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CHAPTER

3

Glebelands Hostel, Durban

Dale T. McKinley

An integral part of the backbone of the apartheid migrant labour and influx control system was the establishment of single-sex hostels in the main urban centres of South Africa. Such hostels were essentially worker dormitories, often multi-storey and made up of small rooms (with common ablution areas), each of which usually housed many individuals. Like so many others around the country, the Glebelands hostel complex, located next to South Durban’s Umlazi township, became the home of male workers who were brought in from the rural areas to fill mostly low-skilled and low-paying jobs in manufacturing and heavy industries (Zulu 1993).

From the beginning, the entire hostel system provided fertile ground for individual and collective, as well as ethno-political, conflict. The main means of someone getting a room in a hostel tended to be largely ‘through personal contacts, or via companies’, which ‘contributed to the formation of homeboy [regional] cliques among residents in hostels’. The long-term result was that hostel social life tended to be ‘organised around regional or ethnocentric arrangements’ (Zulu 1993: 4). Initially run and managed by provincial authorities, the Glebelands hostel, similar to all others in Durban, has been administered by the eThekwini Municipality since the late 1990s.

On the political side, the hostel (historically an African National Congress [ANC] stronghold) saw intense conflict between the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) during the early 1990s. The first official recording of a political killing was the gunning down of Dome Wellington Ngobese, the chairperson of the IFP branch at the hostel, in July 1992 (SAHA 1992). In the late 1990s, there was a shift to intra-ANC conflict when ‘dozens of residents were murdered’, followed by a lengthy period largely free from political violence until 2008 ‘when there were attacks on, and evictions of, people who joined COPE [Congress of the People]’ (De Haas 2016).

As will be told in much more personal and direct detail below by the interviewees, the last five years have been a period of unrelenting violence and conflict, warlordism, and ethnicised and factionalised party politics, which have seen more than 100 residents being killed. All this has been accompanied by a seemingly never-ending cycle of mismanagement, corruption and criminality emanating from local government and the police.

Presently, the hostel houses an ‘estimated 22 000 people living in approximately 80 blocks’, most of which are extremely overcrowded and in serious need of repair, although there are a few ‘newly constructed family units’. Unlike during the apartheid and early post-1994 years, a large number of residents now consist of families with a considerable majority being unemployed. As a result, poverty is rife, with the average income being an estimated R1600 per month and each adult resident supporting, on average, an estimated six other people (Gift of the Givers/Ubunye 2015).

INTERVIEWEES AND THE INTERVIEW PROCESS

All of the Glebelands residents who were interviewed have been, either directly or indirectly, at the forefront of ongoing collective and individual struggles to halt the violence and killings, expose corruption and mismanagement as well as to seek justice for many of those who have been killed over the last several years. Two of them were previous leaders of the hostel residents’ organisation (Ubunye bama Hostela or Hostel Unity), another two previously lived in blocks associated with hired killers, several have been personally threatened and/or targeted and all have lost either close friends or family to the ongoing violence and killings.

The resident interviewees are of varying ages but all are adults and the majority are middle-aged, male and originate from the Eastern Cape. Almost all have children (although in most cases the children are not residing with them at the hostel) and some still have partners, while others’ partners have been the victims of the Glebelands killers. Half of the interviewees are formally employed, all in low-skilled and low-paying jobs.

Only one of the interviewees is not a hostel resident. Vanessa Burger is a long-time community and human rights activist, who has been the mandated public face of the Glebelands struggles since 2014. She has worked with and actively supported both Ubunye bama Hostela and those Glebelands residents who have been involved in the struggles described earlier. A few months before the interviews, she relocated away from Durban because of persistent harassment, the targeted theft of her vehicle, as well as numerous threats of physical harm.

Due to the extremely vulnerable and dangerous situation in which the resident interviewees find themselves, all of them requested to remain anonymous for fear of possible exposure. This is understandable given that at Glebelands such exposure has most often led to violent victimisation or retribution and, in many cases, death.

A timely reminder of this was provided during the interview process when the schedules had to be shifted because of threats of violence against some of the interviewees. The interviews that took place on the hostel grounds were conducted under very stressful conditions, while another interview had to be conducted at an undisclosed location because the interviewee was in hiding due to persistent death threats. Most of the interviews were conducted in English but in two cases there was the need for on-site translation.

THE PERSONAL SIDE

Listening to Glebelands residents speak about personal matters, their feelings, their emotions, their families, their fears and their challenges is a humbling experience. There is no better way to make a human connection with and try to better understand those who often appear to the general public, through the lens of the dominant media, as largely faceless actors, occasional victims and very seldom as ordinary people.

And yet, during the interviews it also became clear that most residents were extremely cautious about engaging in a more detailed conversation related to their personal lives. Upon reflection, such reticence made sense: the product of a combination of justifiable concern and fear about being identified, alongside negative views about how they have been portrayed in the dominant media.

When asked to describe daily life at Glebelands, a 30-something-year-old mother of three, whose husband was murdered at Glebelands for speaking out against corruption, had this to say:

It is too tough. Things are terrible since [my now deceased] husband was busy building [a] home in [the] rural areas so everything now is stuck because [I am] not working … [and] most of the children are still young, they have to go to school, there are so many things, yes like school fees, shoes. I sell small things, just for baking, selling … chips, drinks. Life is difficult; it’s very, very difficult (G5 interview).

For one of the elders of the community who is no longer able to find formal work, it is the widespread criminality that has accompanied the violence which makes it hard to even engage in survivalist work: ‘[Because of the violence/killings] it’s hard even to sell now to go door to door selling peanuts, go door to door selling T-shirts and everything, because that is the way of doing things here. Even to go look for a R10 job, it’s hard because if they can see you working here they will wait for you’ (G4 interview).

One of the community’s leaders, who has lived at Glebelands for over 20 years, provides an instructive reminder of the physical, psychological and social impact of living in an environment marked by almost constant disruption, violence and death:

There are so many children here [who] drop out from school [and] the trauma people have here is worse than you can think. There are so many people who [have] died because … [of] the stress they had. And no one is prepared to come to you, to counsel you, nobody. Each and every time you take a step you think about death. I’m from town now but you know when I leave here I’m thinking oh am I going to reach there, once I reach there I feel happy but when I have to come back I have to think now am I going to reach my house? Because maybe someone is waiting [for] me somewhere … every minute, even if you are sleeping, [you] sleep like a bird in the tree (G2 interview).

Despite the resilience, grit and courage displayed by the vast majority of Glebelands residents, there is an acknowledgement of a distinct sense of powerlessness (but not hopelessness) in the face of the hostel’s enduring bloodletting. In this case, in the words of a younger man whose attempts to serve on a peace committee have been met with constant death threats and have caused him to flee from one hostel block to another:

It [the violence/killings] affect[s] me a lot, but there is nothing I can do, because I have to work for my kids. I can’t run away from here because there will be no one to see me if I’m still alive and protected. We are like in a place where … there is no one to help us. We don’t have powers. If we had powers I think this violence [would be] gone from here, that is my belief (G3 interview).

HISTORY AND CONTEXT OF THE AREA

One of the main reasons why those who watch, listen and read the dominant media often struggle to gain any meaningful understanding and appreciation of poor communities in struggle is because of the paucity of associated history and context. All the more so for a community such as Glebelands where, as will be shown in chapter 6, the coverage of the dominant media has almost exclusively focused on specific acts or events of violence and killing.

Such history and context is not simply the preserve of the ‘expert’ researcher, the academic or government officials and local politicians. Rather, it is greatly enriched when it encompasses the knowledge and views of the very people who live in and work with those respective communities. Here, Burger gives some useful insights into the institutional and socio-political history of hostels themselves, which provides a foundational backdrop to Glebelands’ more contemporary realities:

There are common issues at all the hostels and the biggest problem is political interference, manipulation … what you would call favouritism, you know ward councillors or the hostel superintendent that would say favour a certain group who were supporters of a certain [political] party. When Ubunye bama Hostela came about it was to address social issues, service delivery issues, non-political stuff, but at the same time they couldn’t move beyond the politics because the politicians themselves were too involved in using the hostels as power bases, exactly as the apartheid regime had done. So that tendency has followed through unchanged, and a lot of the … power structures that existed then have continued even up till now (G1 interview).

In this light, it becomes easier to grasp the continuity between apartheid and post-apartheid politically motivated and ethnically oriented conflict that took place in hostels such as Glebelands. As the community leader interviewee details, the conflict and violence related to IFP–ANC turf wars and competition of the early to mid-1990s, returned in 1997 in the form of ethnic-related violence and conflict between Xhosa and Zulu members of the ANC. That round of violence only ended in 1999 after peace talks. And then there was renewed and similarly framed conflict in 2008, resulting in several deaths and hundreds of evictions when the ANC experienced a split that led to the formation of COPE (G2 interview).

COMMUNITY ORGANISATION

Unlike many other poor communities facing a range of local governance and socio-economic challenges, as well as problems centred on political party factionalism in the post-1994 period, Glebelands has not had a formally constituted and structured community organisation for the majority of that time. Rather, in the first 20 years of the democratic era, the dominant organisational space was taken up by two distinct areas of activity.

The most organic and democratically constituted were the block committees, which had been formed long before 1994. Every hostel block had a block committee. Among other administrative duties, the committees acted as something akin to ‘security mechanisms to resolve internal conflicts within each block’ and, importantly, to oversee and manage room allocations. ‘Hostel rooms are inherited usually so ... the block committees were instrumental in preventing outsiders from coming in and exploiting the situation’ (G1 interview). What is absolutely crucial to understanding the story of Glebelands is how and why the block committees were at first destabilised, then physically attacked and, finally, politically and practically undermined by being cast (with the dominant media playing a major role) as central – through the selling of beds – to much of the violence and conflict over the last several years.¹

The remainder of the organisational space was taken up by political party branch activity, contestation and the activities of local and provincial party leadership, particularly the councillor. As has already been chronicled above, this area has always been dominated by one political party, the ANC, whether in unity or division.

What emerges clearly from the interviewees is that the block committees, despite their weaknesses and problems, were by far the most representative and democratic community structures in the hostel complex and the most effective at maintaining administrative as well as social cohesion. As one of the interviewees put it: ‘… to keep law and order, it’s essential you have a community-based structure that is elected by the community and the block committees were. People [were] nominated as needed’ (G1 interview).

Regardless of the fact that some members of the block committees ‘got involved in selling beds themselves … this is an issue that has been common in all the hostels since before ’94; it’s petty corruption. If there had been a functioning administration and a functioning police force, the issue of bed-selling could have been easily stamped out, but there was no trust with the community, there was no outreach by the powers to resolve the situation, and a lot of them capitalised on it’ (G1 interview).

Where the political party divisions and machinations began to substantively impact on the block committees was after the 2008 split in the ANC, the formation of the break-away party COPE and the subsequent widespread opposition to Robert Mzobe’s ascension to the positions of ANC branch chairperson and local councillor. Things ‘really came to a head [because] the main people who were leading that [opposition] and a lot of the defectors [to COPE] were block chairmen and committee members and they were also some of the main mobilisers against Mzobe’ (G1 interview). In the period that followed, a large number of the block chairmen and committees were violently attacked and evicted from their resident blocks, with those aligned to Mzobe and the triumphant Jacob Zuma faction within the ANC taking control of many of the block committees and effectively splitting the Glebelands community both physically and along thinly disguised political party and ethnic lines.

It was more or less at this point that many residents, both at Glebelands and others hostels in the Durban area, began to search for alternative forms of organisation, voice and representation. ‘The communities themselves were sick of fighting, they wanted to have peace, they were tired of being used, on both sides, so they had a lot of meetings … this is where Ubunye came about originally, to try and counter this and to try and bring people together, to unite the different hostels so they could speak with one voice’ (G1 interview).

By 2013, Ubunye bama Hostela had been formally constituted; its very presence a testimony to the desire and ability of hostel residents to overcome historic and ongoing organisational, political, ideological and ethno-linguistic divisions. Initial programmes, even without any meaningful financial resources at hand, centred on efforts for hostels ‘to develop their own sort of cooperatives’ as a practical means ‘to counter the [widespread] unemployment’ and to develop the capacity to ‘look after their own hostels’ (G1 interview). Additionally, Ubunye ‘tried everything … to deal with the violence. We wrote several letters [to the] Humans Rights Commission [with] nobody responding; IPID [Independent Police Investigative Directorate] nobody responding’ (G2 interview).

These democratically mandated and collectively expressed attempts to engender peace and practical empowerment of hostel residents were not only actively blocked by the municipality but were mostly ignored by the dominant media. Combined with the ongoing violence directed at Ubunye leaders and members, as well as the associated corruption and criminality from the ranks of local government and the police, the cumulative result was that by 2016 Ubunye had effectively ceased to exist at Glebelands. As a resident sardonically noted, ‘… we are not condoms [to be] thrown away [but] that is what they do’ (G2 interview).

ROLE OF THE STATE

For the vast majority of communities, regardless of their political history, geographical location and socio-economic status, it is at the local level where the face of government is most visible and where its actions have the most impact. This certainly applies to Glebelands and even more so due to the fact that it is local government (in this case, the eThekwini Municipality) which has officially been running and managing the hostel complex for the last 15 years.

As has been the case with a large number of other poor communities when it comes to the provision of basic public services and infrastructure at the local government level (especially hostels, which have historically been the most neglected), many of the negative experiences of Glebelands have been well documented by Burger, especially in the independent online media publications, the Daily Maverick and Elitsha. Indeed, the general living conditions in the majority of the blocks is similar to that which applies in most poor township communities across the country.

This side of government’s role and activity, however, is the ‘easier’ one to notice and to expose, precisely because government’s service delivery failures have become so normalised in South African society, with the dominant media playing a sizeable role in that regard. However, the other side of that role and activity – the specific links between poor or non-existent service delivery and management, and government corruption, greed, criminality and conscious cover-ups – is regularly ignored and often hidden by news reportage. For the Glebelands interviewees though, they are very much two sides of the same coin.

Take the case of security-related infrastructure, on which tens of millions in public funds has been spent, much of it to outsourced private companies with questionable links to those in government (Ubunye bama Hostela et al. 2014). Such infrastructure has usually been publically presented, including by the dominant media, as practical confirmation of local government’s positive and preventative response to the ongoing violence and killings. But, that is not how one of the community leaders sees and experiences it:

There are people from the state that are making money out of blood … There is a fence surrounding us, what was this fence for? There are cameras here, there are so many people shot next to these cameras but I never heard not even one suspect that was arrested just because of the footage of the cameras … There are private security companies, we don’t know what they are doing here, they are going up and down, doing nothing (G2 interview).

Even more damning is the claim by a resident, who was an integral part of the Glebelands peace committee set up to ostensibly try to halt the violence, that local government officials and politicians are themselves party to the violence and killings through either conveniently looking the other way or through conscious facilitation:

Our government knows something about this violence, I can assure that … Before elections last year [2016] we were at the ICC [International Convention Centre], there was the mayor of Durban there [and] those kings of KwaZulu-Natal … [Also], there was a member of the ANC that is ruling inside here [at Glebelands]. He said we must stop now until elections then after we can start killing people – in front of the mayor … and nobody followed that. After [the] elections one of our peace committee members, Thobile Mazongono, was killed. That’s where they started; as the days go [another peace committee member] was shot again … (G3 interview).