Our Mother City is Motherless

Cape Town, also known as the ‘Mother City’, is one of the top tourist destinations in the world. The city is also one of the most racially segregated cities in the world, and, further, the city is characterized by inequality. Gael Reagon argues that Cape Town is being “enslaved and stratified according to who has material wealth and who does not. The mother city is motherless.”

"An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so." Mahatma Gandhi

On 7 December 2006, the city of Cape Town will vote on a bylaw which, if passed or not, will be an acute measurement of our morality. The By Law Relating to Streets, Public Places and Prevention of Nuisances is a slim invidious document that outlines the strategic management of the central city’s spaces and of its people.

It is the social dimension of the ‘nuisances’ bylaw that concerns me heavily on the reasoning that the one operates in relation to the other – that how we treat each other in the same space (our public and natural resources) will indicate who or perhaps more cogently, what we are. In that a society is measured by its treatment of its least.

A reading of the new proposed consolidated nuisances bylaw reveals a political premise and ethical ethos that regard the poor as social untouchables to be driven legally and economically from the centre to the gods know where, the desolate dustbowl of Happy Valley seems the favoured destination. Having in the last few months been walking at all hours the city streets with a crew of thinking caring people - Nombulelo, Mimi, Buyaphi, Wasefa and Sibusiso - we can attest via personal experience and witnessing, that our city is in anomie, an advanced state of lawlessness that benefits the rich and beleaguers the poor.

Rohinton Maistry, in his astute novel, A Fine Balance, set in the crazed schism of the post- independence India/Pakistan split, intones it succinctly, that ‘when they said they would clean the streets of poverty, they meant clean out the poor’.

Here my children who live on the streets are unlawfully arrested daily and nightly; their takings via hustling, begging or work are taken from them by security forces; they are constantly shoved around by the police who will arrest them on the most fragile of pretences for “loitering” or for “riotous” behaviour; here, one of my children was dropped on the mountain for no reason and broke his leg trying to come down; here the peace officers have become pimps, taking the earnings of sex workers under threat of arrest; here my children are woken by boots and pepper spray at any time of day or night; here my disabled street friend Envor Mac was arrested two weeks ago for taking a duvet and sent to Pollsmoor Prison for 2 years; here the excessive needs of tourists and the native greedy ones are given priority over care, shelter and education for my children.

This blessed piece of the planet, in the embrace of two oceans and Table Mountain, a world heritage site; this mother city, our top tourist destination and earner; this city of hybridity , of all colours and tongues; this city is being enslaved and stratified according to who has material wealth and who does not. The mother city is motherless.

But let’s rewind to the legislative birth of this new proposed bylaw that faces us today. It reared its gorgon head four years ago when it was lopped off with the double-edged sword of NGO-led public resistance coupled with a change of city administration with the installment of Nomaindia Mfeketo as mayor. By all accounts, Mfeketo, who in her 2005/6 budget pledged nearly R18 billion to provide shelter and jobs for all the city’s citizens in the next decade, did not have the courage of her conviction (that the bylaw is inherently prejudiced towards the poor) and simply did nothing – she did not facilitate a vote for or against, instead launching her Smile-A-Child publicity campaign.

This suspended status of the bylaw changed this year when the current incumbent, Helen Zille slipped on the mayoral mantle and chain and inaugurated an aggressive revival of the nuisances bylaw.

In May this year, the bylaw was passed by majority vote in a full sitting of council (the ANC voted against it) whose R900 000 social spending budget allocates a third for street people according to Bantry Bay councillor Jean-Pierre Smith. On its promulgation through the Provincial Gazette on 23 June 2006, street people and civil society organizations, largely under the auspices of a 20-member NGO Task Team again registered their protest on the basis that there had been no public participation. The bylaw was withdrawn 3 days later and a 2-week public participation process, inviting the submission of written comments on the bylaw, instituted in late September. According to the NGO Task Team 115 submissions were sent to the city management: 32 from organizations of which 7 support the proposed bylaw and 25 reject it; the rest are from individuals, 14 of whom are neutral, 19 are against it and 43 are in favour of it.

Now, the city managers are ready to vote. They have also just adopted a draft policy on adult street people, developed by Jean-Pierre Smith and entitled A Foot in the Door, which shows some measure of concern for the city’s nearly 10 000 homeless but locates its concerns in a kind of pathological paternalism that brands street people as insane, as drunkards or as drug addicts. Furthermore this draft policy is pretty much the theory that informs the actions proposed in the bylaw.

I have to let you know that though the bylaw will again be formally voted on Thursday (7 December 2006), it has, in effect been law any way. This new ‘nuisances’ bylaw is actually just a consolidation and refinement of a collection of nearly 30 municipal bylaws in existence from Tygerberg to Fish Hoek to the City that have, in amended and non-amended forms, existed from 1903 to now. The 1917 bylaw for the city, last amended in 1944, for instance, prevents spitting in public spaces. This proscription co-incidentally, is still nestling in the new bylaw, the infringement of which will elicit a fine of R100.

Since there are no substantive changes and reformulations in the new proposed nuisances bylaw as it stands, and since the 115 written submissions - most from individuals living in wealthy suburbs - can hardly be viewed as a vigorous, comprehensive and inclusive public input (with much respect to those who made submissions in the limited time-span); our city managers will be voting on a bylaw which is already law.

That’s the complicated statutory position. The social implication is simple: the city, like all cities claiming the appellation world class through the capitalist discourse of economic development and its concomitant strategy of urban renewal or regeneration, is shaping itself as a home, boardroom and playground for the black-chip empowered and the dollar rich.

Since the document is in the public domain – you can access it via NGO Task Team members Anna Weekes (021 448 7875) or Patric Solomons (021 762 5423) – I am not going to outline its clauses and sub-clauses except to say that Sub-section 2, which deals with prohibited behaviour, is unashamedly targeted at the mother city’s homeless, jobless and youth subculture.

It proposes severe fines or imprisonment for, amongst others, washing and drying clothes in public, aggressive begging, selling goods or washing cars without permission, shouting, touching someone’s property without consent, dancing and drumming without consent, rollerblading or skateboarding, and for sex work. Fines are anything between R50 – R500.

And, since I do not own an SUV, I will propose to be your GPS and finesse some moral calibration in relation to law, and its bona fide, justice.

This post-fascist bylaw is fundamentally and constitutionally unjust. It denies the underclass the rights to work, live and play in the city. Resistance to this legislative and social deprivation is then criminalized and punished.

This is the law of rapacity. My city is being raped by the men and women who manage it and own it via the Cape Town Partnership – a private/public partnership between the City of Cape Town, property owners and business sealed in 1999 – led by Shaun Johnson, the chief executive of the Mandela/Rhodes Foundation.

It’s property namesake, the plush new Mandela/Rhodes Place in St George’s Mall owned by Eurocape, houses apartments that can be bought for anything between R1- R7 million.

The CTP manages the Central City Improvement District (CCID) which employs a private security firm, g4s, to implement its strictures to clean the streets of the homeless in a relentless campaign of low-intensity terror and petty avarice.

On the street and in the parliamentary session Patricia de Lille (Member of Parliament) held last week with street people the word is informed and unambiguous: NO. No, the street people are saying, we will not be treated like non-citizens and non-human beings because a few want too much.

Marwaan Abrahams aka ‘Kakkies’ says that the bylaw is “how they fight us”. “All they see is criminal, but they don’t know what is going on inside. All the wrong things that you did that you went to prison for, when you come out you are hunted and still treated the same. Me, I am on a level. I am transformed, they are not. We are in a war. A total war”.

• This article first appeared in the Cape Argus, and it is republished here with a kind permission of the author. Gael Reagon is a freelance journalist and is based in Cape Town.
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