One No, Many Yeses

by Paul Kingsnorth

  The ANC itself, of course, is not happy about the work that people like George are doing. Not happy at all.

  ‘The ANC’s attitude to what we do is interesting,’ says George. ‘It’s basically “Who are you? Civil society? What are you for? Why don’t you just close down? We led the struggle, we are the mass movement and now we’re in government.” Government has bred arrogance in them very quickly. They will always accuse everyone who even questions them of being “counter-revolutionary”. Resentment is starting to build against that. It is slow, and still small, but at the same time, much bigger than even a few years ago. Things are starting to develop, people are starting to understand the issues and feel strongly about the issues – and the global issues, as they relate to what is happening on the ground here in South Africa. Last year, for the World Bank meeting in Prague, we had a lot of people and organisations getting active, held workshops, had public forums. We had a very colourful march. That’s what those puppets outside were for.’

  ‘Nice puppets.’

  ‘Yeah, they’re not bad, are they? They were very last-minute. In any case, if you want to see what we do on these occasions, you’re here at the right time.’ And I am. It’s November 2001, and next week the World Trade Organization will be holding its first ministerial meeting since the débâcle of Seattle. It’s a biggie: the WTO needs to nail down the new round of trade agreements that it was prevented from achieving in 1999. If it fails again, the entire organisation will be in jeopardy. So it has no intention of failing. To make sure that no protesters get near this time, it has decided to hold its meeting in a desert in Qatar, a conveniently repressive and inaccessible nation. It’s a step on even from Genoa; this time, the whole nation will be its Red Zone.

  In Johannesburg, as in hundreds of other cities around the world, anti-WTO actions will be taking place on 9 November. George is the man charged with making this one happen. ‘Over the next week, we’re organising a series of workshops and discussion groups about the WTO, which will culminate in a street protest on the 9th,’ he says. ‘Most people here have no idea what the WTO even is, let alone what effect it has on their lives. I hope that if we can start to change that, we’ll see more mobilisations. If you want to come along, I’m doing a workshop in Soweto in a couple of days. You might find it interesting.’ He grins. ‘I think it’s going to be a good one.’

  Durban, unlike Johannesburg, is a city worth visiting, and plenty of tourists, from both inside and outside the country, do. Lounging on the edge of the Indian ocean, the city was once a key Afrikaner holiday destination for those who wanted a whites-only Victorian seaside fantasy. Today, though, it is less of a fantasy. I have come here to see what the sort of struggles that Patrick and George talk about actually mean to people’s lives.

  As in Johannesburg, a rebellion is happening in this city. In June 2001, as the UN’s World Conference on Racism began, the Durban Social Forum, organised by NGOs and community groups, staged a huge march. Their declared aim was to march ‘against the South African government and its conservative economic policy, GEAR, that is making the poor poorer’.10 Twenty thousand people took this message to the streets of Durban, shouting ‘ANC – agent of global apartheid!’ and ‘Mbeki – don’t sell our future!’ It was Africa’s Seattle.

  Meanwhile, around the edges of the city, in the old townships where the blacks, the Indians and the ‘coloureds’ were herded by apartheid, a more constant, more local and more difficult battle is taking place day after day. The city government is busy evicting people, cutting off their water and electricity, and sending them to jail when they resist. And the more this happens, the more they resist.

  I am sitting in the back seat of a car, belting down a motorway towards a place that, once I have seen it, I will never be able to forget: Chatsworth. An old Indian township on the edge of Durban, Chatsworth is the scene of an increasingly vicious clash between the ANC and the people. In the front seats of the car are a pair of frighteningly effective and uncompromising activists with fire in their bellies and frustration in their hearts.

  Ashwin Desai, a South African Indian, went to school in Chatsworth; he’s now a doctor, a writer, an activist, a community hero and an ANC hate-figure. Heinrich Bohmke is a lawyer, an activist, and an ex-ANC member, who is now as disillusioned with the party as anyone gets. Both were imprisoned by the apartheid regime, and both are seeking a new approach to political change in the country. They have been working for the past few years to help the people of Chatsworth, and other Durban townships like it, resist eviction, cut-offs and destitution. Heinrich and Ashwin are street-fighters – literally and metaphorically. Both have strong opinions on, well, everything, which they are currently laying out for me at 70 miles an hour.

  ‘I’m sick of the fucking left!’ Heinrich is saying, as he drives. He wears a sensible, tucked-in shirt and trousers, and little rectangular glasses. He looks like a lawyer, and talks like a revolutionary.

  ‘There are two lefts in South Africa,’ he goes on. ‘One is old and bureaucratic and ossified, and the other is new and creative and still unformed. There’s all this intellectual Marxist shit, and then there’s people in communities doing things they need to do. But they don’t connect it to some great neoliberal project, they just do it. I’ve stopped even referring to myself as “left”. It’s so patronising and disempowering, calling yourself “left” or “progressive”. We need a new vocabulary.’

  ‘Right!’ says Ashwin. ‘And we need to connect up these struggles. Connect them up nationally, and internationally, with all those other movements that are out there. It’s starting to happen, but it’s slow. Instead of always asking the state to give us what we deserve, we need some way of taking it. These people in Chatsworth are angry, man. Guys are turning up with guns and throwing them out of homes they can’t afford to pay for.’

  ‘But it’s so hard, Paul, in this country,’ cuts in Heinrich. ‘People are so sick of struggling. And there’s still this great legacy of liberation to deal with.’

  ‘There’s a lot of energy, you know,’ says Ashwin, ‘but how do we harness it? How do we make sure that COSATU or the ANC don’t harness it? Or some little bunch of fascists? You know organised labour won’t work with us – they just won’t. They’ve got their little power base, and they’re going to defend it, whatever the consequences. They’re so fucking shortsighted. You know, during the racism conference, we held a community march of the poor. We had 20,000 people on the streets. Next day, COSATU holds its own march, and gets about 9,000 people out. Next day, the ANC holds another one, and they get about 2,000 people!’

  Heinrich changes gear determinedly. ‘But at least people are starting to break through the barrier of illegality,’ he says. ‘They’ve given up expecting the government to do right by them. But then, you know, we have these leftie intellectuals in Jo’burg who are just waiting for Pretoria to have a change of heart and invite them in to sort out the economic programme. Whenever we mobilise for any sort of confrontation here it’s always, “Well, comrade, we support your struggle, but we’re worried about your analytical fucking framework, and your tactics.” Your tactics, man! People are dying, literally, and they’re worried about tactics.’ I’m suddenly glad that Patrick isn’t here.

  ‘You’ve come at an interesting time, Paul,’ says Ashwin. ‘We’re entering a new phase of political activism in this country. Hein and I, we both feel it’s time for new approaches. As a movement we need to start proposing things, getting out there, doing things ourselves. You know, Zapatista-style. Taking it back; communities doing it themselves, instead of always reacting to whatever shit the government gives them. A lot of activists here are stuck in old ways of reacting to injustice. We need some new ones, man, and fast.’

  ‘Sounds like a good idea,’ I say.

  Off the motorway, through the suburbs and out on the very edges of the city, strung along an abandoned railway line, Chatsworth sprawls, ugly and unashamed. We stutter down a dirt road, past gang
s of grinning, shoeless black and Indian girls. At the end of the track, we park the car.

  ‘This is it,’ says Ashwin.

  A creation of the notorious Group Areas Act of 1950, the act which, more than any other, created apartheid by requiring that non-whites move to designated areas – ‘townships’ on the edge of cities, and, later, ‘homelands’ in the countryside – the Chatsworth township was, and largely still is, for Indians. Forty years old, and home to 300,000 people, it is, today, a place that would make the worst British inner-city estate look desirable. I step out of the car and look around me.

  Yellow and maroon tenements with corrugated roofs cling to a long ridge. Many have smashed windows and all have barred doors – crime is rife here. Communal taps outside the houses are capped with devices designed to make them unusable, and are padlocked down. The poor have not been paying their way. What was once grass is now scrub and dust, the roads are pitted with holes and the children’s playground looks lethal. Gangs of teenage boys mooch around, bored, and kids play on piles of old tyres and low-hanging tree branches. There is little else for them to do; many have no schools to go to; many, too, have unemployed parents. There are no jobs for people like this.

  The state – the very existence – of Chatsworth cannot be blamed on the ANC; it is a product of forty years of apartheid, under which those with non-white skin were treated like the animals the government believed them to be. Neither is it the fault of the new government that, nine years after apartheid finally fell, people still live in places like this. The point, say people like Ashwin, Heinrich, and the residents of Chatsworth, is not that the government is being slow to deliver, but that it is not delivering at all.

  ‘Everyone knew that after apartheid, there’d be a huge backlog in social services, and it would be unrealistic to expect nirvana, or even just a decent standard of living, immediately,’ says Heinrich. ‘What is generating these struggles is not a failure to deliver, but a veritable attack on the poor. Government is not just leaving poor communities in misery, it’s actually cutting off the little social support that they have in order to keep the national budget within a figure demanded by the Washington consensus. The ANC sees itself as being able to position the country as one of the best options among “emerging markets” by making these gestures to international capital. For people here, those fucking gestures lose them their homes.’

  Chatsworth’s people have lived in misery for decades. Eviction notices were served on them in such quantities during the 1970s and 1980s – often on unemployed families, for being in arrears by the equivalent of a few pounds – that mass protests ensued against the apartheid government. When the ANC government was elected in 1994, with the promise of mass housing provision for the poorest, hopes were as high in Chatsworth as elsewhere.

  What followed, though, was an increase in evictions, and cut-offs of electricity and water. Durban’s city council, now under ANC control, was employing the ‘cost recovery’ ethic that the World Bank was so proud of the ANC for adopting. ‘Normal business practice demands that if tenants can’t pay rent, they must be evicted,’ said the council’s acting director of housing.11 Unemployment in Chatsworth was, and is, around 70 per cent, and many of its residents had the same problem as the Sowetans: they simply couldn’t pay. Like the Sowetans, they believed the government’s promise of free services for the poor, but what this promise turned into was a patchily enforced guarantee of minimum amounts of water and electricity for all.

  The promised amounts were tiny – 6 kl of free water a month per household in Chatsworth, and a promise of 50 kw of free electricity that has not been delivered – and both were hedged in with small print. The free water, for instance, is only available to those who owe no money to the water company, which cuts out most of the poor of Chatsworth. The free electricity, meanwhile, is available only to those able to pay for installation of a pre-paid meter, which is conveniently impossible to reconnect if it is cut off. Then there are the evictions, for non-payment of rent: evictions which began to run into the hundreds after the ANC took control of the council. Evictions of old men and women, families with babies; whole legions of the poor.

  By 1996, Durban city council was dusting down its apartheid-era combat gear, and moving into Chatsworth with police dogs and tear-gas, to forcibly evict, or disconnect water and electricity from, hundreds of its residents.12 Chatsworth’s people began forming community groups and linking up with those in other townships. Protests were held when local councillors came to town. Gangs of armed bailiffs stormed daily into the township to find themselves confronted with rings of residents determined to resist them. Battles ensued, bottles, stones and sticks were thrown. Sometimes the council men would turn tail, sometimes they would hit back, with tear-gas, rubber bullets and side-handled batons. Hard, vicious, physical confrontations went on for hours, days, weeks. The people of Chatsworth had had enough.

  Today, because of this resistance, there are fewer evictions. But there are still regular disconnections, and poverty is still intense. Yet I can feel, all around me, a sense of dignity, and a sense of community that seems to defy the pressure from above. As we arrive, the residents are staging an event to try to keep that community spirit alive. It is Diwali, the Hindu festival of light, and the people of Chatsworth are holding a ‘festival of no lights’ to celebrate both Diwali itself and the community’s resistance to the sort of cut-offs that leave them without working bulbs.

  A red, white and blue marquee has been set up on an area of common ground, inside which singing, dancing and performances are taking place on a small stage in front of lines of chairs. Groups of young girls, faces painted, are dancing shyly, women are singing, and a wide-boy compère is making the audience laugh. Outside, groups of men are stirring curry, rice and dahl in huge, ancient iron pots. They insist on feeding me first. In return, I have been designated official photographer for the event, on the grounds that I am the only one with a camera.

  I wander around snapping, and talking to mothers and grandmothers, who tell me that they are fighting the government because, in the words of one, ‘What else do we do?’ A group of young men hanging around by the broken swings tell me that the ANC is worse than the National Party that preceded it; at least you knew where you stood with apartheid, they say. ‘A lot of families who’ve been evicted in Durban,’ one boy told me, ‘have just got nowhere to go. There are whole families living out in the bush. They’ve got nothing left.’

  Inside the houses, the situation is even worse than it appears from the outside, as I discover when a shy, middle-aged woman lets me use her toilet. The rooms are tiny, filthy, crumbling; plaster is falling from the walls, floorboards are rotting, plastic bags are stuffed into holes in the broken windows. It is a tiny, three-room tenement with primus stoves, broken chairs and decades of accumulated filth that can never be scrubbed away. I ask her how many people live there. ‘Six,’ she says. She looks embarrassed and I don’t know what to say.

  Outside, Ashwin is wandering around high-fiving and back-slapping, chatting and plotting. Everybody here knows him. We end up sitting on a low stone wall together with Heinrich, watching the festivities and eating more curry. I am trying to digest both my food and my experience. I can’t remember ever having seen such human misery in my life – nor such dignity and determination in the midst of it. It makes me feel small, depressed and angry. I don’t know what to say, and I tell Ashwin how shocked I am.

  ‘Yeah,’ he nods, through a mouthful of dahl. ‘You can’t come to this place and not be shocked. I’m still shocked, man. Look at all this’ – he sweeps his arm across the grim vista before us. There is a look in his eyes that must have been there many times before.

  ‘These people are fighting to be allowed to stay in houses that fucking animals shouldn’t have to live in,’ he says, fiercely. ‘That’s why we have to fight. And we have to move this fight on from just being reactive. We need to start setting the agenda ourselves, or all we’re doing is fighting a r
earguard action to stop the worst things that the government is throwing at us.’

  ‘It is a war on the poor,’ interjects Heinrich. ‘Look at what the government is doing – all the unnecessary pain they’re causing people like this. The government has volunteered to dismantle its tariff barriers faster than it’s required to by the WTO, even though it will cause unnecessary unemployment. These people are being evicted, cut off . . . and it doesn’t stop there. You used to get a childcare grant of 450 Rand a month if your kid was under eighteen. Now it’s been slashed to 100 Rand if your kid is under seven. You’re suddenly expected to pay school fees – you never used to . . .’ Ashwin is nodding again.

  ‘What you’re seeing here,’ Heinrich goes on, ‘and I really hesitate to say this, even now, but it’s true – is a dismantling of even what apartheid gave these people – puny as that was. If there was a rent boycott under apartheid, the National Party didn’t dare send in the troops, because there would have been mayhem. The ANC can do it, and they can do it in the name of development.’

  ‘Yeah,’ nods Ashwin. ‘It’s true. And you know, to oppose this is totally legitimate – to oppose both the process and the government that pushes it. It’s damn hard, man, to oppose the ANC in this country – damn hard. They’re still the liberators to so many people, but what we have to do is build a culture where opposing the ANC is progressive.’

  ‘We all lived under a Nazi-like regime,’ says Heinrich, ‘and we defeated it – and that defeat took heroic things. People still have those memories. Now, the party that has hijacked that victory – that has come to stand for that victory – is out doing all this to its people . . .’ – he shakes his head – ‘even I have trouble sometimes, having to make that call, having to stand up and say “Down with the ANC!” But it needs to be done.’