It is common for most of us to be naked when we bath, Dan Plato, and most of us do so without fear of having our doors knocked in by masked gunmen, on instruction from bureaucrats with a deep disdain for the poor. The same bureaucrats, as we have learnt time and again in this country, will pass the responsibility on to functionaries.
The suspensions of those involved in the Bulelani Qholani incident, while welcome, serve as a public absolution of those at the helm of the power and property matrix that descended with great force on the small sandy corner that is Qholani’s world. As it did, many of us were caught flat-footed. What do we do now that we know? What did we do with what we have always known? Nothing.
The smartphone footage foreclosed the possibility of unseeing the real-time affront on the dignity of a father and citizen. Some have suggested we “crowd fund” and close ranks around Qholani. I agree, but while necessary and important, this action has to complement a thorough dissection of what was on display on that fateful first day of July.
I argue that Qholani’s humiliation and dehumanisation, rather than just eliciting an outflow of outrage and empathy, reveals the scale of the agitative and legislative work needed to expedite the expropriation of land without compensation. The precise precariousness of Qholani’s experience, even if he had invaded municipal or state land, as the City of Cape Town has suggested, does not explain the absence of alternative settlement options in a place with many vacant tracts of land close to economic opportunity.
The other dimension of what was on display last week was the Balkanisation of SA. There is a strong belief in parts of our society that Qholani had no “right” to be there. Govan Mbeki might have been speaking of Qholani’s Khayelitsha when he made reference to the Johannesburg of the 1930s, where he lived in cramped quarters. The police, Mbeki suggested, would “start searching the houses, beat up people” for no other reason than “that they were there”.
Qholani was beaten up because he was “there”, and ostensibly surplus to the needs of industry (or else he would be renting a backyard shack somewhere with the cash), rather than “in Transkei somewhere”.
There are historic linkages between Qholani’s case and those of many other residents of Khayelitsha who tick the Eastern Cape box next to the census question of their home province. In referring to these people as “refugees” several years ago, Helen Zille joined a long line that stretches from Cecil John Rhodes in 1894 to Hertzog to Verwoerd and even Plato. It is a tradition that positions Qholani and his family as aliens in the land of their birth.
Mbeki highlighted in his work on the Transkei the economic basis of this system. The theory of the “backward (bending) supply curve for African labour” was a justification for slave-like wages. In neoclassical economics, this argument suggests wages be brought close to subsistence, or else above a certain level a worker will substitute leisure for paid work, and thus higher wages lead to a decrease in labour supply as people “opt out” of the labour market. This theory explains the stripping of Africans of all the endowments (land, family, education, skill and reproductive rights) that would also induce such a proclivity for leisure.
Rhodes suggested before the houses of parliament at the Cape that Africans in the reserves “simply loaf about in sloth and laziness”. Mbeki pointed out that they were subsequently put to work in a milieu wherein “the law made it impossible to settle where they worked”. It is a tragic inheritance, as Qholani discovered, a nightmare feature of SA life from which we are yet to wake up.
• Cawe (@aycawe), a development economist, is MD of Xesibe Holdings and hosts MetroFMTalk on Metro FM.
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