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).
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