Church’s armed guards brutally evict derelict mansion’s tenants
THEY came in the dead of night bearing sledgehammers and guns.
Xoliswa Jali was sleeping with her six-month-old baby, Zwelihle, when they kicked her door in.
“They pointed guns at us. The big ones. When I stood up they tripped me. I fell down with my child. Then they smashed everything.”
Jali, 22, and her son were among 46 people evicted from an abandoned mansion on a hill near the Ponte City tower in inner Johannesburg. Most had moved there from poor rural areas of KwaZuluNatal in search of work.
At 3am on November 16, the Revelation Church of God, founded by Prophet Samuel Radebe, sent dozens of armed security guards with dogs to storm the mansion, evict the tenants and dump them on the street.
At first light they threw a barbedwire cordon around the property to prevent the tenants from returning. The church apparently wants to build a new building on the site.
The evicted occupants spent 17 days living on the pavement, enduring torrential rains that washed the food and few possessions they could salvage down the street.
Yesterday they returned to their wrecked home after the High Court in Johannesburg ruled in their favour on Friday. A court order directed the church to remove the barbed wire and restore the occupants to “undisturbed possession of the property”.
There was little left to return to. The church’s security guards used sledgehammers and axes to break down doors and walls and smash windows. The rooms are strewn with the wreckage of cupboards, wooden partitions and doors, rubble and a jumble of food wrappers, cooking utensils, plastic cups, clothes, shoes and shards of glass.
“They made a mess of everything,” said Jali. “Now I must clean it