It is not just DA evicting the poor

Last week Wednesday, in the blistering cold of a winter morning, Bulelani Qholani was dragged naked out of a shack during an eviction by the city in Khayelitsha, Cape Town.

The video, which went viral on social media, captured the shocking moment when the man was forced out of his shack by uniformed men.

As he fought hard against the eviction, falling to the ground as he refused to be constrained by law enforcement officers, community members stood taking photos that captured the shame and humiliation that the poor of our country have come to know too well.

They captured the black condition.

The mayor of Cape Town, Dan Plato, would later apologise to Qholani and suspend four officers who were part of the eviction.

But he would claim, tragically, that Qholani had in fact staged the scene to make the city look bad.

According to Plato, the man had been fully clothed shortly before the eviction occurred and had run into his shack to undress to deliberately “put the City of Cape Town in a very bad light”.

Let us imagine that indeed Qholani had staged his naked protest.

Does this lessen the brutality of evicting people in the dead of winter, in the middle of a global health pandemic that has claimed the lives of thousands of South Africans, in a province that has recorded a majority of these fatalities?

Would Qholani being fully clothed make the City of Cape Town any less inhuman than it was when it decided to completely disregard the instructions of the national government that clearly communicate that no evictions should happen during lockdown? Absolutely not.

In seeing the viral video, many people were naturally deeply angered.

To see a man humiliated like that, with a law enforcement officer’s knee pressing down on him, was too raw a wound for black people who, just a few weeks ago, witnessed the painful death of George Floyd at the hands of US law enforcement officers.

He too, like Qholani, was kneed.

It was a moment that reminded us of what we know to be true, that black lives do not matter anywhere — not in the US and certainly not in SA.

Many members and leaders of the governing party condemned the incident.

But in doing so, they sought to present the evictions as being reflective of a DA that has no regard for the lives of the poor.

They sought to play politics, claiming that the evictions are evidence of a DA that does not care about the people.

But this language of propaganda must be rejected because what happened in Khayelitsha last Wednesday morning happens across SA all the time, under an ANC government that has also demonstrated lack of regard for the lives of the poor.

I did my masters in geography research on gentrification and the displacement of poor vulnerable communities in the post-apartheid city, looking at the Maboneng Precinct in Johannesburg as my case study.

The results of my study demonstrated that the Maboneng Precinct is a middle-class haven built on evictions of the poor.

Hundreds of working-class vulnerable people, largely black, were evicted and continue to be evicted and displaced in Johannesburg and elsewhere in the country.

Like Qholani, their crime is that they are poor.

And like Qholani, their eviction is sanctioned by a government that has extraordinarily little regard for human life and uses lawfulness as a mask for lack of humanity and failure to resolve the historical housing crisis that confronts our country.

Qholani is a symbol of black life in post-apartheid South Africa, under both DA and ANC governments.

Black people in our country are naked and have a knee pressing down the sides of

‘The video, which went viral on social media, captured the shocking moment when the man was forced out of his shack by uniformed men

their necks. Black people in this country are unable to breathe.

The condition of blackness is a nervous condition, and noone dares tell me that what happened to Qholani is about the DA.

It is about power.

It is about how those with power have a monopoly of violence and savagery, and those without, have been rendered naked and decivilised.