Though Julius Malema may have struck panic into the hearts of segments of the population when he stopped short of calling for the slaughter of white people, the soundbite that should have been cause for disquiet was the one of the EFF leader allegedly rallying the faithful to take up unoccupied land back in 2014.
The utterance certainly affirmed everything that has been written of Malema’s whimsical proclivity to rabble-rousing but also suggested that here is a man who, more than his political rivals, seemingly has his ears strained to the talking points around the dinner tables of the poor and working class. Following charges filed by civil rights group AfriForum, Malema has since found himself hauled before the courts on charges of contravening the Riotous Assemblies Act of 1956. Amid the legal wrangling that has followed, going all the way to the apex court, the gist of the issue – namely land and, by default, housing – remains the pain in the proverbial for the marginalised.
From the slums of Cape Town to our backyard in Colesberg, access to land and housing as well as dismantling apartheid’s spatial planning which reduced black residential areas into sprawling, unsightly labour dormitories far removed from economic hubs continues to dog the nation long after the abolishment of legalised racism. In an apparent attempt to save face following Malema’s calls for the expropriation of land without compensation, in 2017 the ANC adopted a party resolution “to pursue land reform with greater determination” and which led to debates and public hearings across the country the following year.
But some five years on, Nelson Mandela’s commitment to housing being an “unbreakable promise” seems to have been placed on the backburner by those who’ve since taken up the baton. There has been a marked slump since the upsurge of state (RDP) houses following the first democratic elections in 1994. Worse still, is how inadequate housing sets in motion a butterfly effect that sees the state hurtling to put out unnecessary fires, often quite literally.
Earlier this year a devastating fire in Durban’s Kennedy Road informal settlement saw some 1101 homes reduced to cinder. In what has been described as one of the most deadliest fires in South Africa’s history some 77 people perished when another fire engulfed an abandoned building in the Johannesburg CBD a few months ago. More fires have since been reported in our informal settlements. And if you turn on the news in winter, chances are you’ll see how this all pales in comparison to the fires that have been ravaging the shantytowns of Cape Town throughout the decades.
With at least 4 297 informal settlements across the country according to the department of human settlements, this problem as well as its attendant socioeconomic consequences poses serious challenges for communities. Despite efforts such as the Urban Settlements Development Grant as well as the Informal Settlements Upgrading Programme Grant aimed at mitigating the problem, informal settlements continue to burgeon.
Here in Colesberg, the situation is scarcely different. In fact bring up the housing topic to people of a certain generation and expect drawn-out sighs and pained recollections of the ‘rent office’. That apartheid building, a solemn, foreboding blockhouse situated in ‘eDrayini’ – a burrough of Kuyasa – would see throngs of sullen black residents lined up to pay the much despised rent spawned by the ‘Black Local Authorities Act in 1982, which allowed black townships to elect town councilors’ according to Dr Sipho Mbuqe.
Resident Xolile Mrwarwaza recalls how hard the authorities would come down on non-payers, often locking them out of their homes.
Dr Mbuqe’s seminal dissertation entitled Political Violence in South Africa: A Case Study of “Necklacing” in Colesberg is inarguably the most insightful literature on the events that characterised the violence, turmoil and socioeconomic realities of the 80s in the township. Though he nowadays rubs shoulders with intelligentsia sorts in the US, out in the streets of Kuyasa he is known by his clan name, Mnune. A grootman raised in a two-room apartheid state house; whose intellect would pluck him out of SA’s bush-league universities into a pristine American institution where in turn he would place a barely-known town in the platteland front and centre of his PhD thesis.
“Houses,” he writes, “had big rocks on the roof to prevent the wind from taking the shanty houses’ roof away, yet people had to pay rent, which never matched the value of the houses. Inside the houses at night, people slept from the kitchen floor to the bedroom, because extended family members lived under the same roof, irrespective of the number of occupants.” A subsequent rent increment in the 80’s would “become a central feature of civic black resistance in the 1980’s,” he notes.
Although there have been noteworthy improvements since those barbaric days to the lives of the townsfolk, there are those who feel the new dispensation has, quite literally, left them out in the cold.
eParkeni has reported on the hardscrabble of people from the Old Location, waiting years on homes promised to them through the Ou Boks Project. Some of those homes are now a dilapidated catastrophe, apparently marked for demolishing. Countless more residents never even made the shortlist and only God knows when and if their day to dignified housing will come in their lifetime. But this has seemingly always been how much of Colesberg’s peripheral townships came into being – people grew gatvol of waiting and simply found pieces of vacant land whereon to put up a structure.
In Masiphakame, colloquially known as Toilet City, which was the town’s first promising scene of the post-1994 major housing projects is also where residents are impatiently taking up land. In recent years informal structures and livestock encampments have been popping up overnight there. One resident who spoke on condition of anonymity laments how the system appears to ignore the plight of the poor. As a casual worker, she says she can’t afford going through the formal route of buying an erf. So, like her neighbours, now numbering in the hundreds, she just demarcated a piece of land to herself and started building. Because these communities often take on a life of their own, the municipality has since come to the party, building toilets and installing taps. In due course some of the corrugated iron shacks have been turned into formidable homes of brick and mortar. A popular and profitable shisanyama business has emerged from the rubble and despondency.
If we are to take the Umsobomvu Municipality at their word, not all is doom and gloom. According to a memo released last month, the Council “has resolved to dispose a total of 265 sites to accomodate members of the community who do not qualify for RDP housing.” The municipality further expressed that they would be engaging with the community as soon as they’ve decided on the pricing of these sites. In the interim they have begun to prepare access roads to the earmarked areas.
But of course in the bigger scheme of things this will hardly put a dent to the overall housing shortage. Not when population figures are on the up and with them, severe unemployment. Even if these prices would be dirt-cheap, they are still way beyond the means of the everyday resident. As such, it is wishful thinking to suppose that in the absence of meaningful government assistance in not only in building state houses but also granting access to land, residents will not be illegally taking up unoccupied land.
In the 80s, when Eskom was a thriving parastatal, the SOE would through its housing programs for employees lead to the emergence of Khayelitsha. In a township where the most lavish houses were usually state-built and further extended by the owners, the new modest homes at Khayelitsha were a sight to behold. Perhaps that era could be referred to as the time that Kuyasa Township was modernised.
However, although there has been a flourish of new houses, the intervening years have also seen a lot of informal structures creeping up. The are the so-called Plakkes Kamp; grim outliers along the N1 Highway and secluded parts of the township. And more are popping up throughout Kuyasa.
Common sense would inform the powers that be to exercise some proactiveness on the issue. Regrettably, it would seem that they instead employ reactive bureaucracy which makes fertile ground for the likes of Malema and ilk to exploit the desperation on the ground for political mileage. We have seen the violent images of the Red Ants evacuating illegal squatters in big cities. Here, the situation appears a lot calmer but every day someone is unlawfully erecting a structure and eventually this will inevitably catch up with everybody. And only then will we see why it is wise to have one’s finger foremost on the pulse of the poor and working class.