Richard Pithouse, CounterPunch
On Monday morning there was a protest, in the
form of a road blockade, organised from a shack settlement in Durban, South
Africa. The settlement, officially known as Quarry Road but popularly known as
KwaMam’Suthu, is on a sliver of land that runs along a river bank squeezed
between two busy roads. It is in the suburbs to the North of the city. The
current sequence of open contestation between people occupying land in the
interstices of this part of the city and the local state stretches back to the
‘80s. It has a prior history that, before the mass evictions of the ‘50s and
‘60s, came to a head in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s. Over the last decade it
has ebbed and flowed as the state has alternated between offering material and
political concessions and responding to struggle with increasingly violent
repression. Recently things have been getting hot again. Last month residents
from the nearby Kennedy Road settlement burnt a municipal truck during two days
of protest.
Ten years ago the leadership in KwaMam’Suthu
were affiliated to the South African National Civic Organisation (SANCO) which
is aligned to the ruling African National Congress (ANC). Since then they have
sometimes worked with Abahali baseMjondolo, an autonomous poor people’s
movement, when seeking to secure land or services, or to oppose or get rid of a
local politician, but have generally returned to formations allied to the
ruling party when working to secure these gains. But any organisation outside
of the control of the local ANC structures is highly contested. The local ward
councillor was not impressed when the South African Communist Party, which is
in alliance with the ANC, recently launched a branch in the settlement.
Early on Monday afternoon it was reported that
“A protester who was running from rubber bullet fire and a haze of teargas has
died in a stream after he became entangled in a web of illegal electricity
connections.” It was also reported that six children, ranging in age from a
months to five years old were treated after having inhaled tear gas. As is
often the case in these kinds of situations the dead man was not dignified with
his name in the media reports. The term ‘violent’ was only used to describe the
protestors.
The man whose life came to an end in the river
was Jabulani Sokhela. He was forty years old. He had no family of his own but
was an elder in a family of four. He was from Donnybrook in the Midlands. He
made his living as a ‘Community Caretaker’ in the ablution blocks that, as a
concession to struggle, are now housed in shipping containers in some shack
settlements.
The death of a protestor at the hands of the
police is not an unusual event in South Africa. A google search, no doubt an
inadequate research tool, shows up more than fifty cases of people killed by the
police during street protests since the turn of the century. This figure does
not include the thirty four miners massacred at Marikana in 2012, the growing
list of grassroots activists assassinated by more shadowy forces or the people
killed by the various other armed forces available to the state and used to
effect evictions and disconnections from self-organised access to municipal
services like water, electricity and, although less frequently, sanitation. In
October 2013 two people were killed, and another seven injured, after they were
attacked by municipal security guards during an armed electricity disconnection
in the New Germany settlement, which is just up the road from KwaMam’Suthu. At
the time Mbali Mdlozini, whose cousin was killed in the attack, told a
newspaper, in a phrase that has been consistently present during street
protests over the last fifteen years, that “We are not animals”. On Monday some
residents from the New Germany settlement joined the road blockade organised
from Quarry Road. Jabulani Sokhela was one of them.
In October 2005 residents of KwaMam’Suthu
marched on their local municipal councillor in opposition to the ongoing
attempts to ‘eradicate’ the settlement and remove those of its residents that
would not have been left homeless to the rural periphery of the city. They
organised a mock burial of their councillor and demanded that he hand over the
keys to his office. At the time one of the residents was in Westville Prison
after being arrested during a successful attempt to stop an eviction. The
evictions were seen off and the middle class councillor was removed and
replaced with a resident from a nearby shack settlement. Two years ago, with
activists who had been forced out of the Kennedy Road settlement by the local
ANC leading the struggle, KwaMam’Suthu was successfully extended to include an
adjacent piece of land. The occupation was held in the face of repeated
attempts to evict. The settlement is now considerably more dense, and larger,
than it was in 2005.
Its residents have won some access to
sanitation and showers, provided in the shipping containers where Sokhela was a
cleaner. But they continue to live in life threatening conditions and have to
face regular fires and floods. They are not alone in this. The morning after
the protest organised from KwaMam’Suthu the Daily Maverick reported that last
year 2 090 people burned to death Gauteng, the province in which Johannesburg
is situated, “many of them in shack fires that sweep through informal
settlements”. Monday’s protest was to demand basic services, including
electricity, which is essential to any serious attempt to reduce shack fires,
and in opposition to the ward councillor.
The mode of urbanism in which some lives are
lived amid radical precariousness and, in death, are seldom mourned in wider
society, has been central to some of the most compelling critiques of the
fundamental inhumanity of colonialism. In 1956, the same year that he resigned
from the French Communist Party on account of its inability to take the
particularly of the situation confronted by black people seriously, the great
Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, declaring that “My dignity wallows in puke”,
looked to a redemptive moment that “breathtakingly. . . would fall down over
the town and burst open the life of shacks like an over-ripe pomegranate”.
In 1961, in his famous account of the colonial
city in The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon, also from Martinique, wrote
that in the colonial ghetto – understood from without as “a place of ill fame,
peopled by men of evil repute” and evidently “a hungry town, starved of bread,
of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light . . . a crouching village, a town on its
knees, a town wallowing in the mire” the colonized “die there, it matters not
where, nor how”. Fanon, less taken with apocalyptic fantasies than Césaire, saw
the urban land occupation as the “gangrene ever present at the heart of
colonial domination”.
More contemporaneously another great writer
from Martinique, Patrick Chamoiseau, wrote, with profound political sympathy,
in his 1982 novel Texaco of a “proletariat without factories, workshops, and
work, and without bosses, in the muddle of odd jobs, drowning in survival and
leading an existence like a path through embers” amidst a “disaster of asbestos,
tin sheets crates, mud tears, blood, police”.
In 2015 South Africa continues to inhabit the
logic, inscribed in space and sustained at gunpoint, of the colonial city. The
spatial order that structures who counts, and who doesn’t, continues to be
fundamentally raced. The state has no plan to move into a postcolonial urban
order. In so far as there is a plan being pieced together, frequently in
practice rather than via policy and legislation, its logic is clear: to contain
the situation by recourse to the eminently colonial strategy of normalising
violence as a central tool of governance for certain categories of people.
The state – ever more corrupt and brutal – is
often held to account for the state of South African cities. It is also not
unusual for the critical gaze to turn to the gated communities, with their
McMansions and golf courses, and to deplore the ways in which colonial spatial
relations have mutated into the new order. Recently there has also been some
critique of ‘civil society’, usually understood as politics organised through
NGOs, and its frequent inability, often but not always raced, to recognise
modes of politics organised outside of its narrow gaze. In this milieu, it has
been argued, there is a systemic inability to recognise sustained grassroots
struggles, often conducted at real cost, as a mode of politics rather than a
mere symptom of a deepening social crisis. But none of these lines of critique
enable movement out of the general complacency in the face of the everyday
brutality by which people who are poor and black are governed. The essential
logic of colonialism – that some people just don’t, not in practice anyway,
count as people – has become widely normalised.
In October 2005, three weeks after the
residents of KwaMam’Suthu marched on their councillor, four boys in Paris,
taking a short cut home from a football game, were pursued by the police. They
ran, and for good reason. Their names were Muttin Altun, Zyed Benna, and Bouna
Traoré. Their families were from Turkey, Tunisia and Mali. Seeking refuge they
ducked into a building. It turned out to be an electricity substation. Benna
and Traoré died in a single agonising moment. Altun was grievously burnt but
survived. The revolt that began after the funeral continued for twenty days,
moved into more than 250 cities and towns and left almost nine thousand cars
burnt out or damaged.
In South Africa riots will not roll through
our cities in an act of mass refusal to accept the electrocution of an
impoverished man in a filthy river while in flight from the police as normal.
No Bishops will lead the faithful in a candlelit march on the Durban City Hall.
No trade union will call its members out on strike. We remain habituated to the
evident fact that our country is, fundamentally, a moral, political, spatial
and racial order in which some of us just don’t count as fully human.
