These were the words of the president of a multi-community housing development organization made up of shack/shanty towns in the greater Durban area.
We started the development portion of our Reconciliation & Development seminar yesterday with a brief lecture and then a walking tour of the Kennedy Road shack community, populated nearly 100% by blacks. I’m imagining some reactions: Why would you ever go there? It must be so dirty. What were the people like? Was there a lot of disease?
The fact of the matter is that whether living in a three story home or a board, mud and tin-roofed shack, a human is a human is a human. The shack community is incredibly cohesive; they are activists, talented builders, self-policing and, despite their situation, often smiling.
After the walk we met in a community building constructed in 1990. The Kennedy Road community is one of the only shack settlements to have a formal community building. We sat with community leaders for dinner and talked about their struggles. They’ve taken beatings from police for marching, rubber bullets and live ammunition for protesting and, in general, degradation and blame for being poor. And this is all well past the 1994 “coming of democracy”.
The constitutional laws in South Africa are some of the most progressive in the world, including guaranteed rights to housing, equality before the law, etc. Yet the local city councilors, who are appointed and not nominated, do not carry out the law or listen to the issues of local people. The people we ate with last night had been personally and unlawfully incarcerated, intimidated, shot at and beaten to the ground. They made no aggressive moves. They were unarmed. They simply marched for their rights.
It’s a Catch 22, really. The government has said it will be rid of all shack communities by 2010, the same year the World Cup comes to South Africa. This means that by 2010, the government will have to build tens of thousands of new houses, a nearly impossible task. But because of this policy, the shack settlements have been declared “temporary”, and therefore the government refuses to put in any infrastructure, including water taps and toilets.
A good example is garbage collection. Throughout South Africa, including the Bonela community I stay in, the government contracts for curbside pickup each week. It’s really no different than the United States. But the government refuses to pickup trash from the shack settlements because they are “temporary”. The Kennedy Road settlement lives with an open garbage landfill as its neighbor, with odors and rainwater spilling into the community, yet the government will not pick up their trash. With no other means of disposing of their waste, it piles up throughout the settlement.
The continued will of the people to march to the homes of the wealthy, the privilege, those who live just across the street, has a powerful affect on any “tourist” willing to visit some of the poorest of South Africa. These are people: mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, aspiring musicians and accountants. They are no different than any of us, yet they struggle everyday for basic rights that we all enjoy, take for granted and have protected. There is no excuse for how these people live. None at all. The government of South Africa - yes, the African National Congress government which made so many promises in the late 1980s and early 1990s - continues to let its own people down.