The bulldozing of inconvenient realities is not just a strand in the story of our past. Almost a hundred years after the Land Act millions of roving pariahs remain in the shack settlements on the edges of our towns and cities. They are often shunted around at the point of guns wielded by the state and private power. There are plenty of sixteen year olds who have never lived a day under apartheid but who have seen their homes, communities and, in Motala Heights, their temple, treated as nothing but an aberration to be bulldozed from the landscape.

Excerpted from a report at the The South African Civil Society Information Service by South-African urban commons activist Richard Pithouse:

“Here in South Africa the Constitution may declare that we are all, or least all of us with the appropriate papers, equally the public and equally entitled to find and share beauty as we see fit. But much of our shared life is dominated by business interests that appeal to markets rather than publics and not everyone is in the market for everything. This is not always a case of market logic rendering, as it often does, some people superfluous and therefore invisible. When the poor are out of the places to which they are supposed to keep, when a shack stands next to a suburban home or a poor child sits next to a richer child in a school, the mere presence of people without money can render them hyper-visible. People, with all their individual depth and complexity, are sometimes turned into objects onto which all kinds of contempt, fear and hate are projected.

One of the many places in our society where the fracturing in who counts as a full member of our national public and who does not is immediately visible is Motala Heights near Durban. Motala Heights is nestled into a valley between the factories on the outskirts of Pinetown and a steep hill that leads up to the expensive suburb of Kloof. Some of the people in the valley are poor and live in tin houses that they have built on rented land and some are middle class or wealthy and live in large suburban homes. There is also a shack settlement at the foot of the hill that leads up to Kloof.

In 2006 the eThekwini Municipality tried to send in their men with guns to eradicate the shack settlement. When Bheki Ngcobo told them that their actions were illegal in terms of the Constitution he was tear-gassed and beaten to the ground. But, in the end, the squatters stopped the City’s illegal eviction. The law is not everything but it is also not nothing. At the time the squatters were convinced that the eviction had been directed by a local landlord and businessman, Ricky Govender, and claimed that the municipal demolition team had been drinking in his pub before they set off up the hill to eradicate a community. There is no doubt that some municipal officials and police officers speak as if Govender, who boasts of connections to Jacob Zuma, has some sort of extra-legal authority over the whole community. Govender’s plans to force out the poor in order to develop Motala Heights for private profit clearly carry a lot more weight than the demand of its poor residents that the state support them in building a community for all the residents of the area.

Govender has been trying, for some years now, to evict some of the people in the tin houses. They are often old and poor. Some have lived in their homes for as long as forty-five years. Like the municipality, he has failed because his attempted evictions have been illegal. This is public knowledge. Allegations that he has dumped dangerous industrial waste right outside activists’ homes, threatened to have activist Shamita Naidoo killed for R50 and to bulldoze people’s homes have been reported in the local press. “

More background on the urban crisis in South Africa is here.

A short video about Durban community Motala Heights settlement leader Shamita Naidoo: