SOUTH AFRICA: Housing protests spread to Cape Town
Housing protests in Gugulethu and Khayelitsha, the huge impoverished "townships" that are home to many of Cape Town's working class and poor, erupted on May 23. These protests follow a wave of similar mass protests in recent weeks in Durban and Port Elizabeth.
In "Gugs", the whole of NY1, the main township thoroughfare, was blockaded every 100 metres with piles of burning tyres. Residents were angry at the lack of provision of housing, as well as the failure to deliver water and electricity services for informal settlements.
Eleven years after the first democratic election in South Africa elected the African National Congress to government nationally, and which now controls the Western Cape provincial government and the Cape Town city council, people are still being exploited by backyard landlords, must walk kilometres for water and shit in a hole in the ground (or a bucket).
Khayelitsha residents graphically illustrated their discontent when they dumped excrement from their buckets in the yard of ANC municipal councillor Phakamile Kula.
The protesters staffing burning barricades of tyres were met with rubber bullets from the South African Police (SAP) and Cape Town city police, with 15 residents being arrested on May 23 and dozens more in the days that followed. Force was used to disperse any residents gathering in Gugulethu. A group of visiting journalists were greeted with stun grenades fired by the SAP when a crowd gathered around them (one journalist was hit in the leg). This violent reaction did little to stem the protest, whose amorphous nature can be summed up by the fact that "the committee" co-ordinating the mounds of burning tyres and rubbish as yet doesn't have a name.
As an organisation, though, it has undergone a baptism of fire, organising a protest that aspired to block one of Cape Town's major highways, the N2. In response, 20 comrades were arrested, at least 20 others were injured, and the township feels like a warzone.
"We are non-violent", Sandile (not his real name) from the committee told us, and amazingly, in a township where protest has generally meant stone throwing and the destruction of government and commercial vehicles, he was right. The uneven battle between police and residents was marked by violence only from the police side — otherwise, it was a game of running and ducking, staying one step ahead of the "authorities".
People from "Cuban Heights", a land occupation in Cape Town's Lavender Hill, a "coloured" settlement, joined the protests in the mainly "African" Gugulethu township. This put the lie to the notion that recent housing protests in Cape Town were racially motivated affairs of "coloureds" angry that they were being ignored by the ANC in favour of "Africans".
On May 21, Wallace Mgoqi, the Cape Town city manager and former land claims commissioner, was booed out of a collective meeting where he came to address the land occupations that have been happening. Gugulethu is historic ANC heartland, and the scale of the protests, the drubbing of Mgoqi, and the obvious support that the residents offered to the protesters marks a political shift whose ramifications no doubt are causing sleepless nights for ANC leaders.
[This is an abridged version of a report posted on the website of the University of KwaZulu Natal's Centre for Civil Society (<http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs/default.asp?2,27,3,706>) and Indymedia South Africa (<http://southafrica.indymedia.org/>).]
From Green Left Weekly, June 1, 2005.
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