Cape Town, government at odds over refugee housing
• Historians show that in the past the country always took advantage of health crises to further segregate and impoverish those it viewed as ‘other’
The national government and the City of Cape Town are locked in a row over housing arrangements for refugees who occupied a church building in the city’s CBD.
About 500 foreign nationals occupied the central Methodist church in Green Market Square and demanded that the UN high commissioner for refugees move them to another country, such as Canada, citing fear of xenophobic attacks.
The departments of public works & home affairs issued a joint statement on Monday criticising the city over the housing of the foreigners who were evicted from the church.
“The recent events unfolding in Cape Town regarding the relocation of asylum seekers and refugees, including untrue statements peddled by the officials of the City of Cape Town and the executive mayor in the public domain has compelled us to take an unusual step to issue this joint press statement,” the departments said.
“Thus far we have exercised restraint in the face of provocative press statements attributed to the officials of the City of Cape Town,” they said.
The statement blamed the delay in relocating of the group on the city for allegedly failing to enforce a court order to remove the group.
“In all instances, the City of Cape Town failed to enforce its bylaws, even after being ordered to do so by the court. It is this dragging of feet ... that led to the hearing by the portfolio committee on home affairs on March 10 2020,” the statement said. It criticised the city for rejecting possible relocation sites for “unknown reasons”.
The statement came a day after Cape Town mayor Dan Plato said the removal of the refugees from the church had been premature, as the city was still preparing a relocation site to ensure physical distancing for the duration of the pandemic.
President Cyril Ramaphosa declared a national state of disaster and ordered 21-day lockdown in a bid to curb the spread of Covid-19.
“Unfortunately, for reasons that are still unknown to me, the removal of the refugees from the church at Green Market Square on Thursday, carried out by SAPS, was premature and did not conform to our agreement in this regard,” Plato said.
“The Wingfield site was not yet ready for occupation and the church refugees were moved to the Paint City site by SAPS without the city’s agreement, while that site was also not yet ready.”
Plato said that accommodation at the Paint City site was not compliant with Covid-19 regulations and could result in further relocation.
“It is also important to note, that while the city did not support the removal of the church refugees to the Paint City site as it was contrary to prior agreements reached with the national government, the fact is that the removal has taken place and any resultant overcrowding and/or health risks that are triggered at that site will need to be dealt with by all three tiers of government on a co-operative basis,” the mayor said.
MAYOR SAYS THE REMOVAL OF THE REFUGEES WAS PREMATURE AS THE CITY WAS STILL PREPARING A RELOCATION SITE
In a Time of Plague: Memories of the Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918 in SA, ed Howard Philips, Van Riebeeck Society
Plague, Pox and Pandemics: A Jacana Pocket History of Epidemics in SA Howard Philips, Jacana
The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic Plague and the Urban Native Policy in the Cape Colony, 1900-1909, Maynard Swanson, Journal of African History
SO UNCANNY WAS THE STILLNESS IN THE STREETS AND SHOPS THAT WE MIGHT HAVE BEEN IN A CITY OF THE DEAD
Confined to my home, in comfort, with a full larder and uncapped Wi-Fi and a view over False Bay to the Cape Flats, I find myself pondering a question raised by the history I am reading: where is the line between quarantine and segregation? And another: how does an epidemic change society, or expose its underlying fissures?
The threatening coronavirus epidemic underscores the gross inequality of our society — and this division was actually written into law as a response to previous SA epidemics.
In a seminal essay published 40 years ago, historian Maynard Swanson tracked the way the bubonic plague of 1901 was used by the Cape authorities to achieve what they had always desired, namely “no less than the mass removal of Cape Town’s African population, even though the number of Africans contracting the plague was less than either whites or coloureds”.
When whites and coloureds were removed from infected homes in Cape Town, they were taken to an emergency camp but allowed to return after the buildings had been fumigated. But Capetonian “Kaffirs” were forced to move permanently, in the interests of public hygiene, to hastily constructed lean-tos at Uitvlugt on the edge of town. Renamed Ndabeni, this was SA’s first township.
As the plague spread, carried in fodder for British horses during the South African War, black people would be forcibly removed to settlements outside other towns too: Ginsberg and New Brighton in the Eastern Cape and, to the north, Klipspruit, the seed of Soweto, established after the torching of Coolie Location in Johannesburg.
Before it was set on fire, a
cordon sanitaire had been thrown around Coolie Location: all inhabitants were to be treated, the Rand plague committee said, “as suspects and not as mere contacts”, and not allowed to leave. Watching it go up in flames, a young Indian lawyer named Mohandas K Gandhi noted that this was “essentially a theatrical display”; one calculated “to reassure white Johannesburg that no stone would be left unturned to safeguard their health”, as Howard Phillips puts it in his
Plague, Pox and Pandemics ,a short book that is required reading for these times.
Phillips cites Swanson, who wrote that “it was the merest step of logic to proceed from the isolation of plague victims to the creation of a permanent location for the black labouring class … With the plague emergency, the definitive step of quarantine and segregation was taken.”
This became apartheid, when black people were allowed out of what we might call lockdown only to provide the “essential service” of their labour for whites.
Phillips coins the term “epidemic expediency” to describe the way an epidemic is used to achieve a policy objective beyond that of public health. Examples abound through history, and Philips demonstrates how such expediency was further applied in SA 17 years later, when 300,000 people died in just six weeks of the Spanish Flu of 1918. Finally, in 1923, prime minister Jan Smuts could put in place the Native (Urban Areas) Act, precursor to the Group Areas Act, arguing that it would remove the slums that were “a grievance and a menace to health and decent living.”
Here is a difficult truth: disease does spread more rapidly in places where there is overcrowding, and where it is so much harder to implement the basic rules of hygiene. For all our romanticisation of places such as District Six and Sophiatown, we forget how tough life could be in them, particularly if you were poor. For this reason, “slum clearance” has always been a double-edged term in SA history. Today, as a century ago, the people who live in informal settlements are not there by choice: they need to be close to work, or to the possibility of it and to services, and this is all they can afford or have access to. This poses a question for us today: whether Covid-19 has revealed inequality in a way so stark that those in power can no longer ignore it. The way they respond — that we respond, readers of Business Day — will be the measure of our “epidemic expediency”.
Such expediency need not only have negative connotations. Phillips gives another, perhaps more constructive, application of the concept, in the way the vaccination against smallpox was used “by medics, missionaries and ministers” to expand the reach of Western medicine across the region: “The spread of biomedicine in the 19th Century was led by the tip of a vaccinating lancet.”
Of course, others have noted the sharp point to this lancet, given the missionaries bringing the Bible and the administrators bringing colonial law, alongside those medics. The racist nature of hygiene discourse in Africa is something Thabo Mbeki loved to cite, for example, in his critique of the way he believed epidemiologists pathologised black sexuality.
“As always, the fear engendered by an epidemic revealed underlying notions of the self and others,” writes Phillips of Aids. “A very heterogenous society such as SA has never lacked for ‘others’ to suspect of difference; what HIV/Aids and its predecessor epidemics added to this so powerfully was the belief that such difference could be fatal to the rest of society. In this situation, prejudice, stigma and hostility flourished and prompted action.”
If white South Africans tended to blame unsanitary black people in their cities for spreading disease, then for many traditional Africans “evil stemmed from the actions of malevolent witches and wizards seeking to destroy them and their families”. And so, in the aftermath of the Spanish Flu, “professional witch-finders were in high demand to ‘smell out’ those responsible”.
Witch-hunting was a phenomenon of the Aids epidemic too, and there are, today, the first signs of such stigmatisation accompanying the Covid-19 epidemic: last weekend, the Sunday Times reported that two early sufferers and their families, in Khayelitsha and in KwaZulu-Natal, had been ostracised by their communities.
In the case of the Khayelitsha woman, her landlady chucked her out, and she was hounded out of the township by negative social media.
“Epidemics do not create abnormal situations but rather sharpen existing behaviour[s] which ‘betray deeply rooted and continuing social imbalances’.” Thus wrote Roderick McGrew, a historian of cholera in imperial Russia.
Citing him in The Sanitation
Syndrome, Swanson contrasts the way Western liberal states and Russia dealt with cholera in the 19th century. While in the West, public health programmes were extended and “tended to enhance the governmental assumption of responsibility for social conditions, Russia remained essentially repressive in character, consistent with its fundamental social structure”.
The Russian authorities “treated the people as a captive population in a conquered country”, wrote McGrew; they were “better at devising restrictions than at offering positive reforms”.
I have been thinking about these lines as I watched various leaders deal with today’s coronavirus. China’s repressive regime meant first that it suppressed information about the epidemic (thus allowing it to spread) and then that it was able to control it through fiats to a compliant and fearful citizenry. Meanwhile, the US is now unthreading before our eyes because it has no public health system and a president whose only wellness indices are the market and his inexplicably rising approvals polls.
Germany’s Angela Merkel called for national solidarity, saying that since World War 2 “there has been no challenge to our nation that has demanded such a degree of common and united action”.
Crazy Jair Bolsonaro continues to deny the virus as a left-wing plot to his Brazilian rule, and India’s Narendra Modi effectively expelled millions of poor people from the cities with a peremptory lockdown and then put up barriers to stop them getting home, leaving them to starve in hastily erected emergency camps.
In terms of public discourse, we South Africans are mercifully in the Merkel camp. But we have our own internal contradictions, and our epidemic will be unique, not just because of our inequality gap but because one of the consequences of this gap is a population deeply compromised, already, by HIV and tuberculosis. Our lockdown regulations mirror those of Europe, but are ill-suited to the dense urban settlements that really are a “grievance and menace to decent living” in our country. And while health minister Zweli Mkhize’s screening and isolation strategies are laudable, we are, as ever, the victims of another gap in SA: that between great ideas at the top, and the ability to implement them on the ground.
Some lines of Swanson on pre-revolutionary Russia, citing McGrew, haunt me: because cholera hit the slums disproportionately, it took on a “class character”. When “the wealthy and civilised” contracted the disease, this “‘seemed only to underline the danger of living near the poor ...’ The poor on the other hand turned feelings of resentment, suspicion and blame against the wealthy and those in authority, who in turn felt threatened by the menace of social disorder and revolution.”
Any SA response to Covid-19 has to consider this, alongside the public health imperatives.
Howard Phillips is this country’s pre-eminent historian of epidemics. I asked him whether he had seen any examples of “epidemic expediency” in SA’s response to Covid-19? I had in mind a niggling anxiety about the government’s decision to access our cellphones to do contact tracing, and how this might conveniently spill into “peacetime” practice if we don’t pay attention.
But Phillips responded with a more tangible, and immediate, example: the removal of protesting refugees, bunkered down in Cape Town’s Central Methodist Church in Cape Town. “The city has been wanting to do this for many weeks, and now, because of the epidemic, the refugees simply can no longer remain in the church. They’ve been removed and placed in camps, and the city has achieved its objective. It’s a textbook case of epidemic expediency.”
Philips told me there was one primary lesson from 1918: “Social distancing, quarantine and isolation are a sine qua non.”
Because infected SA troops who had just returned from Europe to be demobilised were not properly quarantined in 1918, “they spread the disease high, wide and handsome once they were allowed to go home by train. It was such as mercury being spilt: it spreads in every direction, unstoppably. That’s what happens when you don’t quarantine effectively.”
To commemorate the centenary of the Spanish Flu of 1918, Phillips published a collection of interviews he did with survivors from the 1970s onwards, with other archival material. It makes for poignant reading today. As I look outside at the stillness of Cape Town — well, my suburban part of it, anyway — I cannot but think of this description of Bloemfontein in October 1918: “All this week the hand of the disease has lain heavily on the town, and so uncanny was the stillness in the streets and shops that we might have been in a city of the dead.”
The horror of so much death around them, and the sadness of loss, haunts the memories of Phillips’s informants. But in stark contrast to the historian’s objective record of the othering in public discourse, so many of them find solace in the memory of solidarity. Perhaps this is a natural function of nostalgia.
Listen, for example, to the ANC founder Selby Msimang: “Despite all differences with whites, the ‘Spanish’ flu epidemic created a spirit that was never known before in Bloemfontein. Whites were sympathetic — they became friends and brothers to people in the location … There was a lovely feeling of brotherhood — it never again existed.”
Msimang was interviewed by Phillips in 1981, a year before his death. “In these days, with all their uncertainty,” he added ruefully, “perhaps such an epidemic would create a new spirit.”
Philips also includes a 1981
interview with a woman named Gertrude Kumalo, who was 25 during the epidemic. She breaks into song, singing by memory a dirge written by the pioneering Zulu composer Reuben Caluza:
“Ngonyaka ka nineteen eighteen/ Saqedwa ukufa esikubiza ngokuti kuyi
influenza.” (“In 1918 an influenza epidemic spread like wildfire throughout the country. It took with it many lives. Our beloved mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers died. At some homes not a soul survived.”)
Here is the final line, as translated in Phillips’s book: “Therefore, youth, let not hearts be troubled, for there is no complete happiness.”
This seems to me the eternal message of epidemics. “The plague condition is simply a heightened state of the condition of being mortal,” writes J.M. Coetzee of plague literature, from Defoe through Camus to Roth. In a beautiful recent New York Times essay on Camus’s
The Plague, the philosopher Alain de Botton agrees: “For Camus … there is no escape from our frailty. Being alive always was and will always remain an emergency; it is truly an inescapable ‘underlying condition’. Plague or no plague, there is always, as it were, the plague, if what we mean by that is a susceptibility to sudden death, an event that can render our lives instantaneously meaningless.”
For De Botton, “this is what Camus meant when he talked about the ‘absurdity’ of life. Recognising this absurdity should lead us not to despair but to a tragicomic redemption, a softening of the heart, a turning away from judgment and moralising to joy and gratitude.”
Howard Phillips has sent me a 1930 recording of Influenza, by Caluza’s own choir, and I am listening to it right now. It is disconcertingly jaunty, and as I look out across the dead-still city I choose to hear the soothing hope of its last line. And of its author’s own extraordinary life: a legend in choral music, he managed to get a master’s degree in music from an American university, even as his life as a black South African was challenged by the epidemic expediency of apartheid.
Next week, in the second part of this Monthly Review, Mark will review books that help us understand Covid-19 within the context of other global pandemics.