browseLife in the Liberated Zone
David Lurie (Photographer)
Original Side Gallery Exhibition Text by Rian Malan, 1990:
The despair was always there, I suppose, but its true extent was long obscured by the pass-laws; Africans without passes were required to live in the tribal homelands, where they might starve and suffer out of sight. There were nine, ten, maybe even twelve million of them out there, desperate for food and work, kept at bay only by the pass laws and the cold-blooded bureaucracy that enforced them. For decades, the police destroyed squatter camps wherever they appeared and ‘repatriated’ their inhabitants to the homelands, but the illegals were too numerous and the homelands too hopeless, and by Easter 1986 the government had given up. The pass laws were repealed, and a vast tide of desperate blacks came flooding into ‘white’ South Africa.
Five years ago the bleak salt flats outside Cape Town were empty and desolate, nothing there but sand dunes, scrub, thousands of corrugated iron toilets shaped like sentry boxes and wind blowing sand around. Now it’s a city of sorts, a metropolis of shacks and shanties, as densely packed and alley-riven as a walled medieval city, and populated by fantastic characters - bootleggers, Cape Rastas, ‘daggarokers’ (dope smokers), witch doctors, thugs and revolutionaries plus a million ordinary working people for whom life is very tough. It’s a liberated zone of sorts, a place where the white government has virtually no influence, and even the police dare not set foot. Some parts of it are ruled by People’s Committees, others by dictatorial strongmen in the traditional African mould.
There is courage here, and resourcefulness, and laughter, but there is appalling violence, hunger and hopelessness too. In this, the Cape squatter cities are unfortunately not unique. One million squatters have settled in the veldt around Johannesburg, another two million in the bush around Durban. There are squatters on the outskirts of every white town, squatters on the rubbish dumps, squatters in the parks in well-off white suburbia. The vast majority of them have no jobs, no access to schools or clinics. Some don’t even have water. Many adults have tuberculosis, and their children suffer from nutritional diseases. There are so many of them, and their needs are so enormous that I cringe to think of them.
In a way, these images raise the single most important question in the emerging ‘New South Africa’, the question on which our collective fate depends. The apparently imminent institution of a new order will not in itself transform the lives of the poorest blacks. Nelson Mandela might win full political rights for all black South Africans, but the squatters will still be huddled in their shacks, starving. So what then shall we do? I look at these pictures and long for Lenin’s ghost to rise and ask me to dance again. Poverty so extreme seems to beg extreme solutions; to beg an immediate redistribution of bread and land and BMWs and everything else that white South Africans take more or less for granted, and yet, and yet, and yet... it wouldn’t help. Or would it? I don’t know. All I know is that we’ll have an ugly revolution if the present negotiations fail to redeem poor blacks from poverty. Is such redemption possible? Again, I just don’t know.
(Text drawn from Life In The Liberated Zone to be published in Autumn 1990)