On April 27, while political parties were spending fortunes
to celebrate freedom, the shack dwellers' movement Abahlali baseMjondolo
commemorated – or "mourned" – what it called UnFreedom Day in Sweet
Home, the shack settlement in Philippi on the Cape Flats.
On the same day, a group of shack dwellers from the Philippi
East area increased their occupation of a piece of land just off Symphony Way,
between Stock and Govan Mbeki roads. But a day later, the City of Cape Town
decided to show them exactly how unfree they still are.
This settlement, according to community leader Sandile
Ngoxolo, was named the "Marikana land occupation" in honour of the
workers who died last year in North West province in their struggle for a
living wage – and because "we too are organising ourselves peacefully and
are willing to die for our struggle". Homes were built and occupied, and
families worked through the night of Freedom Day to put the finishing touches
to them.
On Sunday April 28 the Democratic Alliance, which runs Cape
Town and which is trying to showcase an anti-apartheid past with the "Know
Your DA" campaign, showed that its approach to land issues is not so
different from that of the old apartheid National Party. At 1.15pm a large
contingent of the city's anti-land invasion unit (ALI) and dozens of day
labourers arrived. They were backed up by law enforcement units and police
vehicles, including, for extra effect, a Casspir and a Nyala.
These forces evicted residents from their homes, often
beating them in the process. They pepper-sprayed Abahlali activist Cindy Ketani
and then stole her phone, shot another woman twice with rubber bullets and
arrested Abahlali baseMjondolo activist Tumi Ramahlele and community member
Kemelo Mosaku.
Ramahlele claims to have been severely beaten by law
enforcement members inside the Casspir after being arrested and is preparing to
lay a charge with the Independent Police Investigative Directorate after
being examined by a doctor.
Counter-spoliation
For its part, the ALI then took apart the Marikana homes,
often destroying people's property in the process.
This was repeated on Tuesday April 30 and once again on
Wednesday May 1, only with a much larger police contingent present, which took
down yet more homes. Two more residents were arrested.
The May Day eviction finished the job begun on Freedom Day,
destroying every last home. Moreover, most of the zinc sheets residents had
used to build their homes were confiscated by the ALI.
On Friday May 3 I got a phone call from a newly homeless resident,
Zanele: "Law enforcement is back again. They are not only taking our zinc
sheets, but now they are even taking our sails [plastic tarpaulins]. We do not
know what to do. It's raining and we have nowhere else to go."
I later found out that not only was removing people's
belongings illegal (especially if the city doesn't allow residents to claim it
back) but also it is against the ALI's official guidelines. I also found out
that not only were these evictions illegal but also that the city was citing a
nonexistent Act to justify them.
City of Cape Town media manager Kylie Hatton claimed in a
statement that the evictions were done in accordance with the "Protection
of the Possession of Property Act" as an act of
"counter-spoliation". But Sheldon Magardie, director of the Cape Town
office of the Legal Resources Centre, said there is no such law. Advocate
Stuart Wilson, director of the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa,
and constitutional law professor Pierre de Vos concurred.
The overarching law that regulates evictions is section
26(3) of the Constitution, which states: "No one may be evicted from their
home, or have their home demolished, without an order of court made after
considering all the relevant circumstances. No legislation may permit arbitrary
evictions."
Unfinished and unoccupied
The Prevention of Illegal Eviction From and Unlawful
Occupation of Land Act of 1998 (the PIE Act) expands on that, as well as on
"spoliation", and details the procedures a municipality must follow
in order to conduct a legal eviction.
According to Wilson, in common law "counter-spoliation
… permits a person who is in the process of having property taken from them to
immediately take that property back without a court order".
But, as Wilson, Magardie and others explain,
counter-spoliation does not apply to the eviction of people from their homes.
Once they are deemed squatters, or even illegal land grabbers, as per the 2004
case of Rudolf vs City of Cape Town, the PIE Act must apply.
To justify the eviction in terms of counter-spoliation, the
city claims the structures were not homes but
were unfinished and unoccupied. This is a blatant lie. I saw the homes,
and there are photographs and videos showing clearly that the homes were fully
occupied and were being lived and slept in from as early as April 25.
On Friday May 3, for the fifth time that week, I set off for
the "Marikana" occupation. When I arrived people were cold, wet,
tired and depressed. "How could they take the only things we have that
would keep us dry?" they wondered.
What could be the city's justification for confiscating the
tarpaulins? Did they want people to get wet and sick? Is it punishment for
daring to build shacks in the first place?
I can understand the city's perverted rationale for
illegally evicting poor people from empty land. I can understand the economic
logic behind the city leaving such land vacant until its value increases, and I
can understand the city's perversion of the PIE Act to place the interests of
the rich and well connected over the welfare of the poor.
But, visiting Sweet Home on that cold day, I could not
understand the reason why the ALI would be so malicious as to steal an item
vital to the struggle to keep dry on such a miserable, rainy day.
Well-thought-out strategy
Then I remembered Naomi Klein's discussion of the role of
torture in her book, The Shock Doctrine. Torture is a notoriously unreliable
way to extract information but, as Klein points out, that is not its primary
motive. Rather, it is to put the victims in a position of such disarray that
they could not resist power.
In the case of these occupiers, shocking them with
aggressive displays of power, removing their belongings and making them as
uncomfortable as possible in the rain was equivalent to the "shock and
awe" tactics of the American invasion of Iraq. As Harlan K Ullman and
James P Wade define it in their history of the war, Shock and Awe: Achieving
Rapid Dominance, the aim was "to seize control of the environment and
paralyse or so overload an adversary's perceptions and understanding of events
that the enemy would be incapable of resistance at the tactical and strategic
levels".
Is this why the ALI flouted its own guidelines? Was it mere
meanness, or a well-thought-out strategy aimed at breaking the will of the
community?
Whatever the case, these actions show that the DA's liberal
ideal of small, "efficient" government is a farce, because it
requires an extensive, violent, often illicit system of authority to contain
the basic demands of the poor – as well as their larger, emancipatory
aspirations. The ANC, too, in a city such as Durban, talks about the "rule
of law" while responding to the organised poor with astonishing violence.
This violence is physical, social and spatial. Geographer
David McDonald writes in World City Syndrome: Neoliberalism and Inequality in
Cape Town (2008) that it is now "arguably the most uneven and spatially
segregated city in the country".
Abahlali baseMjondolo mourns on UnFreedom Day because, for
the poor, the only thing liberalism has given them the right to vote for their
oppressors.
If we are to have any chance of resolving the escalating
crisis in our society, we are going to have to think beyond liberalism. To
start, we need to talk about redistribution and put the social value of urban
land above its commercial value.
