Sanele
Ntshingana and Paddy O’ Halloran, The Con
The room is
walled with grey, cracking plaster, and the ceiling is sagging. Its only
adornments are angular burglar bars over the single window and a tilted picture
on the wall. A dozen women, maybe more, sit or stand, shoulder to shoulder.
They are shouting: not to be heard, but because what they have to say can only
be said in a shout. They are some of the women whose shops and homes have been
emptied in five days of xenophobic looting in Grahamstown, whose families are
left with nothing.
Five hundred
people have been left stranded by the attacks. The Makana Municipality and the
police have been of scant assistance
and, in some cases, even implicated in the rumour-driven xenophobic
sentiment and crimes.
The women
continue shouting, explaining what happened to them, working it all into a
statement to send to the press that has been mostly silent about their plight.
“And what
about our children’s education?” asks one woman, her face tight with anger. The
shop owners’ children are not in school because of threats to their safety.
The crowded
room is located in the office of the Unemployed People’s Movement (UPM) in
Grahamstown. Throughout the attacks, UPM members have worked hard to contest
the crisis, both politically and practically, even though the movement has no
resources beyond a few tiny rooms and the energy of its members.
One woman
moves around the room with plates of amasi to be shared by the people gathered
there. Behind the shouting, murmured conversations are held in Xhosa,
Afrikaans, and English. Two women even share a joke in Xhosa and laugh, if
briefly.
In the front
room, which is emptier and quieter, a Nigerian man whose fruit and vegetable
shop was among the first to be looted, sits, in borrowed clothing, speaking to
his countryman, an academic at Rhodes University..The shop owner is startlingly
calm for a man in his predicament; the academic, on the other hand, wears his
shock on his face and posture. Soon, they go out to eat lunch—still unsure of
their safety on the streets
The attacks
began last week following rumours that an “Arab looking” man was responsible
for the deaths and mutilation of six women, whose bodies have been found in the
town’s ghettoes in the weeks since September.
Aslam Madbur
is one of the many Bangladeshis who have been affected by the attacks and
looting. He has lived in South Africa for over 10 years and has been trading in
Grahamstown for more than seven
“More than 70
people broke into my shop and took everything. They say we’re cutting other
people. There’s no proof, maybe they want to do that but now they taking out
and making stories,” Madbur says. He adds that the looters took more than R50
000 worth of stock from his shop and that he is now left with nothing.
The rumours of
a foreign national being responsible for the deaths had been brewing for
weeks until some members of the township
were incited to carry out their own version of vigilante justice. The rumours
had been brought to the attention of authorities on separate occasions—with no
response from either the police or the municipality.
One of the
attacks took place after a taxi-driver protest in Grahamstown, when members of
the protest went on a looting rampage. But while some looted, other locals
stood shoulder to shoulder with the Ethiopian, Somali, Pakistani and Bangladeshi
shopkeepers in support and protection of people who had integrated themselves
into the communities, and become locals themselves.
Outside the
UPM office, a fifty-year-old man sits quietly smoking. He lives in a shack on
the outskirts of town with his wife and children, but since the looting began,
he has been busy disseminating anti-xenophobic flyers in Grahamstown’s
township.
“I know
everything about the people who are suffering, who are still suffering again,”
he used to say when the looting first began. “They say I’m free, but there is
no free for me. I’m still living in the squatter camp in the shacks. But
everybody, this is our country, everybody, no matter you are white, not matter
you are black, no matter you are green, we are here in South Africa,” he would
add.
He is quieter
now.
“This rain,”
is all he has to say, looking down at the drizzle spotting the cobble-stone
road.
A few metres
from him, a man sits in the passenger seat of a white bakkie with a cigarette
in his fingers. His shop was also looted, but he is silent.
In the past
five days, people in Grahamstown have been political in different ways. Some
admirable, even courageous, fought to defend other’s shops and safety, their
own and their families’ livelihoods, while others have robbed and burned,
motivated by rumours, fears, selfish business interests, and the frustrations
and corruption of local political life.
Inside the UPM
building, an infant runs in the narrow passage as best as his new legs will
allow him, smiling up at people and laughing. He greets everyone, men included,
as his mother. Meanwhile, the women work on their statement, determined to
affirm their humanity.
“We are all
persons. We must treat each other with respect,” they say, opposing the
xenophobic slogans that were painted on taxis last week: “They must go. They
must burn.”
Across town,
in another room, municipal councillors mince around but offer no help. Though
the municipality has called a meeting of ‘the community’, the spirit of the
word is lost. There, form and authority are important, not the crisis of human
lives. When one councillor furiously says that we all belong in South Africa, she
is told by the chair to sit down and show some respect. Another councillor says
that when the ‘foreigners’ return, they should have fewer shops. She is not
interrupted.
Five hundred
people were directly affected by the looting in Grahamstown—but the dozen women
who shout in the tiny room and even the man who smokes silently out front
convey more intensely and suddenly the actual meaning of the five days of
violence. Community exists even where violence and exclusion seem to break it.
Among the diverse people gathered at the UPM office, community is created and
preserved, even while in other spaces, it is destroyed. Community is based on
shared humanity, in some cases shared suffering. The little boy who gnaws on a
carrot and the woman who defiantly asserts that she will defend her shop if it
is attacked again are both part of it.
People live
during times of crisis—they still eat, they still find humour around them, and
they still defy the inhuman treatment of themselves and of others. People who
have had everything taken from them are still people. They are not simply ‘five
hundred affected people’, nor merely the objects of violence, prejudices,
crime, or xenophobia, but people with things to say who are not defined only by
their recent victimisation. They need help, urgently, but they are not
helpless.
