The xenophobia of bureaucracy

The only time I have heard Ebrahim Rasool speak was at the launch of a book of Sufi philosophy I had helped edit. The launch was in a museum in the Bo-Kaap. Rasool was on his home turf, comfortable amidst his community. He was confident, humane, urbane, knowledgeable and deeply impressive.

The now notorious refugee camp called Soetwater is a few kilometres from where I live. Three thousand people have been living there in bitter cold, increasingly wet tents for two weeks, tortured by uncertainty. They were wrenched from their homes and businesses by violence and terror. Overnight, the patient, painful work of years was plundered, burnt or crumbling behind them. The response of the authorities, and the UN, to their plight has been to insist that they must return to the communities that turned on them so suddenly and brutally. In other words, preserving the illusion of national harmony and tolerance is considered more

A witness to xenophobic attacks in Joe Slovo settlement, Cape Town

This is a young woman’s experience of xenophobic violence, and police complicity, in her community:

I live in Joe Slovo settlement, in Milnerton. It was Thursday afternoon (22 May). Me and my friends were talking, and my friends were saying, “These foreigners, they must leave the country.” My feelings were different, that these are Africans, and we must stand together, but my friends said their parents feel betrayed by these foreigners, because they’re losing their jobs to these foreigners. So if someone’s standing with foreigners looking for a job, the foreigners will say to whoever’s going to hire them, “You can give me less money than to the South Africans.”

That’s where the complications come in, like say, the Somalians, they have these shops, where the prices are cheaper, which makes it difficult for the other black people, like the Xhosa, because people are going to go to the Somalian shops. So that’s where the conflict comes in.

And the other issue that came up in our discussion is that [my friends] believe that these foreigners come to South Africa with drugs, and that these drugs are affecting their children and their lives. But me, in my own opinion, there may be some who come in and sell drugs and stuff like that, but the other [foreigners] who are innocent, they work very hard, like five to five a day for minimum wages . . . But my friends say, “They’re not supposed to be here, they must go back to their country, ‘cause they’re simply messing up our country.”

But at the same time, while these riots are happening, our brothers, our brothers who are very close-minded, criminals who normally do stuff, get a chance to do things. So that night, when the riots were happening, they were burning people’s containers, you know, where [the foreigners] do business. People were burning

Ode to the cardboard toilet roll

On a slightly lighter note than recent circumstances have permitted:–

Oh simple cylinder:
You have not changed; you are constant,

you are the brown paper bulwark I have always known;
unstamped, unnamed, unmottled;
you do not come in a fresh multitude of seasonal colours;
you have not been plasticised, imbued with essence of potpourri, lavender
or 16 other fresh new fragrances that will have my friends
wondering how they slipped behind in the racing cargo cult;
you do not offer coy shelter to special offers or once-in-a-lifetime opportunities
to scorch the planet in flight to ever more indistinguishable destinations.
Without fanfare or hesitation or hope of recognition,
you simply give invisible and unfailing support,
as do all the world’s real heroes.
Unwrapped and shredded on soil, you do not fight death
but yield perfectly to oblivion — or kindergarten craft.
You are neither new nor improved, your humility has not yet been torn
from you by the greed of others;
you are, without pretence, just perfect.

[this doesn't really work as a poem as the humour is trampled by earnestness, so it's posted as socioeconomic commentary!]

Amongst the lizard men at the WEF on Africa

I’m at the World Economic Forum for Africa. At least I think I am. Four of the five panelists at the opening press conference were most certainly not African, so perhaps I’ve been transported to some parallel, non-African dimension. But then, this is the WEF on Africa, not the WEF for Africa.

I was greeted by Lucy at media registration. Irish, I think.

Besuited WEF delegates at the Cape Town International Convention Centre

She told me that quite a few sessions are off-limits for the media. ‘Why, is that because the lizard people need a chance to breathe and scratch their scales?’ I ask. She was unfazed.

But back to that press conference, an insipid ritual designed only for casting some few shards of offhand wisdom to less-than-agog hacks.

Mrs Ogata, head of the Japanese Overseas Development Agency, and a previous head of the UNHCR, tells us that Japan’s overseas development priorities have now shifted: ‘Asia has moved up. Our main focus has shifted into Africa.’

Perhaps the Japanese are feeling left out of the sudden tumble to exploit Africa’s commodity markets. The Chinese have been tumbling in for the last couple of years, with partnerships, initiatives and the usual arsenal of ‘we take your stuff and give money to your elites’-type strategies. By some accounts, the Chinese were bankrolling Mugabe’s regime till recently.

The Japanese are burdened with having to be a little more respectable,

Calling them internment camps clarified what they nearly became

Rastafarian waving a flag in protest against xenophobia, at a vigil outside Parliament, on May 23. No politicians attended the vigil. Rastas have been brutally assaulted when standing up against xenophobic mobs.

The use of the term “internment camps” for the City of Cape Town refugee camps, by the Treatment Action Campaign, has become somewhat controversial. This is my view, posted as a comment elsewhere. I omitted to mention the sheer terror with which many refugees, victims of state violence elsewhere on the continent, respond to official action :

["Internment camps" is] a very emotive term — but the city was at one stage undoubtedly heading towards creating places that would have been internment camps in all but name.

I have absolutely no doubt about this, because I heard discussions amongst city officials myself, in person, with my own ears, showing that they were at times considering lockdowns on the camps and sites, for ’security reasons’, and that they thought they might end up forcibly removing people from certain locations. At least one of the sites was in fact locked down over Sunday night. What’s more, the city wanted to remove people from all the smaller refuges and concentrate them in the camps.

From genocide to genocide to persecution in Cape Town

Refugee leader Theo addresses his fellows outside Caledon Square police station, in central Cape Town

I can’t get the stench of urine out of my nostrils. It’s the smell of fear, anger and humiliation.

I smelt it last night, when I spoke to the refugees outside Caledon Square police station. I saw it running thick in the gutters a couple of feet away from where people were sleeping. I smelt it again this morning, when I went round to advise them that lawyers and press were about to visit to take statements. The refugees were preparing to embark on a hunger strike. Theo, a published author from the DRC, was standing on a milk crate, addressing his comrades. They were refusing to abandon the pavement, in protest at their treatment by the government.

There must have been a whole lot of developments during the day which I was unable to track, as this evening they were being driven to a community hall in Sea Point, awaiting a visit by the provincial premier or his representative.

After talking to the refugees at Caledon Square, I crossed the road to the District Six Museum, to request they open up toilet facilities. Filled with righteous indignation at the doors I’d found barred the night before, I embarrassed myself fairly thoroughly, as it turned out the side doors had been open, and the museum staff had been doing a great deal for the refugees.

Then I drove out with another volunteer to assessments of the refugee sites, one of several teams with that task today. We expected to see signs of misery, and to run into obstructive and unpleasant officials. Fortunately we did not. Others, however, did.

Silwerstroom, which is one of the six official city camps, is 45 mins drive out of the city, north, near Atlantis. It’s a resort. Now there are six large tents erected there, the kind events management people erect for banquets. Carpets cover the earth.

Refugees queue for ‘brunch’ at the Silverstroom camp, 45 mins north of Cape Town

The site was created to cater for 2000 people. Fortunately, only 250 are there, and in what seemed like relatively decent conditions, though as the rain pours down now, I dread to think how miserable they must be. Though they have many blankets and sleeping mats, many said they’d been terribly cold at night, and I know from experience how cold it can get right next to the Atlantic, even in the middle of summer.

The Red Cross is now leading efforts to feed people, albeit inconsistently. They get just two meals a day, and the ‘brunch’ we saw served late at 12.15 was little more than two slices of bread.

Officials from the Department of Home Affairs were visiting. One of the DRC refugees pointed at one of them, and said he had told her that her son, born in South Africa, is not a South African national.

Many of them came from Du Noon, and again I heard reports of how police in that area had collaborated in the looting of their homes and shops. The refugees now have a fairly universal distrust and fear of black South Africans, by all accounts. At one of the sites, some were threatened with throat slitting gestures by people erecting tents. Officials running some of the sites are siphoning off supplies and selling them or giving them away to non-refugees.

TAC volunteers sort clothes for distribution to refugees, with frenetic speed - Sunday 25 May

We then visited several churches in Rondebosch, Claremont and Mowbray, each housing between 20 and 100 people. In all of them, the local communities had provided amazing support. At one church in Claremont, doctors, even counsellors, had been organised. There are many hundreds of people around the city working very hard to support other refugees in similar circumstances.

But the situations do vary. Twenty people holed up in a church in Mowbray will not venture onto the streets. They were hounded by an angry mob outside a church right in the middle of Cape Town, an incident which has gone completely unreported it seems.

The vast majority of refugees seem to be Zimbabwean and Congolese. In other words, from two of the most conflict-ridden countries in the region.

Someone from TAC this evening heard the following statement from one of the refugees departing the pavement at Caledon Square. They embarked on the buses in terrible fear, dreading where they might actually be taken. This man, a Burundian, spoke along these lines:

“Many of us have been running all our lives. Since I was six, I have been surrounded by death. I escaped genocide in Burundi to go to Rwanda. I fled genocide in Rwanda to the DRC, and fled from mass killings there to return to Rwanda. From there, I went to Tanzania, and then came to South Africa. Now, this happens, and I must flee again.”

Here’s a New York Times article on everything that’s happening, written in their customary remote and genteel tones.

The abusive ‘mother city’

This evening, I stood outside the Caledon Square police station, where 150 displaced South Africans of other nationalities are sleeping on the pavement, amidst a heavy smell of urine. They’ve been here for two nights already. The rain is about to come, heavy rain for the next three days. Around them swirls a fight between the city authorities and the provincial authorities. No more than 20m from a fucking police station, and they’ve not after two days been provided with anything other than food and blankets by members of the community.

A group of 12 people from the DRC and Tanzania and Rwanda and Burundi and Somalia surround me (not threateningly) and grill me on what’s happening. “My business of ten years has been destroyed, how can I go back to my mother empty-handed?” “How will we get restitution?” “This government treats us like animals.” “Where is the government, why do they not come to talk us?” “We don’t trust anyone any more, we want the UNHCR.” “They must send us to Namibia, to Zambia. There we will be okay.”

Zimbabweans who have been holed up in a backyard shack in Khayelitsha for three days, after being stoned by locals, prepare to leave

My armchair theory that South Africa is in fact one of the continent’s least developed countries, when one looks at human decency and not at numbers of shopping malls, looks dismayingly substantial.

John, from the DRC, had two businesses which he ran from containers in Nyanga. He is married to a South African woman. He has two South African children. Yet he has been hounded from his home to sleep on a stinking pavement outside a police station. He has no idea whether he will ever be able to return to his family.

They are all sleeping on the pavement across the road from the District Six Museum, a museum supposedly dedicated to the rights of forcibly displaced people. Yet tonight, with dozens of forcibly displaced people on its doorstep, those doors remain tightly barred. [update on Wednesday: I was completely wrong about the museum, they are doing lots to assist]

Earlier this evening, we heard that officials from the Department of Social Development, were telling the manager of one of the sites out on the flats, Father Louis, to keep out TAC, and to keep out journalists. So government officials are trying to muzzle the media and block civil society assistance.

Fortunately they are not succeeding. While there are now 21 000 people in recognised sites around the peninsula, many in church halls and mosques, there are many as well in private homes. They are the fortunate ones. I spoke today to a man in Paarden Island whose non-profit company is cooking meals for 6 000. Here outside Caledon Square, I meet Bilel, a Muslim whose community is feeding hundreds of people in the Youngsfield Military Base. Donations are pouring in to TAC. Many are helping. Conditions in the camps are bad, in many instances. Tomorrow I’ll know more.

What should I tell the people around me? That the mayor, Helen Zille, once considered a determined leader for human rights would rather shut them up in internment camps than allow them into smaller, more humane community halls – because to do so would disrupt some weddings!!? That she, the mayor of an entire city of millions, was indignantly telling TAC (the small volunteer-based organisation with which I’m working) this morning that the city had done at least as much as us? That the government has spent the last two weeks mostly sitting on its collective backside while the president contemplates his evaporating legacy through thick glass and amber fluid? That the authorities are now forcibly preventing people from leaving some of the camps, camps even the likes of TAC initially supported.This is a tourist city. But it does not welcome those who are black. At the foot of Africa, something revoltingly close to apartheid is alive and kicking.

And during the day, the suburbs and the city move on, most people mostly unmoved, as always, by the disaster a few feet away.

Update: Wednesday morning

Going, at least, by what I read in the Cape Times, it seems some measure of order may be descending.

The UNHCR has spoken against the camps established by the city. Reading between the lines, there seems to be a greater measure of consensus amongst the various parties. Let’s hope dialogue continues. The challenge seems to remain getting information about what is actually happening, and where, and properly coordinating (to whatever degree is possible) the multitude of efforts.

Vast amounts of resources are now being mobilised. There’s probably even a danger that too much may be pushed into the situation.

I am, more than ever, convinced that in situations such as these, it is the efforts of ordinary people working in their immediate environment, that truly makes a difference, as much if not far more than the efforts of large organisations. All have their place, but the first kind of effort is more valuable. And when people start shouting at each other, and pointing fingers, it simply strengthens those who are neglectful, apathetic or incompetent, while undermining those determined to do good in allegiance with others doing the same.

Protesting xenophobia, in the absence of xenophobes

Archbishop Thabo Mokgatho addresses a protest meeting in Cape Town’s St Georges Cathedral. His plea for an end to the furious finger-pointing that surrounds us has so far gone unheeded.

I’d prefer to be doing something more ‘useful’ but I’m sitting in St. Georges Cathedral, waiting to play into a microphone, a sound clip of refugees speaking of their experiences. It’s one item on the programme at a public meeting protesting xenophobia. I’m wearing a t-shirt that says ‘foreigner on the front’, as are many. Archbishop Mokgatho’s wearing it over his long purple robes. I haven’t had a chance to read the back yet.

Themba Baleni, my soundman from Beat It days, greets me – we haven’t seen each other for over two years. He tells me that Peter, the cameraman we used to work with, is now living on the streets in Muizenberg. This I had heard already; but had hoped might have changed.

The cathedral is filling up with people from all Cape Town’s communities, archbishops, imams and chief justices will speak alongside the activists.

And for xenophobic attacks, press 9

Police at anti-xenophobia ‘vigil’ outside Parliament on Friday 23 May

This was written on the night of Sunday 26. By Monday midday, fortunately, it seemed sense had prevailed, in good part due to strong pressure from the likes of TAC, and the authorities had retreated from insisting that all refugees be concentrated in a few large camps.

I’m sitting in the Cape Town Disaster Risk Management Centre, around a square of desks, cables, microphones and cables. It’s 2am, and half the eight people in the room are asleep. They’re not being neglectful – out on the flats and in the townships, the violence has, for tonight at any rate, subsided. No more bullets fly in Du Noon, that we know of. (“Who’s shooting?” “If there were names on the bullets, we’d know.”)

In front of me is the carefully tabulated Treatment Action Campaign/Aids Law Project/MSF assessment of the refugee situation: “Displaced persons, Sunday 25 May: 8969”.

Phrases: “entirely lacking in all supplies”, “incidents of intimidation at hospital”, “desperately need more ablution blocks”, “seems to be well-kept and under control”, “military providing protection”, “crowd unsettled, concerned for lack of safety; lack of drinking water”.

Over 650 people are in the Gant’s warehouse in Somerset West, 500 in the Desmond Tutu hall, 1320 in the Kraaifontein Youth Centre.

Perception and faerie

Last night I dreamt of someone I knew at school. He has not entered my conscious mind in nearly twenty years, probably because before that I didn’t like him very much. In the dream he offered me a bite of a roast potato, while my car was burgled. Hmm. But the potato, the car and the burglary are not the point of this excursus (thanks for that word, Nadia; perhaps blogs should rather be called excursions).

Joseph Paton’s Study for the quarrel of Oberon and Titania.
Pic: Wikimedia Commons

For on waking I remembered how very different people seemed to me as a child. When I was six, in a school in Johannesburg, bathed in the (then) comfortingly bright light of fluorescent tubes as the deep gloom of thunderstorms battered around us, as beans grew behind blotting paper in glass jars and potatoes surrendered to the hands of early Gutenbergs, the forms of people around me shifted immensely. If children of 11 or 12 entered the classroom, there seemed to my eyes to be very little difference between them and the teacher. All were huge, infinitely wise and worldly, inhabiting a remote domain I could only dream of entering. Of my peers, who to adult eyes would have seemed then almost uniformly innocent, some were saints and some literally almost as threatening as trolls; and indeed, some would waylay me on the road home.

It seems possible then, given these huge variations in perception, that the realm of fairy tales is perhaps not so much one originally conjured by those who wished to spin tales for the entertainment of the young, but a function of the medieval tribal mind boggled by encounters with merchants and nobles; encounters which for many, isolated by geography, must have been far, far more occasional than we imagine. And if I, as a medieval peasant remote even from the feudal system, somehow entered the world of these “elves and fairies”, and for a few years lived a vastly different and more prosperous life away from my people, then on my return to those left behind, they would indeed have been aged by grueling lives, while I in turn would feel comparatively untouched by time.

We do not know how dark are the depths from which we have sometimes clambered. (I say sometimes, for I do not believe the minds of all pre-feudal peasants were dark; while many of us remain in the dark.) These fixed forms, our bodies, are more instantly mutable than we imagine; they shift and change in the minds of others. The shape of the world we see is far more a function of our minds than we imagine. The gloomy insistence of science that there is an objective, “standard” reality to which we should shape our perceptions and conform, is rather totalitarian. Sure it’s helpful, when we’re conducting open-heart surgery, or casually obliterating children and their mind-cloud-blossoms of light and thought with high-tech weaponry, but it’s totalitarian.

Reality is a language we speak to each other.

(Or shout at each other. Or broadcast with stadium-scale speakers. So blogging, the willingness, most often, to speak only to the few – or none – is many times an advance.)

[There are a number of retrospective postings on this blog.]