Tell Our Story. Julie Reid

      CHAPTER

      3

Glebelands Hostel, Durban

      Dale T. McKinley

      An integral part of the backbone of the apartheid migrant labour and influx control system was the establishment of single-sex hostels in the main urban centres of South Africa. Such hostels were essentially worker dormitories, often multi-storey and made up of small rooms (with common ablution areas), each of which usually housed many individuals. Like so many others around the country, the Glebelands hostel complex, located next to South Durban’s Umlazi township, became the home of male workers who were brought in from the rural areas to fill mostly low-skilled and low-paying jobs in manufacturing and heavy industries (Zulu 1993).

      From the beginning, the entire hostel system provided fertile ground for individual and collective, as well as ethno-political, conflict. The main means of someone getting a room in a hostel tended to be largely ‘through personal contacts, or via companies’, which ‘contributed to the formation of homeboy [regional] cliques among residents in hostels’. The long-term result was that hostel social life tended to be ‘organised around regional or ethnocentric arrangements’ (Zulu 1993: 4). Initially run and managed by provincial authorities, the Glebelands hostel, similar to all others in Durban, has been administered by the eThekwini Municipality since the late 1990s.

      On the political side, the hostel (historically an African National Congress [ANC] stronghold) saw intense conflict between the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) during the early 1990s. The first official recording of a political killing was the gunning down of Dome Wellington Ngobese, the chairperson of the IFP branch at the hostel, in July 1992 (SAHA 1992). In the late 1990s, there was a shift to intra-ANC conflict when ‘dozens of residents were murdered’, followed by a lengthy period largely free from political violence until 2008 ‘when there were attacks on, and evictions of, people who joined COPE [Congress of the People]’ (De Haas 2016).

      As will be told in much more personal and direct detail below by the interviewees, the last five years have been a period of unrelenting violence and conflict, warlordism, and ethnicised and factionalised party politics, which have seen more than 100 residents being killed. All this has been accompanied by a seemingly never-ending cycle of mismanagement, corruption and criminality emanating from local government and the police.

      Presently, the hostel houses an ‘estimated 22 000 people living in approximately 80 blocks’, most of which are extremely overcrowded and in serious need of repair, although there are a few ‘newly constructed family units’. Unlike during the apartheid and early post-1994 years, a large number of residents now consist of families with a considerable majority being unemployed. As a result, poverty is rife, with the average income being an estimated R1600 per month and each adult resident supporting, on average, an estimated six other people (Gift of the Givers/Ubunye 2015).

      INTERVIEWEES AND THE INTERVIEW PROCESS

      All of the Glebelands residents who were interviewed have been, either directly or indirectly, at the forefront of ongoing collective and individual struggles to halt the violence and killings, expose corruption and mismanagement as well as to seek justice for many of those who have been killed over the last several years. Two of them were previous leaders of the hostel residents’ organisation (Ubunye bama Hostela or Hostel Unity), another two previously lived in blocks associated with hired killers, several have been personally threatened and/or targeted and all have lost either close friends or family to the ongoing violence and killings.

      The resident interviewees are of varying ages but all are adults and the majority are middle-aged, male and originate from the Eastern Cape. Almost all have children (although in most cases the children are not residing with them at the hostel) and some still have partners, while others’ partners have been the victims of the Glebelands killers. Half of the interviewees are formally employed, all in low-skilled and low-paying jobs.

      Only one of the interviewees is not a hostel resident. Vanessa Burger is a long-time community and human rights activist, who has been the mandated public face of the Glebelands struggles since 2014. She has worked with and actively supported both Ubunye bama Hostela and those Glebelands residents who have been involved in the struggles described earlier. A few months before the interviews, she relocated away from Durban because of persistent harassment, the targeted theft of her vehicle, as well as numerous threats of physical harm.

      Due to the extremely vulnerable and dangerous situation in which the resident interviewees find themselves, all of them requested to remain anonymous for fear of possible exposure. This is understandable given that at Glebelands such exposure has most often led to violent victimisation or retribution and, in many cases, death.

      A timely reminder of this was provided during the interview process when the schedules had to be shifted because of threats of violence against some of the interviewees. The interviews that took place on the hostel grounds were conducted under very stressful conditions, while another interview had to be conducted at an undisclosed location because the interviewee was in hiding due to persistent death threats. Most of the interviews were conducted in English but in two cases there was the need for on-site translation.

      THE PERSONAL SIDE

      Listening to Glebelands residents speak about personal matters, their feelings, their emotions, their families, their fears and their challenges is a humbling experience. There is no better way to make a human connection with and try to better understand those who often appear to the general public, through the lens of the dominant media, as largely faceless actors, occasional victims and very seldom as ordinary people.

      And yet, during the interviews it also became clear that most residents were extremely cautious about engaging in a more detailed conversation related to their personal lives. Upon reflection, such reticence made sense: the product of a combination of justifiable concern and fear about being identified, alongside negative views about how they have been portrayed in the dominant media.

      When asked to describe daily life at Glebelands, a 30-something-year-old mother of three, whose husband was murdered at Glebelands for speaking out against corruption, had this to say:

      It is too tough. Things are terrible since [my now deceased] husband was busy building [a] home in [the] rural areas so everything now is stuck because [I am] not working … [and] most of the children are still young, they have to go to school, there are so many things, yes like school fees, shoes. I sell small things, just for baking, selling … chips, drinks. Life is difficult; it’s very, very difficult (G5 interview).

      For one of the elders of the community who is no longer able to find formal work, it is the widespread criminality that has accompanied the violence which makes it hard to even engage in survivalist work: ‘[Because of the violence/killings] it’s hard even to sell now to go door to door selling peanuts, go door to door selling T-shirts and everything, because that is the way of doing things here. Even to go look for a R10 job, it’s hard because if they can see you working here they will wait for you’ (G4 interview).

      One of the community’s leaders, who has lived at Glebelands for over 20 years, provides an instructive reminder of the physical, psychological and social impact of living in an environment marked by almost constant disruption, violence and death:

      There are so many children here [who] drop out from school [and] the trauma people have here is worse than you can think. There are so many people who [have] died because … [of] the stress they had. And no one is prepared to come to you, to counsel you, nobody. Each and every time you take a step you think about death. I’m from town now but you know when I leave here I’m thinking oh am I going to reach there, once I reach there I feel happy but when I have to come back I have to think now am I going to reach my house? Because maybe someone is waiting [for] me somewhere … every minute, even if you are sleeping, [you] sleep like a bird in the tree (G2 interview).

      Despite the resilience, grit and courage displayed by the vast majority of Glebelands residents, there is an acknowledgement of a distinct sense of powerlessness (but not hopelessness)