Tell Our Story. Julie Reid
of a younger man whose attempts to serve on a peace committee have been met with constant death threats and have caused him to flee from one hostel block to another:
It [the violence/killings] affect[s] me a lot, but there is nothing I can do, because I have to work for my kids. I can’t run away from here because there will be no one to see me if I’m still alive and protected. We are like in a place where … there is no one to help us. We don’t have powers. If we had powers I think this violence [would be] gone from here, that is my belief (G3 interview).
HISTORY AND CONTEXT OF THE AREA
One of the main reasons why those who watch, listen and read the dominant media often struggle to gain any meaningful understanding and appreciation of poor communities in struggle is because of the paucity of associated history and context. All the more so for a community such as Glebelands where, as will be shown in chapter 6, the coverage of the dominant media has almost exclusively focused on specific acts or events of violence and killing.
Such history and context is not simply the preserve of the ‘expert’ researcher, the academic or government officials and local politicians. Rather, it is greatly enriched when it encompasses the knowledge and views of the very people who live in and work with those respective communities. Here, Burger gives some useful insights into the institutional and socio-political history of hostels themselves, which provides a foundational backdrop to Glebelands’ more contemporary realities:
There are common issues at all the hostels and the biggest problem is political interference, manipulation … what you would call favouritism, you know ward councillors or the hostel superintendent that would say favour a certain group who were supporters of a certain [political] party. When Ubunye bama Hostela came about it was to address social issues, service delivery issues, non-political stuff, but at the same time they couldn’t move beyond the politics because the politicians themselves were too involved in using the hostels as power bases, exactly as the apartheid regime had done. So that tendency has followed through unchanged, and a lot of the … power structures that existed then have continued even up till now (G1 interview).
In this light, it becomes easier to grasp the continuity between apartheid and post-apartheid politically motivated and ethnically oriented conflict that took place in hostels such as Glebelands. As the community leader interviewee details, the conflict and violence related to IFP–ANC turf wars and competition of the early to mid-1990s, returned in 1997 in the form of ethnic-related violence and conflict between Xhosa and Zulu members of the ANC. That round of violence only ended in 1999 after peace talks. And then there was renewed and similarly framed conflict in 2008, resulting in several deaths and hundreds of evictions when the ANC experienced a split that led to the formation of COPE (G2 interview).
COMMUNITY ORGANISATION
Unlike many other poor communities facing a range of local governance and socio-economic challenges, as well as problems centred on political party factionalism in the post-1994 period, Glebelands has not had a formally constituted and structured community organisation for the majority of that time. Rather, in the first 20 years of the democratic era, the dominant organisational space was taken up by two distinct areas of activity.
The most organic and democratically constituted were the block committees, which had been formed long before 1994. Every hostel block had a block committee. Among other administrative duties, the committees acted as something akin to ‘security mechanisms to resolve internal conflicts within each block’ and, importantly, to oversee and manage room allocations. ‘Hostel rooms are inherited usually so ... the block committees were instrumental in preventing outsiders from coming in and exploiting the situation’ (G1 interview). What is absolutely crucial to understanding the story of Glebelands is how and why the block committees were at first destabilised, then physically attacked and, finally, politically and practically undermined by being cast (with the dominant media playing a major role) as central – through the selling of beds – to much of the violence and conflict over the last several years.1
The remainder of the organisational space was taken up by political party branch activity, contestation and the activities of local and provincial party leadership, particularly the councillor. As has already been chronicled above, this area has always been dominated by one political party, the ANC, whether in unity or division.
What emerges clearly from the interviewees is that the block committees, despite their weaknesses and problems, were by far the most representative and democratic community structures in the hostel complex and the most effective at maintaining administrative as well as social cohesion. As one of the interviewees put it: ‘… to keep law and order, it’s essential you have a community-based structure that is elected by the community and the block committees were. People [were] nominated as needed’ (G1 interview).
Regardless of the fact that some members of the block committees ‘got involved in selling beds themselves … this is an issue that has been common in all the hostels since before ’94; it’s petty corruption. If there had been a functioning administration and a functioning police force, the issue of bed-selling could have been easily stamped out, but there was no trust with the community, there was no outreach by the powers to resolve the situation, and a lot of them capitalised on it’ (G1 interview).
Where the political party divisions and machinations began to substantively impact on the block committees was after the 2008 split in the ANC, the formation of the break-away party COPE and the subsequent widespread opposition to Robert Mzobe’s ascension to the positions of ANC branch chairperson and local councillor. Things ‘really came to a head [because] the main people who were leading that [opposition] and a lot of the defectors [to COPE] were block chairmen and committee members and they were also some of the main mobilisers against Mzobe’ (G1 interview). In the period that followed, a large number of the block chairmen and committees were violently attacked and evicted from their resident blocks, with those aligned to Mzobe and the triumphant Jacob Zuma faction within the ANC taking control of many of the block committees and effectively splitting the Glebelands community both physically and along thinly disguised political party and ethnic lines.
It was more or less at this point that many residents, both at Glebelands and others hostels in the Durban area, began to search for alternative forms of organisation, voice and representation. ‘The communities themselves were sick of fighting, they wanted to have peace, they were tired of being used, on both sides, so they had a lot of meetings … this is where Ubunye came about originally, to try and counter this and to try and bring people together, to unite the different hostels so they could speak with one voice’ (G1 interview).
By 2013, Ubunye bama Hostela had been formally constituted; its very presence a testimony to the desire and ability of hostel residents to overcome historic and ongoing organisational, political, ideological and ethno-linguistic divisions. Initial programmes, even without any meaningful financial resources at hand, centred on efforts for hostels ‘to develop their own sort of cooperatives’ as a practical means ‘to counter the [widespread] unemployment’ and to develop the capacity to ‘look after their own hostels’ (G1 interview). Additionally, Ubunye ‘tried everything … to deal with the violence. We wrote several letters [to the] Humans Rights Commission [with] nobody responding; IPID [Independent Police Investigative Directorate] nobody responding’ (G2 interview).
These democratically mandated and collectively expressed attempts to engender peace and practical empowerment of hostel residents were not only actively blocked by the municipality but were mostly ignored by the dominant media. Combined with the ongoing violence directed at Ubunye leaders and members, as well as the associated corruption and criminality from the ranks of local government and the police, the cumulative result was that by 2016 Ubunye had effectively ceased to exist at Glebelands. As a resident sardonically noted, ‘… we are not condoms [to be] thrown away [but] that is what they do’ (G2 interview).
ROLE OF THE STATE
For the vast majority of communities, regardless of their political history, geographical location and socio-economic status, it is at the local level where the face of government is most visible and where its actions have the most impact. This certainly applies to Glebelands