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
