"What Stank in the Past Is the Present's Perfume": Dispossession, Resistance, and Repression in Mandela Park

What they [the ANC] have done to put the economy on a right footing, is, I think, almost miraculous.

—Pamela Cox, Former Head of the South Africa Division at the World Bank

Mandela has been the real sellout, the biggest betrayer of his people. When it came to the crunch, he used his status to camouflage the actual agreement that the ANC was forging with the (white) South Africa elite.

—Trevor Ngwane, Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee

The Men with Guns

As this essay goes to publication, Max Ntanyana and Fonky Goboza, activists in the Mandela Park anti-eviction campaign, are awaiting trial under bail conditions designed to make political life almost impossible.¹ In 2003, in an interview, they discussed the government evictions in Mandela Park:

In September 1999 the sheriffs came to Mandela Park with dogs and teargas and guns. On the first day they came to confiscate our goods. On the second day they came back to evict us from our homes. There were a lot of police, in Caspirs and in small vans. It was as if they were at war. They cordoned off one street at a time and started to evict people. The whole area came out, as well as neighbouring areas, to try and prevent the evictions. We stood up to them. No one told us to resist—it was spontaneous. People were beaten with batons, shot at with rubber bullets and bitten by police dogs. Teargas blew everywhere. A lot of people were injured and it is lucky that no-one was killed. The police were only able to evict 13 families on that first day. And the community put many of the people who were evicted back in their houses. Later we got in touch with the Anti-Eviction Campaign in Tafelsig through the Anti-Privatisation Forum and then linked with people in Athlone, KTC, Valhalla Park, Gugulethu, Delft, Tambo Square, Mfuleni and elsewhere.²

Mandela Park is on the edge of Khayalitsha—a massive township that sprawls along the bleak plains of the Cape Flats outside of Cape Town. Khayalitsha is Xhosa for "new home." In its latter years as it increasingly struggled to seek legitimacy the apartheid state gave the townships, where it sought to keep its workers and poor, names that ring with childlike optimism. Nearby Gugulethu means "our treasure." These are extraordinarily alienating environments. But if you walk down to sea you can, on a crisp day, see Robben Island, where Mandela was imprisoned.

Apartheid was undone bit by bit by endlessly multiple acts of resistance and lines of flight. By the early 1980s people were moving from the rural Transkei, where apartheid sought to keep them, to Cape Town in such numbers that the state lost the capacity to regulate the borders between its two opposed zones. Around the country people who were taking control of new spaces gave those spaces names. And the people who moved to the edge of Khayalitsha defiantly called their space Mandela Park in honor of their hope. A few months ago the Mandela Park Anti-eviction Campaign took control of a derelict school and began to run their own school for children excluded from education because their parents couldn't pay user fees. This time they named the space after themselves—People's Power Secondary and then renamed it Masiphumelele School. Masiphumelele means "our collective flourishing."

Mandela Park is not the only community that finds itself under armed assault from the state ten years after the end of apartheid. As we write we are receiving reports of clashes between activists and private security guards hired by the state in Phiri, Soweto. People are resisting the state's installment of prepaid water meters that force the poor to disconnect themselves from water. There have...