riots engulf south african townships

Riots engulf South Africa's townships
By Benjamin Joffe-Walt in Cape Town
TelegraphUK
6/5/05

http://telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/06/05/wsafr05.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/06/05/ixworld.html

Happy Valley does not remotely live up to its name. A shabby collection of makeshift homes that is half township, half rubbish dump, its crime-ridden alleys erupted into violence this week as part of a nationwide wave of rioting that threatens to engulf South Africa.

Across Cape Town, township residents have been fighting with riot police armed with rubber bullets, tear gas and stun grenades in scenes that echo the anti-apartheid riots of the 1980s. This time, though, the focus of anger is the ruling African National Congress and its failure to push through improvements long promised since the end of white rule.

Happy Valley is a drenched wasteland. In pouring rain, roofs fashioned from planks and plastic sheeting leak like old taps. There is no refuse removal or medical care and there are no lavatories. Residents must relieve themselves in the nearby bush, but not at night: last Thursday night a man was stabbed to death and earlier last week a woman was raped.

"When Nelson Mandela was released 15 years ago, I thought we'd be living with more dignity by now," says Noluthando Valela, who lives with six people in a one-room shack and took to the streets with tens of thousands of fellow protesters last week. "How can they name a place Happy Valley under such conditions? It's absolutely appalling."

President Thabo Mbeki, who won a second term last year after he pledged improvements in the townships, admitted that the riots would destabilise the country. "The riots seek to exploit the class and nationality fault lines we inherited from our past," Mr Mbeki told parliament. "If ever they took root, gaining genuine popular support, they would pose a threat to the stability of democratic South Africa."

Sandwiched between a range of mountains and the Indian and Atlantic oceans, Cape Town has until now been among the most peaceful and prosperous parts of post-apartheid South Africa. The city, with its nearby vineyards and lush -forests and its fine old Dutch houses, has become home to a growing number of expatriate Britons, attracted by the lack of crime that blights other cities such as Johannesburg.

But with unemployment in South Africa running at more than 40 per cent, many of the city's 2.5 million people know little of the good life. Township residents are disenchanted and bitter about the indignity of their lives, believing that after 11 years in power the government has lost all desire to help the country's poor.

No one living in Mrs Valela's shack has an income. She burns wood in a large can to cook for the family, storing drinking water in a similarly blackened tin. Her little boys sleep in a small outhouse on a bed made of old cloths, soaking wet from the constantly leaking plastic roof.

"We want to show the authorities that they must pay attention to us," she said. "We burned tyres and threw our s**t all over the street. They can deal with it for once."

In the nearby Khayelitsha township, Nqabisa Ntete, a protest leader, invites visitors to sniff the air. The streets double as open sewage channels and residents are forced to tip-toe through puddles of green excrement to get to their shacks. Children play freely in the channels, kicking footballs covered in sewage.

Clothes lines are often kept indoors because of the smell and, with the rainy season beginning, most homes are flooded. As part of the protests, residents dumped buckets of excrement in the house of a local councillor, whom they referred to as "Mr Idiot" in their chants.

"We are not criminals," Mr Ntete said. "But we have no houses, no toilets, no water, and no other way to attract the attention of government."

Although Cape Town has been the centre of the protests, sporadic riots have also broken out in six of South Africa's nine other provinces in the past month. One protester was killed by police in the Free State province.

Mr Mbeki's government has sought to portray the problems as a legacy of apartheid, stressing that decades of township neglect cannot be overcome quickly.

In the decade of democracy since the first all-inclusive elections in 1994, the government has built 1.6 million houses and given nine million people access to clean water.

Overall, however, housing improvements have come much slower than hoped and the shortage of homes is particularly severe in Cape Town. Across the country there is a backlog of people waiting for 260,000 homes to be built. The residents of the townships are not impressed by the government's record.

They also resent the fact that it called in the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) to investigate whether a "secret force" was orchestrating the riots and brought charges of sedition against protesters in Free State.

"We gave them time but they've done nothing," said Ashraf Cassiem, another protest organiser. "Today we have more unemployment, more crime and more homelessness because of evictions. The people are sick of it."

Evictions are a particularly sore point. Most of the townships were created to house people forcibly removed from areas that were desirable to whites under apartheid segregation laws.

"These people were forced into the townships," says Mr Cassiem. "They never paid rates but now they are being asked to pay and being evicted because they can't afford the taxes, rates or the bond on the shack they never even chose to live in. We're not dogs here. We're human beings."

These are difficult times for the ANC. In a separate scandal last week Jacob Zuma, the deputy president and Mr Mbeki's heir apparent, suffered the embarrassment of seeing a close friend and financial adviser, Shabir Shaik, convicted of corruption. A court found "overwhelming evidence" that the relationship between the men was corrupt.

The verdict prompted renewed calls for Mr Zuma's resignation and deepened the sense that South Africa's political masters are little better than its previous ones.

As one Happy Valley resident said during a confrontation with police: "We have no jobs, we're living without houses in complete filth, our local officials are corrupt, even our next president is corrupt. What else would you suggest we do?"


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