THIS article looks at the recent wave of community protests in South Africa with a focus on the case of Freedom Park in Soweto. The struggle of the black working class majority of Freedom Park, South Africa, is not just for land on which to build housing - although that is obviously a central issue and key demand; nor is it just against the accompanying political and police violence and intimidation. It is a struggle against the injustice, violence and corruption of a system that puts the power, privileges and profits of a few before the lives and wellbeing of the majority. Five months later, however, the Gauteng Department of Human Settlements had still not dignified the community with a response and community organisers started collecting signatures for a “group petition to the Gauteng Legislature”. The petition concluded:
“There is no transparency with regards to beneficiaries and we suspect that some officials and contractors are selling RDP houses. There is also no transparency on the awarding of tenders for development projects and the poor quality of construction.
“We demand all the information, plans and designs with regards to our housing development in Freedom Park.“We demand that the community must be given the right to actively participate in and control the decision-making process with regards to all community development in Freedom Park.”
On the way back from Eldorado Park the march was attacked by thugs allegedly associated with or hired by the local political elite, leaving one person in intensive care. For months thereafter residents were prevented from holding community meetings, community organisers were threatened and harassed by people loyal to or in the pay of the local elite and some were arrested on spurious grounds. Leaders of the local ANC and its civic arm, the South African National Civic Organisation (Sanco), have been accused by residents of paying criminal elements within the township or giving them drugs and alcohol to disrupt community meetings with violence – or the threat of violence – in order to prevent or discourage residents from organising to expose the alleged corruption and hold those responsible to account.
In the face of this violence and intimidation residents agreed, at a meeting in November 2015, “on the need to use legal institutions to enforce the constitutional rights guaranteed in the constitution to advance the struggle against corruption and community exclusion in all housing development projects at Freedom Park. The community further agreed to intensify community mobilisation, organisation and unity of our community across party political lines in a fight for transparency, accountability, community ownership and control of all developmental projects happening in Freedom Park and intensify the fight against corruption.”
To this end and in response to the oppressive, unsafe and unhealthy conditions of overcrowding caused by an influx of people into the township – which has led to many people renting shacks in others’ backyards – the Freedom Park Backyard Dwellers Association was later started to take forward the struggle for land on which to build housing. On 27 April this year, in building toward the third attempt to occupy Bush Koppies, the Freedom Park Backyard Dwellers Association held an “Unfreedom Day” rally to promote and build support for their struggle for land and housing. A statement announcing the event declared:
“As the country celebrates a freedom for which so many sacrificed, we want the country to know that some of us continue to sacrifice – through pitiful wages and squalor-like living conditions. During rain, heat and cold, we live in conditions that expose us to the elements, diminish our well-being and put our children at risk. We have no privacy, no dignity, no freedom.
“We call on media, civil society, political parties to join us and heed the demands we have peacefully made for so long. Our people are suffering – instead of celebrating a hollow freedom we demand that they hear our pain.” Despite having sent the invitation to literally hundreds of media contacts, however, no journalists from the mainstream media were seen to be present on the day to cover the event – maybe because it was expected to be peaceful, which would contradict the mainstream media’s narrative of disaffected black working class township residents as violent and unreasonable. Or maybe because the association responsible for the rally actively tries to expropriate land, not just rhetorically in populist politicking. (Not exactly something the ruling class would like gaining traction.) No political parties actively supported the rally, perhaps with the exception of a minor one to which many of the community organisers are affiliated. So-called civil society also did not turn up in any noticeable numbers. Presumably they were all too busy celebrating their hollow freedom.
And that, dear reader, is why Freedom Park, Eldorado Park, Joe Slovo, Ennerdale, Kliptown, Orange Farm and a host of other townships south of Johannesburg recently went up in flames (as they no doubt will again) and were shut down, for days in succession, gripped by so-called violent protests. Because our people are suffering and no one hears their pain. Because they have tried every other means at their disposal to get the government to listen to and respect them and address their grievances and have either been sent from pillar to post or their pleas have simply fallen on deaf, disinterested or self-interested ears. Because they are frustrated and desperate and anything less than so-called violent protest, having exhausted other purported channels, would amount to resigning themselves to passively accepting a life of continued suffering and misery at the hands of a corrupt self-serving parasitic elite. A life probably cut short by an easily preventable death, like burning to death in a shack fire, in a backyard of some overcrowded, underdeveloped township.
A township where the hope so many people had for a better life after apartheid has been shat upon by the very people that had promised to provide it. A township where the black working class is deliberately kept in a state of poverty and oppression, then labeled ‘violent’ and threatened with rubber bullets (if not live ammunition), tear gas and prison if they dare fight for their constitutional and human rights. A township where more and more people are forced, against their will and well-being, to live in unsafe and unhealthy conditions in informal settlements and backyard shacks despite there being vacant and unused land standing idle nearby.
A township where the majority of people are unemployed and the wages of the lucky few who actually have a job are in decline due to anti-worker policies designed to increase profit rates for the rich at the expense of the poor. A township where many people do not have access to basic services or decent housing while the government actively redirects money that could have been used for such services and development upward, away from the black working class and to the ruling class (white and now black capitalists, top state officials and the political elite), by taxing the black working class through VAT and at the same time giving tax breaks to corporations. A township where government spending on service delivery has either remained the same or been in decline since the ANC came into power over 20 years ago.
A township where the local government has adopted aggressive cost recovery measures that have put access to basic services like electricity and water out of reach for increasingly many residents – cutting those who can’t pay for such services off altogether. A township where the frenzied outsourcing of basic services and development has led to the establishment of networks of political patronage and clientelism ready to resort to violence – be it a legalised monopoly on violence in the form of the state, criminal violence or paramilitary violence – to defend the corrupt ill-gotten interests of a parasitic elite and suppress any challenges both to their political dominance and the access this provides them for the looting of state resources.
A township where, on a clear day, one can maybe even see the uninterrupted, unbridled building and maintenance of infrastructure in the historically white suburbs and for corporations. A township where black working class residents are subjected daily to a class war from above through attacks on their rights and well-being by capitalists, top state officials and local political elites. A township all too common in South Africa.
And therein lies the real violence. In a system that actively and deliberately centralises wealth and power in the hands of an increasingly small and unaccountable minority and makes the rich richer by making the poor poorer; in the laws that legalise this crime against humanity and perpetuate the colonial dispossession of the black working class majority of their land, and; in the state that upholds and enforces both these laws and the criminal system they are designed to legalise and protect.
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