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J’Burg Poors March Against Evictions

By Holly Wren Spaulding

“This system is taking us back to square one,” said Mvenda Masalas, an unemployed father of three fighting eviction from an inner city tenement in Johannesburg.  He was among 150 poors, many of them already homeless, who marched on the offices of the provincial Minister of Housing this past Saturday.

They were protesting the escalation in what amounts to forced removals, a phenomenon many remember from Apartheid days when non-whites were displaced to areas where they could still provide cheap labor to the city, while living on treeless wastelands out of sight of whites.

Others live in run down, unsanitary conditions within the inner city where, at times, whole floors have been burned out of a block of flats.  And yet people are crammed into rooms above and below, cardboard and plastic covering the busted windows.

Many have no light, water, or heat.  Lifts don’t work, and the elderly languish on the upper floors of these buildings, hopeful that they will not need to exit in a hurry.  If a fire were to occur they would not make it out.

Despite such rough conditions, absentee landlords still demand renal payments exceeding the earning potential of most residents.  In the case of Council housing, eviction is a standard response to rental arrears.

On Saturday, banners demanded water, lights, homes, and jobs.  One large banner used a map to indicate the target of upcoming council evictions, likening the policy to those of the 1950’s when
Apartheid ensured that whites could expand and build where they saw fit.  Text on the banner said that today it is the capitalists who wish to expand into spaces occupied by the poors, most of whom are black.

Photo by Holly Wren Spaulding

One man carried a rough cardboard sign with the words “Capitalism: Unfit for Human Consumption” scrawled in black marker on it.  Young girls and boys had signs with stenciled icons of water droplets, light bulbs and houses, demanding that Mayor Masondo stop forcing them onto the street.

Marchers had assembled at a park in Hillbrow, not far from a highrise reputed to house Xhosa sex workers, most of whom come from the Easter Cape where jobs are rare and most families survive on the meager pensions of one or two elders.

The scene was festive, people sang, chanted and the toyi toyi was militant, despite the summer heat. Over the next two hours, buses from Soweto, Alex, Orange Farm arrived with kids, aunties, old women and men.

The march wended through downtown, eventually arriving at its’ destination, in front of the government building from whence eviction notices have originated.  Standing on the steps out front, activists from the Anti-Eviction Forum and the Soldiers Forum spoke with an uncompromising tone about the need for basic services such as water, necessary to sustain life.

Some police lingered around the perimeter, while others videotaped the proceedings from atop an armored personnel carrier.

Elsewhere in the city, Lesego Rampolokeng, a poet and playwright living in the rundown suburb of
Kennsington explained that down the street from his place, a house which stood empty for several years was eventually inhabited by homeless families.  Kids were growing up together; a little community assembled around the shebeen (informal pub) inside. People were squatting for survival.

Recently the roof was taken off the house; rather than evicting the families inside, they were rendered “without a roof over their heads.” No one knows for sure who did it, but like fires, this kind of tactical destruction of space is being used to undermine the poor of this city.

Rampolokeng speaks of failed ANC promises, and neoliberal agendas that cut the throats of those who cast votes for a better future, but have seen little for their efforts.  All over his city people are being evicted from their accommodation, which often amounts to nothing more than a shack or dilapidated flat.  These days, says Rampolokeng, “Kids get born on the road, people die on the road . . . if you deny people water, or even shelter, the intention is to kill them.”

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