There is a story about a king who - on being told that the accepted doctrine of the earth being flat was to be challenged by science - proclaimed, "do you really expect me to believe what I see with my own eyes?!" Recently, leader of the DA and Premier of the Western Cape, Helen Zille, published a response to what has been dubbed ‘the toilet wars' - the controversy over the installation of open-air toilets in Makhaza, Khayelitsha (see here and here). Yet, her response actually speaks beyond the ‘wars' to the broader framework that characterises the City of Cape Town's approach to the reality of informal settlements.
Rhodes, Komani and Rikhotso
According to Zille's response, the majority of "these settlements are the consequence of land invasions", and a "lack of planning" means that these invasions have to be "retrofitted" in terms of services. To understand the meaning of ‘land invasions', it is imperative to take a historical perspective - for the invasions of which Zille speaks are part of a long history of the struggle for social justice in South Africa. Indeed, the attempts to control African urbanisation and the fights against it have been one of the pre-eminent dimensions of those struggles.
It was Cecil Rhodes, who as prime minister of the Cape Colony, pushed through what would become possibly the most serious precursor to Apartheid legislation in terms of dealing with Black urbanisation - the infamous 1894 Glen Grey Act. Everything that came after such as the 1913 Native Land Act, and the array of subsequent ‘high Apartheid' legislation in terms of Verwoerd's ‘separate development' and influx control, built on what had been established through Rhodes's Glen Grey. That one piece of legislation, relating to a small area of the Eastern Cape, made full ownership of land for Black Africans almost impossible, centralised all control over that land within the White authority, and introduced labour taxation that would further force people into labour and off the productive land that was remained in Black hands. In other words, this was the formal beginning of attempts to control Black urbanisation, and it is not far-fetched to imagine Rhodes claiming that migration into urban areas by Black Africans amounted to invasion of land - in fact, it would be no surprise to find that Rhodes did say something along these lines.
Yet, on the other side of this relationship, the fact of urbanisation and migration in Cape Town and elsewhere has been the foremost area of struggle for social justice. In 1975 and 1981, the Komani, and Rikhotso cases for instance were milestones in terms of challenging the National Party government in this regard. Mr Komani's battle was simply for the right for his wife to live with him in the city. Mr Rikhotso was to challenge the contradictory law that required black South Africans to work for an employer continuously for 10 years in order to gain residential rights, but at the same time, forced them to take annual leave, thereby preventing them from ever gaining those residential rights.
What was at stake then, were not just political rights to freedom, but also salvaging what was left of family life that had been destroyed through migrant labour, and visions of a better life beyond the small patches of land that Verwoerd had envisioned would contain an entire population. Ultimately, these were not just legal cases, but like the many millions who took similar steps, the act itself of taking the journey and settling in Cape Town was a political one.
Figments of our imagination
Do informal settlements exist? According to both the DA and former ANC local government's approach, the answer is a resounding ‘no'. Firstly, there is a severe deficit in dealing with the settlements as they exist before our eyes, as opposed to how the City would like them to exist. Recently, a project by the community of one informal settlement was thwarted by the City for this very reason. Seeing the damage being done to children in the settlement on a daily basis through the lack of after-school care, community members decided to open a non-profit day-care centre.
Funding was acquired, yet halfway through the process the City sent notice that the structure being erected would be ‘demolished' as the community members had illegally ‘invaded' the land - a piece of land that was part of the informal settlement, and that they purchased as per how land in informal settlements is in reality transferred. Just like the situation where Mr Rikhotso could not reconcile the requirements for residential rights with the materiality of those requirements, so in this case, the day-care centre is now trying to overcome being forced to go through processes such as rezoning on a piece of land where this is most likely not possible legally.
By declaring a non-profit day-care centre for marginalised children a "land invasion", the City has effectively criminalised an internal community initiative to protect its own children. The reasons given mainly relate to the City wanting to ‘formalise' the informal. Yet, this does not actually address the problem in a substantive way. It rather deals with the informal settlement in a loosely defined, ad-hoc manner that ultimately infringes on people's safety and security, and rights to dignity and freedom. Consequently, whilst Zille talks about community ‘self-empowerment', the local government that her party controls thwarts legitimate attempts at this by the community in the name of a false formalisation.
Secondly, the approach is entirely ahistorical with regards to the existence of informal settlements. The largest migration to Khayelitsha was actually before 1994. Many of the informal settlements that Zille refers to as "land invasions" have actually existed for close on thirty years, and realistically they will continue to exist for the foreseeable future. Is it possible to call a settlement established thirty years ago, at the height of resistance against Apartheid, a land invasion that because of bad planning needs to be retrofitted? This is far from the reality on the ground, and is in and of itself disingenuous. It amounts to saying that these people simply had nothing better to do, and so decided to invade a patch of land without proper planning - an absurd notion when seen in relation to the broader historical struggle.
Finally, where planning has been lacking, is from the local government's side. There has continually been a severe lack of both vision and consultation in dealing with informal settlements in this regard. In effect, the rights of those that inhabit informal settlements are ‘put on hold'; as if they can only be addressed once the informal settlements are gone.
Dealing with materiality
It is impossible to divorce the current struggle of informal settlements from the previous political struggles for rights and social justice. We need to move beyond the current situation of playing pretence.
First, local and national government need to accept that informal settlements do exist, have done so for decades, and in the foreseeable future will continue to do so. During this time, the rights of people living there should not be seen as inconsequential, or ‘on hold' until such time as formal housing is developed. The South African Constitution does not provide exceptions to these rights in the case of informal settlements. On the contrary, that Constitution is there to protect the most vulnerable in our society.
Second, local and national government need to start developing appropriate planning mechanisms that are consultative - involving communities at the local level rather than ‘delivering' a purely technocratic, top-down governance. The Makhaza incident is indicative of both the DA and ANC administrations at different times in Cape Town, and it provides a stark example of what ensues when consultation is not affected properly.
Thirdly, citizens must move beyond seeing informal settlements as just unpleasant sights on the way from the airport, as if they result simply from people coming and invading ‘our' Cape Town land. This is ahistorical, and cannot be reconciled with the reality on the ground. Ultimately, any development that would be meaningful in terms of progressing in dealing with informal settlements will result from partnerships between civil society, government and citizens in general. This partnership should be built in relation to what we do see before our eyes - for from Cape Town, the earth does in fact look quite round.
Dustin Kramer is the Treasurer of the Social Justice Coalition. He writes in his personal capacity.
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