Mother who got arrested protecting my daughter when she was brutally arrested by the new riot police.Lying in the cells listening to the women of Manenberg explain why they went to the Common left me wondering whether I had come full circle in the new South Africa: I got angry as a young woman when I was trying to cool down at Muizenberg beach on a hot Boxing Day and I was unceremoniously thrown off that lovely beach because I was named ‘coloured’ by the apartheid government.
I ended up as one of the many youth who every day – instead of getting good university grades – went to interview working-class people in coloured townships. Every day, we knocked on their doors and patiently and painstakingly documented their grievances against the white government. The electricity bills at the ‘Flatse’ (the ghettos in Grassy Park and Lotus River) were astronomical. The municipality was fleecing the residents who were so mired in poverty that they didn’t know how to respond. The council-owned flats were also falling apart – roofs leaked, window-frames were rotten, toilet bowls were cracked, and Trevor Manuel, our ex-Finance Minister under Mbeki, led the UDF campaign at the time to get the council to sell the houses to residents. Those of us with more left-wing views did not want these tenants burdened with buying these houses. We believed the houses should just be given to them, as they had already paid for the flats so many times over with rent, but that the council should first do the repairs on the flats.
On Friday (the 27th of Feburary) night at the jail, the older women lamented how long some of them had stayed in the flats in Manenberg. The younger women also resented the ‘red slips’ they constantly received to warn them of evictions from the flats. Some promises had been made that new houses would be built. Instead, a new recreation centre was constructed. When people do not have decent and stable accommodation, recreation is not a priority in their view. Nothing came of the promises for new houses. (In the ‘new’ South Africa, electricity too is a big expense.) While some participants may have been inclined to see the march to Rondebocsh Common in symbolic terms – reclaiming public spaces in the same way as the global Occupy movement that is unfolding in the US and elsewhere – there were many practical goals informing these women protesters, Their main goal was to take land like the Rondebosch Common, which is not being used, and to build houses on it.
So once again, more than 30 years after the heroic initiation of mass action that brought the apartheid regime down, working-class people are turning back to the protest lines and questioning who democracy is meant for, as the niceties of democracy have left them high and dry in the old coloured townships. Numbers are still small, but the apartheid ‘kragdadigheid’ of the DA’s response on Friday suggests that the DA fears how quickly these numbers may grow if they don’t stamp out the problem now. Reminds one of what the old apartheid regime thought, too, when they said that the protests were the work of a few agitators. Soon after, the masses ran them down like a buffalo stampede.
My second déjà vu was being grabbed and put in a van with others to be incarcerated for political reasons. Almost 30 years ago, I told my learners to sing when we occupied the schools, our own schools that they were trying to evict us from. Then, too, a contingent of riot police came to put the fear of death into our young students. It had the opposite effect: it reminded them that something was being protected, but it was not them. Our concerns then – for equal education, for houses, for jobs, for land – are still paramount in the agenda of change today. So what can we do, tired as we may be, but put on our struggle boots again and stand on the side of right, as we have always believed was our duty? Three burly policeman threw their large bodies on my daughter’s little frame as she tried to walk away from the Common on Friday; what mother would stand by and watch such brutality being inflicted on her child? I had no choice but to stand by her side. I have no choice but to stand by their sides. Occupy the schools then; occupy the Common now. Our struggle continues in the déjà vu at the Common.
The beautiful ones are not yet born
Friday’s Rondebosch Common arrests took place on the corner of the Red Cross Children’s Hospital, the only dedicated children’s hospital in Africa. So when you are in labour, you push. For the lucky ones, the push is quick. For others, they have to push a lot more. We pushed in South Africa, but we didn’t push far enough. We took democracy forward; we created a platform, the generation of the eighties, for democratic change. Some, like the SACP, used to talk about the second stage of resistance: they said that economic freedom would come in the second stage of the struggle. So we did a good job to push the birth of the new society this far, but now we have to push some more or live with the stinking reality of an abortion. Economic freedom must be ours!
Darlene Miller is a researcher for the Human Sciences Research Council and is currently focusing her work on integrated sciences for the International Social Sciences Council.
