[Debate] (Fwd) Ashwin Desai on Cos Desmond

[Patrick Bond]

The Mercury


  Social justice activist to the last breath

April 16 2012 at 11:45am
By Ashwin Desai

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NM_nm cosmos0

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Cosmas Desmond

One of the most compelling books on dispossession and forced removals is 
the late Cosmas Desmond's /The Discarded People./

In the preface, Lord Caradon wrote: "This is a terrifying book. It is an 
account of callous contempt for human suffering, the ugliness of 
systematic cruelty, and the self-righteousness of the oppressor ... 
sometimes a book can make, can alter, the course of history. Father 
Desmond's book could well do so."

While Desmond's book might not have changed the course of history, it 
was avidly read by those who sought to understand the devastation caused 
by white land seizures through the 20th century.

It was a process in which bloody conquest was given legal sanction in a 
myriad laws as Africans were shoved off the land. As segregation 
broadened into apartheid, so the process of reserving 87 percent of the 
land for white use was pursued more systematically.

Page Yako hauntingly captures this squeezing:

/Yes, we fold up our knees/

/It's impossible to stretch out/

/Because the land has been hedged in./

When Desmond arrived in Mnxesha (Dimbaza) in 1969, 15km from King 
William's Town, the population stood at about 3 400 people with more 
than 2 000 children:

"... There was grinding poverty, squalor and hardship equal to the worst 
places I had seen. There were the familiar, tiny, one- or two-room 
houses, many with a number of ragged, hungry looking children or a bent 
woman sitting outside. It was not quite true that I could no longer be 
shocked or disturbed. I was, in particular, by the sight of one tiny 
baby, a virtual skeleton, unable to move or even cry and covered with 
flies."

Desmond highlighted the story of Mrs E M: "She arrived at Mnxesha from 
Burgersdorp in December 1968, with her six children. By May 1969, two of 
the children had died; two others, aged 13 and six, had 'gross 
pellagra', according to a doctor; another younger child was in hospital 
with malnutrition.

"She is a widow and was supporting herself in Burgersdorp by doing 
domestic work; now she has no employment. She is only 37 years old and 
so does not receive a pension. As Mnxesha is a rural area she cannot get 
a child maintenance allowance.

"Since she went to Mnxesha she had no source of income apart from a few 
cents which she manages to earn by collecting wood from miles away and 
selling it in the settlement.

"She has taken her children to the nurse several times but because she 
did not have 20 cents they were not attended to. She was receiving 
government rations, which were obviously inadequate."

While Desmond's travels documented the impact of removals across the 
country, it was Dimbaza that became the focus of attention. A year after 
the book was published, a 33-year-old Anglican priest, David Russell, 
resolved to live on the government welfare handout of R5 a month: "I 
could run away -- or I could make a symbolic gesture to show my fellow 
whites what is happening to the people they put in Dimbaza."

The response from government was to cut the amount in half to R2.50.

Most significantly, a documentary titled /Last Grave at Dimbaza/ made in 
1974 was shown around the world.

Paul Miller wrote: "/Last Grave /ends on a sombre note in the township 
of Dimbaza. The concluding sequences show the graves of African 
children, some marked with plastic feeding bottles, and a long row of 
empty graves, a foreboding for the future.

"The film ends reminding the viewer that in the hour it took to watch 
it, six families had been kicked out of their homes, 60 people were 
arrested for pass law violations and 60 children have died of 
malnutrition."

There was a time in the early 1980s in which jobs came to Dimbaza, 
benefiting from its declaration as an industrial hub. Fortified by 
generous subsidies, factories, mostly foreign owned, ringed the area. 
But as tariffs tumbled down and subsidies eroded, the factories were 
abandoned.

Some 40 years after Desmond wrote /The Discarded People/, Dimbaza -- 
which means a place where rubbish is dumped -- is still a place for the 
superfluous. A part of what Mike Davis has called the "mass of humanity 
structurally and biologically redundant to global accumulation and the 
corporate matrix. So it was. So it is."

Born in London and arriving in South Africa in 1959 to serve the 
Catholic Church, Desmond's work earned him a banning order in 1971. In 
the aftermath of the murder of Rick Turner in 1978, Desmond left for 
London once more and only returned in 1991. He always had a child-like 
sparkle attached to an acerbic bite, which he often turned on at what he 
saw as the betrayals of the leaders of post-apartheid South Africa.

While he might have left the Catholic priesthood, he often returned to 
the scriptures, writing in 2008 that the rural poor were "still the 
hewers of wood and drawers of water". For Desmond, apartheid did not 
die; rather, it had "a makeover and bought some new clothes".

Tellingly, when he signed the wall at Ike's Bookshop in Morningside, 
Durban, he wrote: "Now we are all discarded."

Desmond's work has been largely ignored in post-1994 South Africa, 
probably too vivid a reminder of how the past persists in the present. 
In a world where research has often become the captive of surveys and 
statistical analysis, Desmond's book reminds us of the power of bearing 
witness.

As we approach a century since the passing of the 1913 Land Act, 
Desmond's book is a classic account of dispossession, standing alongside 
Sol Plaatje's /Native Life in South Africa/ and Charles van Onselen's 
/The Seed is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper. /

l *Ashwin Desai is professor of sociology at the University of 
Johannesburg. His latest book is /Reading Revolution: Shakespeare on 
Robben Island/*

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