[P2P-F] destroying the urban commons of the poor

Wed Jan 19 08:51:56 CET 2011

article by Richard Pithouse, http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/606.1

Destroying the urban commons of the poor in Motala Heights near Durban,
South Africa <http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=13260>
[image: photo of Michel Bauwens]
Michel Bauwens
24th January 2011

 The bulldozing of inconvenient realities is not just a strand in the story
of our past. Almost a hundred years after the Land Act millions of roving
pariahs remain in the shack settlements on the edges of our towns and
cities. They are often shunted around at the point of guns wielded by the
state and private power. There are plenty of sixteen year olds who have
never lived a day under apartheid but who have seen their homes, communities
and, in Motala Heights, their temple, treated as nothing but an aberration
to be bulldozed from the landscape.

Excerpted from a report by
<http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/606.1>South-African urban
commons activist
*Richard Pithouse*:

*“Here in South Africa the Constitution may declare that we are all, or
least all of us with the appropriate papers, equally the public and equally
entitled to find and share beauty as we see fit. But much of our shared life
is dominated by business interests that appeal to markets rather than
publics and not everyone is in the market for everything. This is not always
a case of market logic rendering, as it often does, some people superfluous
and therefore invisible. When the poor are out of the places to which they
are supposed to keep, when a shack stands next to a suburban home or a poor
child sits next to a richer child in a school, the mere presence of people
without money can render them hyper-visible. People, with all their
individual depth and complexity, are sometimes turned into objects onto
which all kinds of contempt, fear and hate are projected.*

*One of the many places in our society where the fracturing in who counts as
a full member of our national public and who does not is immediately visible
is Motala Heights near Durban. Motala Heights is nestled into a valley
between the factories on the outskirts of Pinetown and a steep hill that
leads up to the expensive suburb of Kloof. Some of the people in the valley
are poor and live in tin houses that they have built on rented land and some
are middle class or wealthy and live in large suburban homes. There is also
a shack settlement at the foot of the hill that leads up to Kloof. *

*In 2006 the eThekwini Municipality tried to send in their men with guns to
eradicate the shack settlement. When Bheki Ngcobo told them that their
actions were illegal in terms of the Constitution he was tear-gassed and
beaten to the ground. But, in the end, the squatters stopped the City’s
illegal eviction. The law is not everything but it is also not nothing. At
the time the squatters were convinced that the eviction had been directed by
a local landlord and businessman, Ricky Govender, and claimed that the
municipal demolition team had been drinking in his pub before they set off
up the hill to eradicate a community. There is no doubt that some municipal
officials and police officers speak as if Govender, who boasts of
connections to Jacob Zuma, has some sort of extra-legal authority over the
whole community. Govender’s plans to force out the poor in order to develop
Motala Heights for private profit clearly carry a lot more weight than the
demand of its poor residents that the state support them in building a
community for all the residents of the area.*

*Govender has been trying, for some years now, to evict some of the people
in the tin houses. They are often old and poor. Some have lived in their
homes for as long as forty-five years. Like the municipality, he has failed
because his attempted evictions have been illegal. This is public knowledge.
Allegations that he has dumped dangerous industrial waste right outside
activists’ homes, threatened to have activist Shamita Naidoo killed for R50
and to bulldoze people’s homes have been reported in the local press. “*

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