Unsightly blacks had to go

Press, 12 August 1986, Page 10

Unsightly blacks had to go

NZPA-AFP Uitenhage

In South Africa, white and black communities usually live kilometres apart. But in the small eastern Cape Province town of Uitenhage, the two had come too close and the whites complained that the blacks’ shanties spoiled the landscape.

They organised a petition. As a result, the authorities began a forced removal of hundreds of squatters to a tent town Bkm away.

About 550 black families were uprooted. They were made to pull down their tin shanties, pile their belongings into Government trucks and move away, safely out of sight. “As a human being I am bitter because I am reduced to the level of an animal,” said one woman squatter, Gertrude Noyo.

But Mrs Nellie Buitendag, whose house had overlooked the squatter camp, had a different way of looking at things: “It just didn’t look nice . . . You know blacks, bow they shout and scream

and carry on.” Uitenhage is about 50km from Port Elizabeth and has a population of about 30,000 whites, 30,000 mixed-race people and 350,000 blacks.

Most blacks used to live in Langa, a township of shacks that leapt into world headlines in March, last year when the police opened fire on a funeral crowd, killing 20 people, some of them children. Much of Langa has already been moved to a new township of boxlike brick and cement houses where conditions are better but rents are much higher a crushing burden for a community where unemployment is rife.

The remaining 8000 families are resisting removal, saying that their slum land should be improved so that they can stay where; they have always called home. Kabah, the part of Langa closest to Uitenliage’s white suburbs, gradually expanded until, over the last few years, the sea of squatter shacks began lapping against tidy

white suburbia. Less than Ikm separated them. Last year, residents of the white suburbs of Levyvale and Mossel petitioned for the removal of Kabah. They said crime had rocketed in their suburbs, and that property rates had plummeted. Mrs Buitendag said her house had been burgled nine times in 12 years. One man said his wife had to carry a pistol all the time, and several people complained that washing. was always disappearing off clotheslines.

The Kabah squatters were declared illegal residents and ordered to move. Helped by civil rights workers and lawyers, they attempted a court action to stop the removals, but it failed. In July, black policemen moved into Kabah, often at night, and warned the squatters that if they did not co-operate in tearing down their shacks, it would be done for them.

The police coerced the squatters, many of them illiterate, into signing

away many rights, residents said.

Using the signed forms as proof, the authorities said the removals were strictly voluntary. Some squatters said they were given the forms at soup kitchens set up by the authorities, ‘'and they thought they were signing for free soup.

The blacks were resited in small, windowless plastic tents for temporary accommodation until they reassembled the wooden frames, tin walls and roofs of their dismantled shanties.

Two people, one of them an 8-year-old girl, suffocated and died in one of the tents. There are few taps in the tent-town. Water trucks are supplying water daily. Some portable toilets have been provided, but not nearly enough. Several people said they were using the bare ground for their personal needs.

Back at their former home, Kabah became a strip of green, restoring a pleasant view to thewhitj£ houses. ; . j