Cape Town fast for right to a home

Press, 13 April 1982, Page 20

Cape Town fast for right to a home

By

ALLISTER SPARKS

in Cape Town

While politicians, publicists and sportsmen argue about whether white South Africa is really trying to reform itself, 54 black people have embarked on a death fast in protest against what apartheid is doing to them.

They are not political fanatics like the men who starved themselves to death in Belfast’s Maze Prison. They are ordinary men and women, mostly domestic servants and casual labourers, who belong to no organisation and know little about politics. They have no great ideological or’nationalistic cause for which they are prepared to die. All they want is the right to work and to live with their families.

On March 10 they entered St George’s Anglican Cathedral in Cape Town and vowed not to eat until they are granted that right. It is denied them not because of the more antiquated South African regulations known as ’’petty apartheid," which the Government has indicated a willingness to relax. These people are the victims of the policy's most modern formulation. being implemented by the Cabinet’s leading "verligte” (reformist) Dr Piet Koornhof — the man who "normalised" .sport and who has now been put in charge of African affairs.

Mrs Xoliswa Mgweba, aged 35, tells how Dr Koornhof's system drove her to such desperation that she is now in the cathedral, starving herself. She was born in Cape Town, but at the age of four her mother died and an aunt took her to the Transkei, 1100 kilometres away. In terms of modernised apartheid, the Transkei is now an independent State. It is in tribal homelands like that where Africans are supposed to enjoy their "separate freedoms,” so that the white man can enjoy his in the rest of South Africa. The trouble is there are no jobs in the overcrowded homelands, so, in 1965, Xoliswa came back to Cape Town. That made her an illegal immigrant, because she is. officially a foreigner in South Africa. She began living with a man in what are supposed to be singlesex barracks in Langa township. Though it is a stable relationship, and although Xoliswa has a stable job as a domestic servant, that made her g situation doubly illegal. Last July, the authorities evicted her from the barracks. With nowhere else to go. she

and some 2000 others set up a squatter camp in the bush outside Cape Town. On a wet and bitter winter's day the police demolished the camp and arrested the squatters. Xoliswa went to jail. She was allowed bail, returned to the. bush camp to build a new shack, only to have it demolished and to be jailed again.

Eventually Xoliswa and about 1000 others were loaded in buses and sent "home” — to the Transkei, which she had not seen for 17 years and where she knows nobody. There was neither work nor accommodation for the squatters in the Transkei. So gradually they made their way back to Cape Town. Again they were arrested and sent to the Transkei. Again they returned. In the nine months since the cycle began, the squatter camp has been raided and demolished 50 times.

The squatters want to see Dr Koornhof to appeal to him personally. He says he will see them only if they leave the cathedral. They say they are afraid that if they leave the cathedral they will be arrested

and sent to the Transkei again. So their fast goes on.

Most are illiterate so they do not read. There are no radios. They do not .even converse much. They sit there silently, amid a litter of blankets and baskets, some knitting, some dozing, some simply staring ahead of them with the awesome patience of Africa. Around them children play and laugh. There are 14 babies and toddlers, who are being fed and who look incongruously carefree among the sombre adults. Suddenly from among the patient, silent rows someone will call out a single phrase. Others take it up and the great cathedral is filled with the beautiful harmonising of an African chant. At noon each day they pray. It begins formally, led by some visiting Mfundisi (minister), but soon they get carried away into an urgent cacophony of individual imploration. They shake with fervour. Then they are quiet again, sunk back into their patient vigil. They are waiting, they say, for God to help them.—Copyright, — London Observer Service.