Paying in blood for a shack to call home
As another activist in the fight for housing land is buried this weekend, the man pressing for the rights of shack dwellers is more determined than ever
Nomazulu Khoza walked resolutely down Foreman Road, carrying her two-weekold infant wrapped in a blue blanket, a crowd of crying, singing and angry people behind her. Her face was tear-stained. It could have been from the teargas canisters thrown into her one-room shack by police in an effort to control protestors in the informal settlement. More likely it was brought on by grief after discovering that the baby, Jayden, who was sleeping when the acrid gas stabbed the air, had stopped breathing.
Either way she was angry — for the indignity at the way she, her husband, Receive, and their two children lived in the cramped shack outside Durban, and because her infant son didn’t deserve to die in that way.
It’s been a year since Jayden died.
His family still hope that they will one day have a “proper” house in which to raise their surviving son, Christian, 10.
“What can I tell you? We were told Jayden died because he was sick, not because of the teargas. Our lives are hard here. We want a better life but we have no money, so for now we stay in our shack and hope that God will answer our prayers,” says Receive Khoza.
Nearby, Lindiswa Mhlanga fantasises about living in a brick house with windows, walls, bedrooms and perhaps a garden for her children to play in.
Then reality bites: her home is still a minute pavement tin shack in a sprawling Durban shantytown.
It has been 12 years since Mhlanga and her family put down roots in the Foreman Road informal settlement on the periphery of the city, home to some 2 000 households and 12 000 people.
Tired of fighting for a house
“It’s a difficult life we have. I am still waiting for a proper house. We survive on the money from the odd jobs my husband does as a plumber. This one room is our entire house.
“The four of us eat, sleep and do everything here. I’m tired of fighting for a house. My children are not safe, they play on the road, where there are cars and taxis.”
The Mhlangas have installed a rusty gate at the entrance to their shack as a safety measure so that their children are not mowed down by passing vehicles.
“I can only hope that one day we will have a place to call our home,” says the soft-spoken Mhlanga.
A few hundred metres away, as the afternoon chill sets in, pensioner Thembi Xulu stands quietly in the doorway of her shack.
Her lined face appears tired and fed-up.
“I can’t live like this anymore. It’s been 11 years I’m here. We have one room and one bed that eight of us share. What life is this? We have snakes under the shack. I want a life of dignity,” says Xulu.
Theirs is an informal settlement that attracts a lot of media attention for its devastating shack fires, violent clashes with police during protests over evictions, and poor service delivery.
And it is here, in this impoverished community, where dangerous illegal electricity connections are the norm, that Abahlali baseMjondolo is hailed as the saviour of the people.
The national land rights activist body is mourning the assassination of one of its leaders, S’fiso Ngcobo. He was gunned down in Mariannhill last week and laid to rest yesterday. The movement says it is being targeted for its uncompromising stance on access to housing land and basic services.
“Since 2009, 16 of our community leaders have been killed. We are paying the price,” says S’bu Zikode, founding president of the organisation, which was formed in 2005.
“Many of us have given up hope that there will ever be any change or delivery to our people,” he says.
“What makes us hopeless is that every year the government has a budget announcement and out of those billions, very few communities are benefiting.
“We know that as long as the ANC is in power, shack dwellers and black people are not going to benefit anything from this government.”
Zikode is succinct about why this could be the case. “We believe that many of them eat the money meant for the people. Some of the councillors have told me straight to my face that I am disturbing them from eating. It is their turn to eat.”
He says this is why there is hostility and attacks on Abahlali activists.
“They are there to enrich themselves and it’s obvious,” he says.
“We are reaching a stage where we are saying: ‘Could we accept that we don’t have government?’
“If you listen to us carefully, we are no longer talking about homelessness, we are talking about landlessness, the reason being we have accepted that there is no money for housing.
“That is why our focus is now on the land question. Can you rather release land for us to see what we can do?”
Zikode, a petrol attendant who abandoned his law studies because of tight finances, knows all about living in a shack, having called another Durban informal settlement home before he started Abahlali.
‘Promises were broken’
In his designer suit, pristine white shirt, shiny shoes and expensive fragrance — which masks the smell of rotting rubbish in the settlement — Zikode looks like he would be comfortable in a boardroom.
He says he lives in hiding with his family, but has no fear about facing a bullet.
“No, no, we are all going to die, simple as that. But someone has to tell the truth. The fight about Abahlali is not just about service delivery and land, it’s about a society that we want to build, where there is equality, justice, where respect and dignity become the order of the day.
“From the onset promises were made and broken, lies were put before the truth and money and business were put before human needs. We have been calling for land in our cities for a long time.
“Of course we support the call for the expropriation of land without compensation, but it is what we have already been doing — it’s what we call land occupation.
“It’s really about the redistribution of land from below. People are taking back the land.
“Most of the settlements that we have occupied have not been given on a silver plate. People have had to occupy vacant pieces of land, because nobody will ever give you the land.
“Which is why today there are hundreds of casualties. In any war there will be casualties.
“If you were to ask where all these assassinations and death threats come from: two sources — the police and politicians.”
Zikode claims the growth of Abahlali — to, he says, 50 000 members nationally — poses a threat.
But “despite the death threats we are receiving, we will not be silenced”.
Somehow his words do not ring hollow. Repeated often enough and by tens of thousands of Abahlali members, they contain at least a promise of change for the better.
‘I can’t live like this anymore. It’s been 11 years I’m here. We have one room and one bed that eight of us share. I want a life of dignity.’
‘We are reaching a stage where we are saying . . . we don’t have government. Can you rather release land for us to see what we can do?’