organisation
While this varies widely according to the community, it is vital to provide a clear sense of the reasons behind the formation of the organisation or collective, its relationships (internal and external), core purpose and overall trajectory, as well as the main experiences in struggle. Doing so also allows for the surfacing of any divisions within the community and how this plays out and is understood.
Four: Role of the state
This applies both proactively and reactively and allows for particular attention to be given to the state’s approach to and activity around community protest and voice, as well as official or legal spaces, combined with avenues and institutions for community participation and redress. Where applicable, this also provides an opportunity to include the role and activities of traditional authorities.
Five: Role of political parties
Political parties are most often at the heart of community politics and conflict, more particularly through local councillors, as well as through influence over key local state and governance structures and institutions. As such, their role and activity is central to shaping the character and content of community life and struggle.
Six: Role of law enforcement and the courts
Given the conflictual nature of community stories being ‘told’, it is important to surface the continuities and contradictions of related actions or reactions, complaints for redress, justice and accountability, as well as any measures taken to address these, both immediately and over time.
Seven: The dominant and other media
Rarely are the opinions and experiences that poor people have of the dominant media ever surfaced with any kind of depth and detail. Not only does this allow for a more grounded appraisal and critique but, it also provides space for surfacing the specifics of how the dominant media’s coverage and portrayal can and does impact on how the broader public see the community, its struggles and its residents.
Eight: What the future holds
These questions give air to the broader socio-political and more specific practically oriented views of those whose voice(s) are most ignored and marginalised. Besides that though, the responses here can provide a firm basis upon which to show how the dominant media largely sidelines the positive side of community stories as well as individual and collective endurance, sacrifices and emotions, which would allow for more human and universalist connections.
We developed the eight categories above, with regard to the specific and contextual struggles experienced by each of the three communities, but also according to the principles of voice(s) outlined in chapter 1. These include the principle that voice is not static but is rather an ongoing process: narratives can change and develop over time. Voice is socially grounded, and as such can only be properly understood by placing it within its associated historical and political context. Each voice is distinct because each narrator is different, and each narrative is related to an interweaving set of related stories. There is never only one voice speaking to any particular set of events or issue, but a multiplicity of voices: the task for us as researchers and journalists is to seek out this multiplicity instead of hearing only the ‘loudest’ voice. Above all, we operated according to the fundamental principle that all voice(s) and every voice has value.
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
