We Are the Poors

Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Ashwin Desai

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781583675281
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

When Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa in 1994, freedom-loving people around the world hailed a victory over racial domination, injustice and inequality. The end of apartheid did not change the basic conditions of life for the majority of oppressed South Africans, however. Material inequality has deepened and new forms of resistance have emerged in commnities that have discovered a common oppression and solidarty and forged new and dynamic political identities.

Desai's book follows the growth of the most unexpected of these community movements, describing from the inside the process through which the downtrodden regain their dignity and defend the most basic conditions of life. His book begins with one specific community, with local government enforcing cut-offs of water and electricity, and evicting families from their houses whose breadwinners have lost their jobs. As the Chatsworth community begins to organize and discover leaders among its ranks, so their example spreads to other communities in Durban and the KwaZulu-Natal region, and their struggles build links with those in other parts of the new South Africa.

We Are the Poors was a major event in the life of the South African Left when the first edition was published there in 2000. This new edition follows the ongoing course of events to the present.

1. Fatima Meer Comes to Chatsworth

Chatsworth came into being forty years ago with the passing of the Group Areas Act. It was laid out on either side of a ridge many kilometers long. There is a never-ending highway and railway line running the length of the ridge on its plateau. There are numberless roads leading down steep slopes on either side of the highway. Each of these side roads, in turn, are intersected by streets that run parallel to the highway so giving Chatsworth its sprawling, elongated feel and creating an urban space that is both like a maze and yet also a grid. Today it is home to 300,000 people—mostly, but by no means all, Indian.

If you were to sit in a compartment on the train to Chatsworth and look out of the window, you would see down each of these streets rows and rows of semi-detached two-story flats, painted in faded pastel shades of orange, blue, lilac, and pink. Atop each flat is a dark grey asbestos roof. The flats are so close together that it appears they too could be coaches waiting for an engine to draw them away. As the buildings blur by, you would see, every so often, a structure bigger than the rest; a school, a temple, a funeral parlor, a shop, a house belonging to a doctor or druglord.

At the very bottom of the ridge, where a valley is formed, the semidetached flats mutate into huge, bulky tenement blocks containing six families a piece. Here the poorest of the people of Chatsworth have been put to live and die. These are the proverbial third-class coaches of the apartheid train: cramped, ugly, unsafe, and hidden from view.

In 1990 the Group Areas Act was repealed and liberation movements were unbanned. In 1994 the ANC came to power. Its leaders came to Chatsworth promising a better life for all. It appeared that a new engine had pulled into the station, promising to haul those living in the forgotten sidings of South Africa up onto the main line.

It seems natural that the hope of delivery from the state should have replaced struggle. The spears of opposition politics were beaten into the plowshares of policy. The RDP promised people-centered development. It would take some time, but gradually a better life would be attained for all.

But there was a dark side. Amidst the pageantry of change, there was a praetorian observance of the rules and values of the old. Shortly after elections, severe rent increases were promulgated. As the months passed, the shakedown became unremitting. As the new millennium approached, conditions in Chatsworth’s flatlands were nasty, the authorities were brutish, and evidence of a better life in short supply. Echoes of the apartheid past were heard in the neo- liberal present. Evictions, relocation, and disconnections vied with promises of housing, water, and a culture of human rights. Community leaders were marked with the labels of agitator, radical, and counter-revolutionary, used interchangeably.

THIS WAS THE SITUATION encountered by Professor Fatima Meer when she arrived in Chatsworth at the beginning of May 1999. The internationally recognized sociologist, biographer of Nelson Mandela, patron of Jubilee 2000, and persecuted anti-apartheid activist led a small organization called the Concerned Citizens Group (CCG). Their mission, according to ads taken out in the local media, was to convince Indians not to vote for the “white parties” in the up-coming general elections; a reference to the National and Democratic parties, the parties that had survived from the “whites only” apartheid parliament. However, as the election campaign unfolded, the CCG’s objective became one of garnering votes specifically for the ANC. The CCG’s intervention was watched with interest by established political parties because the approximately 250,000 voters in this community could well determine which party won a majority in KwaZulu-Natal.

Meer and her merry band had crammed onto their letterhead the names of many among the Indian professional and business elite. Their analysis was that Indians were not voting for the ANC because of an inherently racist fear of Africans. Insinuated within this thinking was the view that the ANC was a party dedicated to uplifting the lives of the poor. A further assumption was that “Africans” alone were the poor. The role of Meer and the CCG was, borrowing from Leninist parlance, to bring revolutionary, non-racial consciousness from the outside to the masses who, on their own, could not move beyond a minority false consciousness.

The situation that confronted Meer was much more complex. There were a number of affluent Indians in Chatsworth. The local political hierarchy, in particular, had done well for themselves. But many of the flat dwellers who rented accommodation from the city council seemed impervious to her solicitations not to vote for white parties. They told her that they were “not concerned about their former oppressors but were angry at their present oppressors.”³ This they defined as the Durban Transitional Metropolitan Council, which was involved in water and electricity disconnections and evictions for non-payment of rates and rents. The residents took Meer from house to house showing her how many of them were unemployed, single mothers, or aged and infirm. They were patient with her, but a little hostile, for the council was dominated by the ANC—an organization Meer had served for over 50 years. Nowhere, she discovered, did representatives of this organization command the respect and admiration of decades before. Members of the CCG found the cool reception they received difficult to understand. Any political activist associated with the ANC, especially of Meer’s generation, was accustomed to different throngs when visiting Chatsworth: respectful, not sullen; smiling, not going about their business resentful at the intrusion. Wasn’t it the case that many of the ANC’s leading officials today were once leaders of the civic associations of the 1980s that challenged apartheid-era city councils precisely on evictions and unaffordable rent increases? What had happened?

As is the way of sociologists, Meer decided to conduct a survey of the flat dwellers’ socioeconomic circumstances. While this was still being planned, Winnie Mandela came to visit Chatsworth looking for votes. The tears she shed could well have summed up the interim results of the research. The statistics confirmed that something was terribly wrong. Meer expected evidence of some social and economic distress but the level of poverty and degradation was much worse than imagined. Unemployment was running at 70 percent, many children of school age were not in classrooms for lack of fees, diseases of poverty raged unchecked, and, when they were lucky, whole families were completely reliant on pensions and grants.

“It was difficult to imagine how people managed to feed themselves and their children, let alone pay rent or rates. Suddenly the thousands of rands in rental arrears that had been accumulated by residents made sense,” was the comment of a CCG member after his first tour of Unit 3 or Bangladesh, as it is known. Contrary to government accusations, there was no “culture of non-payment.” There was simply no income in these areas. What had taken root was an economics of non-payment.

Meanwhile, further storm clouds of distress were gathering. The clothing industry, traditional source of work for tens of thousands of people in Chatsworth, was in tatters. From a high of 435 employers in 1995, the industry now contained a paltry 166. The only other sources of income, grants and alms, also began decreasing. Countless mothers reported that their disability and child-care grants had been summarily stopped. Investigations showed that the state had begun making use of new criteria, designed to reduce costs, and was stripping its books of thousands of women whose children were older than seven. Begging, on the other hand, had become so widespread throughout the city that there was simply not enough traffic-light benevolence to go around.

Meer changed tack. In illhealth and against the admonishments of her doctors, she threw all her remaining energies into compiling a research report to present to the ANC government. Meer had made up her mind; if people were too poor to pay rates and rent through no fault of their own, then she’d be damned if her movement and government would throw them out onto the streets or cut off their lights and water. All she had to do was to show the ANC the proof.

In the process of gathering proof, she and other CCG members also spent time attending to the day-to-day problems of the community, learning anew about “material conditions.” It was also a time of awakening for the various communities in whom hidden reserves of leadership suddenly became apparent. Individuals in the community drew confidence from the CCG’s support in their grievance against this policeman or that “druglord.” Some were willing to be elected onto Flat Resident associations and others to assist with the survey. As leadership in one area became more and more visible, so they inspired others. Members of the CCG, in turn, learned that their old categories of political thought were useless and developed new ones. While it still had a certain resonance, it was silly to even think of the area as “Indian.” An increasing number of the flats were occupied by African tenants and, when the chips were down, everyone thought of themselves as a community, as “the poors.” There was space for being black, but it was never certain what blackness was. At the same time it was ridiculous to talk of socialism and the working class. These were generally understood to be noble, but foreign, constructs. To attempt to hold anybody, a priori, to ideological principles proper to “the left” was neither possible nor desirable.

After she started her research, Professor Meer made no further calls on the Indian community to vote one way or the other. The elections came and went. She submitted her report to the ANC. After the elections, Meer was horrified that ANC councilors were among the most vociferous in insisting that electricity and water cut-offs and evictions be visited on the poor. Indeed, in one area, more than half the households were officially without electricity. While this was bad enough, councilors were now advocating water disconnections. Meer could not understand how, in the face of such obvious poverty, residents could be expected to come up with the approximately R400 a month the council required for rent, lights, and water. The disciples of a better life for all were behaving as if poverty itself was a crime.

Meer started asking questions. She demanded answers from ANC policy makers in local government. Some councilors tried to shout her down by insinuating she was standing up for Indian interests. Others talked about financial constraints to her face and about her advancing years behind her back. She persisted in the challenge. The rest is not yet history but the beginning of something historic: the struggle for the new South Africa. To understand this better, we should go back to the beginnings of the township of Chatsworth.

2. Harinarian “Moses” Judhoo in the Promised Land

Rooms have no doors and roofs have no ceilings. Walls are
bag-washed with white lime. It is all rather typical of a horse stable.

—R.S. NAIDOO, Daily News, November 15, 1965.

AFTER THE PASSING of the Group Areas Act in 1950, thousands of Indians from all over Durban were corralled into Chatsworth’s ten-square-kilometer precincts south of Durban. This “pernicious effort to segregate Indians en masse into special kraals, locations and townships” was a task the Durban City Council undertook with zeal.¹ This was not unexpected given Mayor Percy Osborne’s boast in the 1950s that apartheid itself “was the traditional policy of the burgesses of Durban and their municipal representatives long before the Nationalists came to power.” On a later occasion Osborne explained why he was such a fervent adherent of racial segregation: the Group Areas Act was “the lifeline whereby the European City of Durban will be saved.”²

And so tens of thousands of Indians and as many Africans were forced to give up their lives in the areas they had called home and were packed off to the outer reaches of Durban. Whether by the shove of a baton or a bulldozer or simply bowing to the authority of the law, thousands of Indians suddenly found themselves on a sloped piece of land 25 kilometers from the city center. The township was initially to consist of nine self-contained units of tightly packed semi-detached flats ranged along the Higginson Highway. The tiny houses with whitewashed walls, roofs minus a ceiling, and a lone door led to an ironic refrain from residents that they came to the “promised land” (a reference to the apartheid state’s promise of a better life in Chatsworth) and had found a stable.

It is worth pausing for a moment to record that the stables were themselves built on “stolen” land, formerly occupied by 600 Indian small farmers and a community of some 14,000. These families had farmed in the Cavendish, Welbedacht, and Zeekoei Valley areas from the turn of the twentieth century. The famous “Cavendish Bananas” were originally grown here. When land was needed for urbanized Indians displaced by apartheid, the apartheid government in perfect racial symmetry promptly seized such land from Indian farmers for a quarter of its price (Natal Mercury, October 13, 1960). Just as some residents were arriving to start a new life, others were coming to terms with the destruction of a lifetime’s work.

HARINARIAN JUDHOO was one of those early residents. He came to a place he had vaguely heard referred to as “Chatsworth” in 1963. When he got there he pined after the network of friends and relatives he was forced to leave behind in Prospect Hall some 30 kilometers away. Sitting on a sandy hill, he looked at his wife Shakoon. Her stare was empty. She was exhausted from the two-hour walk from Clairwood. There was no transport to this godforsaken place. Shakoon seemed too tired to give attention to their sons, aged eleven and two, who took turns pulling on her sari. Harinarian thought of the two puppies he had left behind with a neighbor in Prospect Hall. The neighbors had decided to stay and fight.

For a time Harinarian contemplated holding on too. People delivered a pamphlet under his door that described the Group Areas Act as emanating from the most “depraved and inhumane forces of the land, for the most depraved and degrading act in our history—armed robbery in the name of the law.” The newspaper was called Fighting Talk. But as the months passed there was a lot of talking but no collective action. He was finally convinced to move to Chatsworth when a city council official told him that there would be many jobs in nearby Mobeni. It was a chance to give his family a better life.

For the first year Harinarian could find no work. Shakoon grew more distant. All the time hundreds of people were arriving in Chatsworth. From Sea Cow Lake, Temple Halt, Riverside, Umhlanga, Berea, Sea View, Bellair, and Cato Manor they settled around him. But there was no family here. No one from whom to borrow a little, to tide the family over. Just strangers, pitched next to each other. Like on a gold rush. There were none of the monthly trips to the city center that had always lifted Shakoon’s spirits.

After a year Harinarian found a job. At first he did not tell his wife. Every morning he got up early and went to the shoe-making factory. Only at the end of the second week when he received his brown packet containing four rand did he tell her. A year later Leela was born. A daughter. How he had craved a girl. He wanted her to have everything. He walked to work to save money to buy her little nice things. He worked overtime, he worked weekends. Shakoon, too, grew visibly younger. How many nights had she gone without, he wondered, so that he and the children could eat?

After three years of non-stop work Harinarian was getting more and more tired. He pushed on with the same punishing hours. There was no time for temple. No time for Leela. The fumes on the factory floor made him cough incessantly. His fingers showed the sharp pinpricks of the sewing needle as his eyesight declined. One day the body would not get up. The next day he was fired. He was in his mid-forties. It was 1967. He had kept up-to-date with payments for rent. He owed nobody.

The cough became more insistent. He could not hide the blood on the handkerchief from Shakoon. Unlike the last time of unemployment she cared for him. She gave him attention. But strangely it was Leela’s attention Harinarian craved. When he had come home at the end of the working week, Leela had clung to him as he slowly conjured goodies from his pockets. But she soon tired of the game after a few months of unemployment. Was it his imagination or was there no magic anymore?

Harinarian was starting to lose control over his youngest boy, Dharam. Dharam was forced to go to school after lunch because of the shortage of schools. He was one of some 30,000 kids who were part of the platoon system. But he had taken to hanging about the streets in the morning, joining a number of unsupervised kids, and then complaining of being tired in the afternoon when it was time to go to school.

A little light was spread by Ram, the oldest boy, who finished school. The Springfield Training College was prepared to take him. But he would need to take two buses. Ram, without asking, got up everyday as his father had once done and went to find work. The bills were mounting. The rent and electricity account averaged R18 a month. The council kept warning him that he would be evicted. Shakoon, with five-year-old Leela in tow, took to looking for a job. This woman, who agonized over marrying one rung below her caste, now stood on the doorsteps of the lowest castes asking to wash their clothes. How class can turn caste upside down.

On April 17, 1969, the Judhoo family were thrown out. Ram had found a low paying job in a furniture factory in Merebank. But it was never going to be enough to keep his house in Road 734. The arrears had climbed to R146.

When the reporters arrived they found Harinarian on a pavement surrounded by the family possessions. He held onto a pet tortoise. This was the second week they had lived outside the sealed house. Everyday Shakoon set out to town to find cheaper accommodation. In the third week they secured a room in a corrugated iron shack in Welbedacht. A temporary arrangement.

The readers of the Daily News were moved by the plight of the Judhoo family. The newspaper reported (May 14, 1969) that readers had donated R53. A group of businessmen promised to make up the shortfall. But Harinarian knew it was over. He would fall behind again. Ram would never be a teacher. Leela would never cling to him again. He had failed Shakoon. One day she came back with an odd smile on her face and told him they had been saved. Saved by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Shakoon was now “Mary.” The worse their suffering became the more she glowed, as if she was getting closer to God.

What did he tell people who asked after him? About his dreams of a better life. How hard he worked. The family he left behind in Prospect Hall and never saw again. The newspaper that referred to the Group Areas Act as armed robbery. The humiliation of not being able to take care of his innocent, neglected daughter.

3. How Are These People Even Able to Exist?

He took a note from his pocket. It stated: “You, Venkatsamy,
are notified by the City Council to leave your plot number so and so”
… He said, “Ma, I’ve been living in this place for the last
fifty years. Where do I go now?” When I went back
a few weeks later, the old man had died. It was the death
of one who did not want to live anymore.

— DR. K. GOONAM, quoted in G. Vahed, The Making of Indian Identity in Durban 1914-49.

IN 1964, an economist visiting Chatsworth said he was amazed at “how some of these people are even able to exist” (Daily News, September 10, 1964). In her 1967 presidential address to the Durban Indian Benevolent Society, Dr. Khorshed Ginwala spoke of the “sordid existence” that is Chatsworth: “Indian employees of the municipality, who belong to the laboring class, earn a maximum wage of R36 per month. It costs R49 a month to keep a family at Chatsworth which is about twelve miles away from the city center. Rent, electricity and transport costs alone total R17....