Defend Truth

Cato Crest: ‘We will stay…we have nowhere else to go’

On Sunday the eThekweni Municipality destroyed dozens of homes in Cato Crest, which it said had been built illegally on land earmarked for housing. RUMANA AKOOB, for Daily Vox, was there.

Durban’s shack dwellers live in constant fear. Evictions have become a common phenomenon in Durban and around the country.  On Sunday morning the eThekweni Municipality destroyed 48 informal dwellings in the Cato Crest settlement.

According to the 101 ward councillor, Nzimuni Ngiba, the municipality broke down these homes because their inhabitants were illegally occupying land that would be used for housing.

As this reporter arrived at Cato Crest, the protest had just become violent. Enraged residents had thrown rubbish onto the street. Burnt tyres blocked off the road next to the Jan Smuts highway. The settlement that was destroyed was just out of view of drivers who shook their heads at the protest and moved on, past the mansions that stand just a half a kilometre away from the devastation.

Within minutes, a community whose homes had just been brought to the ground where also under attack. Tear gas was thrown into the crowd of protesters and a stun grenade went off. The police ran through the settlement close by and a moustachioed policeman bellowed, “Send your members through!”

Cato Crest stuffed animal 2 [Rumana Akoob]

Photo: An abandoned stuffed animal.

The scene was something you’d expect to have happened during Apartheid, not 20 years after democracy.

Going against policemen’s requests for me to stay behind them I walked through the settlement to meet a community member who was too afraid to come close to the road again. “You’re going to get hurt, these people are dangerous,” a policeman carrying a gun warned me.

But the residents told me the police had it wrong. “If we try to stop them from breaking down our houses they threaten to kill us,” Mzamo Majozi told me.

“They come and break down our homes and when we build them up again they come again,” said Mpindelo Mahlwanthi, a Cato Crest resident who added that his shack has been broken down three times already this year.

Cato Crest destruction 1 [Rumana Akoob]

Photo: The destruction in Cato Crest

There were slanting trees used as bridges above streams, iron sheeting that used to be roofing. There was also a young mother. She carried her year-old baby and said in a trembling voice that she could not afford new materials to build with and that she’d have to sleep out in the cold.

The municipality had provided no alternative shelter.

Dumsani Ndlovou from the eThekweni Municipality’s human settlements unit said that when they go in to do an eviction, because of the cost to remove materials, they “work hard on destroying them so they become worthless.”

In the surrounds, people were fighting against the gathering darkness to salvage as much as they could and rebuild.

Schoolbooks littered the ground. Two dusty, stuffed toys lying beneath a fallen wall were visible. They struck a chord. You can never hide from the pain your fellow South Africans live through.

Majozi said that it was hard to live in their conditions. “They said they will come back tomorrow but we will stay here anyway; we have nowhere else to go.” DM

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