”

Place of darkness

In 1995, with her daughter Thembeka strapped to her back, Nelisiwe Chamane took the train to Protea Glen to register for an RDP house.

“Thembeka is 16 years old now,” said Chamane on the stoep opposite her room. “If you look at some townships [around Jo’burg], there are rows of newly occupied RDP houses. How some people got in before me, I can’t tell you.”

Chamane’s nickname for this abode, where she ekes out a living making beaded, Zulu-inspired ceremonial dress and accessories, is simply KwaMnyamandawo [place of darkness].
“You should see this yard in winter. It is dotted with braziers from people trying to keep warm.” The building could easily burn to the ground if a fire started, she said, as there would be no water to put out the flames.

Although the term kwaMnyamandawo is reductive and unassailably pessimistic, she utters it with perverse endearment. It is from this dark abyss that people beat the odds daily, raising children, sending them to school, sending money back home, hopping from job to job — basically doing whatever it takes.

Perhaps Themba Koketi, who functions as a spokesperson for this community, is the perfect embodiment of this place’s limited but compelling pulling power. A public servant based in Soweto, his diminutive frame and boyish manner disguise his brooding seriousness.

Koketi grew up in Vryheid in KwaZulu-Natal and arrived in Johannesburg in 2001 after matriculating. Growing up in a large, matriarchal family with five siblings and five cousins, he had plans to join the navy and was about to enlist when his grandmother begged him not to, citing the recurring nightmares she was having about him.

He tried various other jobs, but soon found himself at a dead end. Though still staying with his taxi-driver cousin, he decided to apply for financial aid at Wits University and studied psychology and sociology.

“During the holidays, I would stay here. I avoided going home because of the expectations they have of people living in Jo’burg,” he said.

“You are always expected to come back bearing gifts. I think they have never got their heads around the whole school thing.”

He got involved in committee meetings, at which residents locked heads with a succession of people claiming to represent the owners.

“I could see that we were being taken for a ride,” he says of the various rent collectors.
While he does have a measure of sympathy for Blue Moonlight Properties and its business aspirations, he said that in its haste to throw them out, it forgot one crucial fact: “Most of us here were raised in mud houses, where there was no electricity or running water anyway. We are used to living like this.”

Koketi spoke to us with his nine-month-old son balanced on his lap; his partner prepared dinner. It was a cramped room, with space for a bed, a small table with chairs and not much else. It was only later, after taking a closer look, that I realised that the room had been subdivided, with Koketi’s three teenage brothers living in the middle section and somebody else on the far end. After the interview, he told me that he is helping all three of them with their education.

Although others have found strength in numbers, there are many youngsters toughing it out alone in these harsh environs.

A double-edged sword

Mlungisi “MaKelloggs” Ntuli, an aspiring actor with a jocular demeanour and relaxed hair, was among those who were slapped around on the morning of the botched eviction.

Then a recent arrival from Jeppe Men’s Hostel, Ntuli had moved into the enclave with his brother so that he could focus on his “schoolwork” (as he referred to his budding acting career).

“As you know, they don’t take too kindly to books in the hostels,” he told me, seated in his dim shack with a newspaper on his lap.

“I had slept quite late that day, because I was busy reading a script until two or three that morning, and they arrived around five. So my movements were still a bit slow.”

For MaKelloggs, whose talents have taken him all over the country, but have yet to catapult him out of Saratoga, living here is a confusing, double-edged sword.

“I’m not ashamed of living here because I’m confident of my abilities,” he said.

“But if you bring friends here, they tend to think that this is a thug’s hideout or something, and they never come back.”

At least he can still walk to Troyeville, where he volunteers at a day-care centre as a speech and drama teacher or trek around town to auditions, while stretching out his groceries for as long as possible.

In a country where the poor are increasingly marginalised, the paranoia cuts both ways. For every heartfelt smile and joke shared, there were behind-the-back comments about us being self-serving and pretending to care.

What struck me as odd, though, was the general lack of enthusiasm about the outcome of this Friday’s Supreme Court of Appeals proceedings. But then, I suppose, in a community of about 80 people, it’s hard to get everyone interested in legal technicalities. Most people were more concerned about the probability of receiving an RDP house and where it would be situated.
“Most of the women here have applied for houses,” Mdlolo told me.

An air of overconfidence hung in the air, no doubt influenced by the CALS’s recent track record in housing-related matters.

Perhaps Koketi captured it best: “Whichever way the court rules, it will still be a victory for us because we are prepared to go all the way to the Constitutional Court.

“Similar cases preceding ours were won at the ­Constitutional Court. It has a good record of protecting human rights. The judges [presiding over the Occupiers of 51 Olivia Road, Berea Township, vs City of Johannesburg and 197 Main Street vs City of Johannesburg and others] went to San Jose [a condemned building in Hillbrow], so they based their judgment on research. They don’t just swivel in their chairs stroking their chins.”

Indeed, the frequent courtroom spankings meted out by judges on the city’s scarred areas are starting to take on a masochistic tint.

Morgan Courtenay, an attorney at CALS, put it differently: “We realise that such matters have huge financial implications for the city. It is our hope that it, through engagement with us and similar organisations, may forge an informed path.”