Ben Mafani: Last Will & Testament

Date 29-05-2013

This is my last message out of the civic prison of Glenmore.

I am Vellie Ben Mafani. My Afterlife Long Ago…

Road to the freedom, my historical background on this world. On behalf of my will I would like to say to all of the people who helped me, well done, we made it.

Mr. Whisson Prof. Tel. 046 6223382

Mr. David McGreger Daily Dispatch Cell. 082 335 4764

Mr. Jock Adv. Cell. 083 444 8231

Mrs. Johnson. Mother of mother. Cell. 082 268 0223

Mr. Paddy. Father of the father. Cell. 076 916 1166

Miss. Michelle. Well done. Go forward to your career. God Bless you.

Ben Mafani fights for development and dignity

Forced Removals in Greater Cape Town, 1948-1970

by Martin Legassick, 2006

During and after the Second World War the African population of the Cape Peninsula grew enormously in number. Until at least the mid-1950s most black Africans lived not in official ‘locations’ such as Langa but in privately-owned and rented high density flats and houses along the docks-Observatory axis, scattered through the predominantly white and Coloured residential areas of Cape Town as plot owners or tenants -- and, mainly, under conditions of extreme squalor, in unregulated ‘pondokkie’ settlements in the peri-urban areas around the fringes of Cape Town. In the 1950s, however, Cape Town “became a test case for influx control and racial segregation”. Government policy, implemented by local authorities, forcibly removed the African population to official ‘locations’ or endorsed them out of the area altogether.

The Discarded People by Cosmas Desmond (1971)

The Discarded People
by Cosmas Desmond 

Apartheid era South Africa was also one of the great
innovators in the ultimate form of marginalisation –
discarding. It discovered that it could discard “surplus” people. One of the classic books that exposed the horror of apartheid practice was Cosmas Desmond’s The Discarded People that described how several million Africans were removed from their homes in land that had been declared “white” They were categorised as ‘superfluous and ‘unproductive’. They were not needed in white cities, towns and farming areas. Declared aliens in the land of their birth
they were dumped in remote rural slums, areas for which the government took no responsibility.

The crime which went away

by David Hemson, The Mail & Guardian

Early in 1968 the apartheid government decreed that African people in and around the community at Maria Ratschitz mission near Ladysmith were to be forcibly removed and dumped on barren exposed land called at Limehill. This was not the first or the last of the forced removals characteristic of the apartheid regime's determination to deny towns and cities to the African people and instead to constitute black political entities, "homelands", on the remaining land occupied by Africans.

On the Return of the Political

by Richard Pithouse, SACSIS 

When the African National Congress was founded in Bloemfontein in 1912 Sol Plaatje, then a newspaper editor, was elected as its first Secretary General. Plaatje, along with some other mission educated African intellectuals, had been optimistic about the new country that had come into being with the Union of South Africa in 1910. But within a year it was clear that segregation was going to be at the heart of the union, the white union, that followed the Boer war, its concentration camps and the English success in seizing control of the gold-fields.

Mr. Velile Mafani Will Throw Three Stones Through the Window of the High Court in Grahamstown Tomorrow

5 January 2012

Unemployed People’s Movement Press Statement

Our movement has been approached by Mr. Velile Ben Mafani. He informed us that tomorrow he will throw three stones, one white, one black, and one red, through the window of the High Court in Grahamstown. He will tie a letter stating his demands around the stones.

On the Casual Bulldozing of a Shembe Temple in Durban

by Richard Pithouse, The Mercury, January 2011

Whenever they find a reality that doesn’t suit them / they alter it with a bulldozer - Mahmoud Darwish, A State of Siege, Ramallah, 2002.

Mahmoud Darwish, a poet who wrote, especially towards the end of his life, with a real confidence in what he called the butterfly's burden, the social weight carried by delicate beauty, began his life in al-Birwa, a village in Galilee. He was seven years old when his family fled the Israeli military in 1948 and his life was spun between Moscow, Cairo, Beirut, Paris and Ramallah before he died in Houston in 2008.