Durban: a new enemy moves into sight - a bitter struggle looms : IMC-SA

(Early morning email to in.the.zone - September 8, 2005)

So, after years of contemptuous neglect the government, in various forms, is suddenly very interested in Kennedy Road. Militant struggle produces the interest that passive suffering does not. On Monday 29 August a cavalcade of yellow cars from various departments rolled in (up to two hours late) for a meeting to discuss the work being done, by the community, for people with AIDS. The community organisation currently provides various forms of support to orphans (including food, clothes, liaison with schools etc), food for the sick, assistance with grants, linkages with hospitals and clinics and so on. The meeting was opened by an official from the Department of Agriculture, Health and Welfare. She said the following in her opening statement:

"We are very pleased to be here in the field with you. We target the same clients and have the same core business. We want to work closely with all our stakeholders so that we can improve services delivery in an integrated manner. We are committed to mainsteaming AIDS and want to help you to develop a business plan."

This is an exact quote.

The actual structure of the meeting took the form of using a 'tool' prepared by a consultant. The 'tool' was a very detailed 21 page questionnaire asking detailed (often statistical) questions about what the community does in the area of AIDS. Government people took turns to ask the questions on the form. The community organisation was not given the form in advance and so, even though they keep very detailed records in a series of notebooks, they couldn't answer all the questions. There is no way that the Centre for Civil Society could have answered similar questions about its own operation without preparation. The structure of the exercise meant that as it went alone the tone of the government officials became somewhat inquisitorial and judgmental and the community organisation people became somewhat depressed. What else can happen when questions can't be answered or, when they can, the consultant's research has deemed the answers 'wrong'? (Food parcels must cost R280. Research has shown this. Spending R150 per food parcel per family is wrong and must be explained). Nevertheless not every impulse towards solidarity could be crushed by the 'tool'. People, on both sides, could find ways around the consultants' madness. When it came to the question of 'sustainability' the community organisation duly produced beaded AIDS ribbons which they said they would sell. The government duly said they would train them to develop a business plan. Everyone knows its nonsense but once the sustainability box is ticked it is possible to move on. And support for some of the extant initiatives was duly and sincerely pledged. In a community where children have been found eating the worms that grow in shit every material advance is a victory. And one officials even proposed a new project - a social workers would arrange for R8 per old person to be paid to hold a monthly get together of the old people.

But last night the big boys rolled in under the confident leadership of Deputy City Manager Derek Naidoo. He was given a broken child's chair left over from the last days of apartheid when the Urban Foundation offered some material support to the community run creche.

Naidoo began, as these people always do (do they read Fanon? they always act out the script with precise accuracy....) with a glowing account of his personal role in The Struggle. As Fazel Khan would later note he said nothing about his more recent role in privatising transport. But we digress. Naidoo swiftly moved on to speak at length about how progressive the City Council was and how it was put there by the people and by the struggle. He then (in what he clearly saw as a magnanimous gesture) spoke about how the people there had suffered and how the municipality felt their pain. He quoted the Durban mayor Obed Mlaba quoting the Freedom Charter on housing to make his point concrete. He spoke at length about an article that would be appearing in The Mercury the following day and how it shows how well the Municipality is doing. The article is on the front page of The Mercury today. Titled "Feeling Good about Durban" it begins by noting that "New Developments, like uShaka Marine World, and the Suncoast and Sibiya Casinos, have made residents more positive about the city". It doesn't enquire as to which residents, exactly, are so pleased that hundreds of millions of rands of public money have been spent on two casinos and a themepark while people starve... Anyway, it goes on to note that, of those working, 92% of whites are happy with their jobs, 80.2% of Asians, 50.5% of coloured and 41.5% of Africans. It concludes with Bonke Dumisa, CEO of the Durban Chamber of Commerce saying that "poverty was a concern" but it wouldn't affect investor confidence" because "Investors accept that South Africa has two economies, a first world economy with people with a high disposable income, and a third world economy." As long as the investors are all right then....It's good to know that we don't have to worry about the fact that fire brigade doesn't come if your home that is burning down and it happens to be a shack....

Naidoo then moved to his key purpose. "We are here", he announced, "to avert the march." Then, after a long (and of course technicist) ramble about budgets and policies - punctuated by an interlude where people were berated for allowing the settlement, which he spoke of as if it were a disease, to grow from 716 shacks in 2002 to 2 666 in 2005 ("This growth is unacceptable!") - he made his offer. Don't hold your breath....

Council wanted a 'partnership' with the 'leadership' of the community. The council would build two toilet blocks in the settlement and the 'leadership' would run these toilet blocks by charging "10 cents and 20 cents a time" (10 cents for a piss and 20 cents for a shit? no one is sure) and using this money to employ a cleaner and to cover the maintenance costs.

Now toilets are not a small issue in Kennedy Road. Right now there 6 portable toilets for 6 000 people. They are not serviced regularly and are in a major mess. On toilet for one thousand people could never be ok. But, we must never forget, this is the time of AIDS. Amongst many other things AIDS means diarrhea.

Along with the more historically resonant demands like land and housing people also demand toilets.

But Naidoo's offer of two pay per use toilet blocks was greated with fury. Cold fury in some cases. Hot in others. But fury all round.

People asked about the nearby land that had been promised to the community for housing for ten years and as recently as two weeks before it was suddenly dug up (in May this year) to build a brick factory. They asked about the housing they had been consistently promised (They have their councellor, Yacoob Baig, repeating this promise on video earlier this year). Naidoo said that the land was not safe for housing - it could move - and that the air (due to the adjacent dump) was not safe for breathing. The pollution, he kept stressing, affects people of all races. People in Kennedy Road are well aware that council tells the people in the big houses across the road that the air is safe. They asked how could this be and how could it be that the land was safe for a factory but not for housing, how could it be that the land was safe on one side of Kennedy Road (where there is a suburb) but not on the other (where there are shacks)? How could it be that the land and air were safe for a school and college nearby but not for them? Why was council so worred about the air that they were breathing when they left them to wallow in shift, breath paraffin fumes every night because they have no electricty and to have their shacks burn every winter?

Naidoo had no real answers but he did say that the city was looking at closing the dump because of the pollution that affects "formal housing" and that the city was setting up a gas to electricity project with the UN. (This is the World Bank project on which people in Kennedy Road have been promised a few jobs - exactly the same promises have been repeated to people in other nearby areas and so people are now well aware that the World Bank is lying. This sharing of information and experiences across race and degrees of poverty and neighbourhoods has been one of the major bennefits of the recent mass struggles in the area).

But Naidoo told the truth about the city's plan for the poor. The squatters will, he said again and again, be moved to the rural periphery of the metro. In his exact words "The city's plan is to move you to the periphery". Don't forget that from the last days of apartheid until a few months ago people have consistently been promised housing in the area. There have, of course, been conflicting annoucements from council. People have been told on occassion that they must go to Verulum or Mount Moriah. But Naidoo's emphatic announcement of impending mass forced removals of squaters from the city was still shocking.

He came under sustained attack. Where will we work? Where will our children school? What clinics are there? How will we live? His answer basically came down to the claim that the city would try to enable entrepreneurship in its rural periphery. People will be dumped in the bush and given training to start businesses. People said that there was no infrastructure in rural areas. Naidoo agreed and said that people must understand that it is too expensive to build it there and that the development focus was the 25km circumference radiating out from the nodal point of the city centre. No one took any comfort from that. No one was prepared to understand.

Nonhlanhla Mzobe stormed out shaking with rage. She came to the settlement as a child when her family was displaced by the Inanda dam. Her mothered raised her with pickings from the dump and occassional domestic work in the laundries and kitchens of the rich. The same laundries and kitchens where water from Inanda dam runs freely and both parents can work to send their children off to university and on to London. Some people suffer so that others can have glamorous lives.

It was put to Naidoo that this was the same as apartheid - black people were being pushed out of the city. It was put to Naidoo that this sounded like a slower and more considered version of Mugabe's attack on the poor in Harare. Naidoo said that if people didn't like it "they should go to the constitutional court." This is, he observed, a democracy. He was told that people would rather block the roads than go to the court. Everyone knows that the courts are for the government and the rich. When the Kennedy Road 14 first appeared in court they chose to speak for themselves. Magistrate Asmal didn't allow to say one word. She just sent them back down to the cells. Not exactly reassuring...

Naidoo kept sayin that there was no land. Cosmos Bhengu pointed out to Naidoo that there was in fact plenty of land around. Examples were cited. Naidoo said that the land belongs to Moreland (Tongart Hulletts). Fazel suggested to him that it be expropriated. Naidoo said that the government was looking into it.

Naidoo was told that the march would be averted if he promised 2 500 houses in the city in writing. He said "No, this place has been identified and prioritised for relocation. It is ringfenced for slum clearance." He was asked if he would put his offer of a partnership around the toilets in writing. He said "No. The city is extending their hand. This is particpatory democracy." Naidoo was told that people wouldn't be voting in the local elections. He berated them for not respecting democracy and said they had no right to tell people not to vote. Naidoo was told that the march on the 14th was going ahead and that if it didn't get results it would be the last attempt at a legal intervention. Further road blockades were promised.

S'bu Zikode declared the meeting closed. He spoke about all the people who had lied - Councillor Yacoob Baig, metro offical Nigel Gumede and others. His closing statement ended as follows: "You have lied, you are lying and it seems you will continue to lie. We'll put 14 000 on the streets."

Naidoo and his entourage left.

The intense discussions about strategy continued into the night.

So what are we to make of all this? None of Naidoo's claims about the land being unsafe sound plausible. The way he spoke of the growth of the settlement as though it was a disease made his subjective position very clear. Last year city manager Mike Sutcliffe gave a lecture at UKZN. He showed photographs of shacks in the nearby elite suburb of Reservoir Hills and said (paraphrasing from memory) "This shows how much work we still have to do to transform the city. There are no squatter settlement in white areas but they are still there in Indian areas. This is not fair." Clearly Sutcliffe is moving from a concern with elites. Our position here is obvious - develop settlements in white areas too. But the council is doing more than just extending white privilege to the Indian elite. It is clear that the entire development strategy is based around nurturing the rich and using public money to making the rich richer on the understanding that this will somehow anga against all evidence of all history one day trickle down to the poor. In this view the poor have no value in-themselves and so must be pushed out of the city. We are back to mass forced removals.

This is the same logic that was recently used to try and expel the poor in flats in muncipal flats around the city. That struggle is, for the moment, won - a victory that we must cherish and celebrate. But winning that struggle is relatively easy. It affects a minority (people in muncipal flats are vastly fewer than people in shacks) and a minority that can more easily (although not easily - lots of work is required) mobilise sympathetic middle class support in the media and so on. What happens when you are talking about a very large group of people routinely stigmatised (very often, and we must face up to this, by the so called 'left' too) as stupid, criminal, dirty and dangerous? A group of people for whom middle class support is very, very difficult to win?

Based on Naidoo's comments last night it seems that two things are in order:

1. An all out attack, using every available mode of struggle, on the council's attempts to move the poor out of the city. Therefore a direct attack on the state under the banner of 'To hell with forced removals'. Baig must still go. He has failed the people in every way. But this is now much bigger than Baig. New enemies are coming into sight which each passing day.

2. A demand that the land owned by Morelands be expropriated by the state and/or movements. Morelands is a company that got its land after it was stolen by violent colonial conquest. They then ran their sugar farms with indentured labour working under conditions of neo-slavery. Now they are building gated communities and business parks where corporate HQs, hospitals and schools all look exactly the same on that land. What company has more blood on its hands? Therefore an attack on capital under the banner of 'Moreland return the land you stole'.

TA series of open community meetings and screenings of Aoibheann o'Sullivan's film Kennedy Road and the Councillor are happening every night between now and the march. They are at 6:00 p.m. Tonight it is the Quarry Road informal settlement. And there is a banner painting workshop at Kennedy Road this Sunday at 3:00 p.m. Come along.

For details on the march visit http://www.nu.ac.za/ccs/default.asp?2,64,3,782