[DEBATE] : Fwd: The Fear of Umbrellas and the Handcuffed Homeless

[ahmed]

>(this is an excellent piece...posted here on behalf of the author, heindrich)
>
>Much of the academic and activist reporting on social
>struggles in Durban is overblown, sentimental (in the worst
>sense of the word) and serving more to promote the
>reporters and display their eloquent indignation than to
>build these movements or nurture their autonomy.  As
>Desai's timely Harold Wolpe lecture showed, this style of
>operation - and style of being - is silly and dangerous.
>  It prevents a proper assessment of where we really are,
>what we are capable of, how power operates between 'us'
>and, importantly, what is to be done.  As we have seen
>recently, we can't even ask these questions without
>hysterical turf-wars erupting and all that goes with it:
>the e-mail slanging matches, sulking, lies,
>self-righteousness, paranoia.
>
>So it is with trepidation that I add to the noise coming
>from Durban, either by sounding sentimental myself or
>provoking the wrath of whatever band of commentators has
>already staked claim to the groups I am going to speak
>about.
>
>This week, after months of skulking and shirking, I went
>with a friend to the site of an eviction.  Where wooden
>homes had been, there were only soft indentations in the
>soil now.  I observed an elderly woman in one of five small
>family groups gathered around a fire in a pit in Crossmore,
>Chatsworth, in terrible weather, open an umbrella.  As she
>performed this precise and tiny act, she was watched over
>by 8, 24-hour security guards and two 4x4 Protection
>Services vans filled with armed men. This woman was part of
>a group of homeless people who had earlier been living in
>20 shacks erected on that piece of land for two week
>already.  This original act was illegal, alright, but since
>they had occupied this site for a long enough period,
>according to the law they could not be evicted without a
>Court order. 
>
>When the Durban Council sent their men to evict them, the
>community rustled up some lawyers and achieved an interdict
>to stop the demolition last Friday.  On Sunday, the very
>day their victory was noted in the press, the City Council
>demolishers arrived anyway and broke half of these same
>structures down, including the shack of the granny with the
>umbrella.  I got this stuff on tape.  It was ugly.  The
>city's men were shown the interdict.  They read and
>understood it.  They apparently consulted with Sutcliffe as
>it all happened.  But, it is fair to say, they took the
>tactical risk that it was better to completely flout the
>law and risk censure from essentially toothless courts (in
>matters holding government agents accountable) than to
>allow this idea, this methodology, this proliferation of
>even flimsy parasols, to spread.
>
>Some people see rank evil in the Council men's acts.  It is
>hard not to.  But, for the first time in a long while,
>there was a whiff of desperation mixed in there too.  I've
>seen the tide turn against me enough to recognise the first
>squints of hesitance creep into the gaze of others.  Back
>to the tattered umbrella.  Sitting out in the open, with
>her shack newly voided and the material charted away and
>with her worldly goods and a small fire at her knees, the
>granny I watched fingered the catch on the stem and opened
>the scraggly thing.  It was just unfurled when the 4x4
>doors opened, the security came loping and the granny was
>rounded upon,  howled at, accused of erecting a structure
>and ordered to take it down "immediately".  A bullshit
>defence, "following explicit orders", they said.  Evil.  Of
>course.  Nevertheless, I believe them about the
>instructions on the suppression of umbrellas.  Desperation!
>
>Still, I was not sure though until I saw Council's replying
>affidavit in the on-going court battle.  There are 300,000
>completely homeless people in this province (their
>figures).  If just 10% of them get the notion that they can
>force government's hand by actions such as the
>Crossmorians, there will be:- a, b, c, d.  As I read the
>list of bad things in their affidavit that would happen if
>this small band were left unmolested, it sounded a lot like
>an insurrection.
>
>While we were witnessing this umbrella incident, my pal and
>I were told of Sbu Zikhode and Philani Zungu's arrest.
>  Although we do ourselves (and our own mental health) no
>good by actually believing the conspiracy theories we
>sometimes put out there, the trumped up nature of the
>charges against these leaders of abaHlali and the racist
>illogic of it all is plain to see.  Also plain to see is
>the hatred and fear of Black people on the part of certain
>cops.  But to miss the fact that the tearer-down-in-chief
>of shacks in Crossmore was African and the squatters mostly
>Indian, while the most enthusiastic oppressor of Sbu and
>Philani was Indian but got on famously with his crew of
>African gun-slingers - is to misunderstand and, in fact,
>deny the brilliant nature of the oppression of abaHlali
>that is now suddenly, barbarically, here.  The cops' hatred
>and fear for all races of homeless people is rabidly
>ideological. It flows from the sort of bilious enmity that
>produces politics.  It feeds on the fear of an eneny become
>formidable.  
>
>Again, I was not too sure about this.  But having bluffed
>my way into the police-station to consult with my
>"clients", I saw Sbu unnecessarily lying on the ground,
>hands cuffed behind his back with Philani propped up
>against the wall moaning from his "resisting arrest,
>slipping on soap" injuries.  I did not abandon my role.  I
>tried to reach a deal with the arresting officers; a fresh
>faced young constable and his surly searge.
>
>They were having none of me.  But then the phone calls
>began.  To this little prick. First someone he knew.
>  Seemed high up.  Super.  Then, one after the other, other
>brass phoning him.  He told the story three times of the
>arrest.  During the last call, he fairly stood stiff when
>talking to whomever was giving him the 3rd degree,
>reassuring, half-apologising for having brought this to
>pass, not sure of himself, but too late now to turn back.
>  Yes, certain cops hate abaHlali with an undisguisedly
>racist glee.  But some of Constable Bagwanjeen's superiors
>were openly happy about Sbu and Philani's arrest for other,
>murkier reasons.  And some cops were openly unhappy about
>Sbu and Philani's arrest, resigned to the danger of it. 
>
>I think the last type are the clever ones.  The ones who
>know already that there is something to fear and hate.
>  Something almost impersonal in its force, uncotainable.
>  "Like a tide that is turning", from a song by Kennedy
>Road's own choir, the Dlamini King Brothers.  I don't claim
>to know or speak the truth.  These are mere speculations.
>  But, I sense a feeling in some of the cops I met in
>Chatsworth and Sydenham on Tuesday night, that soon it will
>be them fetching bowls of water and cloths for abaHlali's
>feet not so long into the future.
>
>HB
>---
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