As you drive from East London airport into the city, after the many auto and component factories, you pass the Latimer's Landing sign near the harbour. If you take a left turn after a few hundred metres, into an indistinct covered pathway used mainly by minibus taxi drivers, you emerge in a new world on the other side. Under a newly built shopping mall, in the hustle and bustle typical of many Eastern Cape towns, you compete with taxi drivers, pedestrians and rickety, short-trip cabs.
If you drive further, you might see behind the rusty skeleton of the industrial inner belly of Buffalo City the zinc-and-brick settlements of Duncan Village on the other side of the river. Founded in 1941, the township has always been home to migrants from outlying areas. However, the transfer of people from this area to Mdantsane in waves in the 1960s and 1970s, and Reeston in the 1990s, by local officials has been inadequate in alleviating the increasing number of households erecting informal structures in an attempt to access local economic opportunities.
Ironically, many of the 2,000 residents who will apparently be moved from Duncan Village in the coming weeks will be taken to Dimbaza. The same Dimbaza that clergyman David Russell starved over in protest; the dumping ground of the surplus and unwanted people of apartheid. Jesse Harber correctly notes that the removals, as urgent as they are in containment efforts, serve to reinforce the same de-densification thesis that has been a “recipe for failure”.
While the Covid-19 virus might not be the first virus to confront Duncan Village, the removals mooted in response to its spread by human settlements minister Lindiwe Sisulu are also not the first set of removals. The current crisis, though unprecedented in many ways, throws up a mix of old trauma, new contests and continuities in inequity and need. But it also presents an opportunity for an in situ reimagining of what the upgrading of informal settlements could look like, and the possibility of reversing the urban sprawl and migratory patterns at the centre of the challenges in local planning pursuits.
Whatsapp voice notes by councillors spread panic as locals rapidly procured — as the emergency requires — a bakkie for a local man to get tested for Covid-19. The residents are alive to what an uncontrolled and rapid spread of the virus could mean in the township’s historical infrastructure faultlines. The authorities know it too.
The Buffalo City Metro has received R340m to “evacuate” densely populated communities. The word evacuate rather than remove highlights the urgency of the situation. It also highlights the disappointment of it. In a week where storage tanks reached Maluti-a-Phofung and Kouga citizens who haven’t had water for years, many asked: “If this can be done so rapidly in an emergency situation, why was it not done pre-Covid?”
The evacuation is urgent because in many ways the authorities too accept that it is impossible to enforce the lockdown and social distancing in an area that houses between 80,000 and 100,000 residents. The plans are not just for Covid-19, it seems, but are also aimed at using the space afforded by the removals to overhaul the local sewer system and decongest the spatial organisation of a township that is at the heart of this industrial harbour city’s DNA.
South Africans will have front-row seats to watch the ambitions of state capacity unfold, and the direction such capacity is drawn towards. One hopes that a new world emerges on the other side. Beyond the covered pathway of uncertainty may lie opportunity.
• Cawe (@aycawe), a development economist, is MD of Xesibe Holdings and hosts MetroFMTalk on Metro FM.
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