Born free - only to perish on the streets of Delft
By Hajira Amla
21 February 2008
You have a one-year old baby in your arms and you have nowhere to sleep, no toilet facilities and no shelter. All your worldly possessions have been bulldozed as per the local government’s directives. What would you do when you realise that the government doesn’t care about you or your innocent child any more than the apartheid government did? Aren’t they the ones that talk about the forced removals of District Six and Sophiatown with haunted expressions on their faces? Why don’t they care about you, suffering here in the present?
Just by putting ourselves in the shoes of the mothers of the illegal settlers at the N2 Gateway housing project in Delft, Cape Town, we experience the kind of despair and anger these “invisible people” must be feeling. After being on a waiting list for housing for 12 years only to be usurped by others who had allegedly only recently put in applications, the disgruntled group of approximately 1 800 people took matters into their own hands and set up house in the long-unfinished Gateway housing complex.
Local charities and the public must now scramble to help these people who have been failed by the government. Don’t these people have a Constitutional right to shelter, clean water and human dignity? Will the children of this homeless crowd have to go to school and be compelled to recite a pledge to uphold the Constitution that their leaders are unable to stick to?
Although the rule of law certainly must be upheld, why was the question of equity left unanswered by the municipality and the judge who made the decision to turf out the poorest of the poor? The apartheid regime forcibly removed some 60 000 residents of District Six and relocated them to the Cape Flats about 28 kilometres away, uprooting families and making it difficult for former District Six residents to go to work and school. Here in this day and age, however, there is no relocation plan for the unsightly and indigent. The babies and the elderly are free to perish at their own leisure on the streets of Delft.
