Many S. Africa Squatters Yield on Relocation

A hammer in one hand, Amos Rexe was pulling down his home--a three-room shack of tin, wood and plastic that he had struggled for a decade to keep. It was a struggle carried on in the face of official pressure to oust him and others the government calls “illegal squatters” from the densely packed Crossroads shantytown near here.

Around Rexe, other Crossroads residents were knocking apart their shacks. They were loading the lumber, corrugated steel, tin sheeting, second-hand window frames and plastic sheets that serve as flooring onto trucks to be carted to a new camp at Khayelitsha, six miles away.

Two months ago, when rumors spread that men like Rexe, as well as their families, would be evicted from Crossroads, moved forcibly to Khayelitsha and perhaps sent back to barren tribal homelands, residents here rioted. They fought police for three days in some of the worst violence that South Africa has recently experienced.

Eighteen people, all black residents of Crossroads, were killed and more than 250 injured in that battle to stay in their meager dwellings.

Now, thousands are willing to leave. About 5,000 headed for Khayelitsha this past week, in what initially appears to be a major victory for the government in its efforts to deal with the severe and increasing problems stemming from the mass migration by blacks flooding into urban areas from the impoverished countryside in search of work.

Of Crossroads’ 100,000 residents, roughly 42,000 have agreed to move out of the shantytown, which covers little more than two square miles, and government officials hope that at least 30,000 more will also agree.

However, the Crossroads squatters, who are leaving only because of the official concessions, see themselves as the real winners. If this confidence proves correct, this breakthrough after years of struggle will have broad implications for the future of South Africa’s policy of apartheid, the separation of the races.

Squatters moving from Crossroads to Khayelitsha--which means “our new home” in the Xhosa language--get government permission to remain and work in the Cape Town area for 18 months with the suggestion that they will be allowed to stay permanently.

“I am moving because the government finally gave us most of what we wanted--the right to stay and work in this area,” said Rexe, 28, a bricklayer and father of three, who 10 years ago came here from Ciskei, one of the tribal homelands created by the Pretoria authorities.

“That means I can get a regular job, not just a few days here and a few days there, that I can keep my family with me and that the door to Cape Town is finally open to me, a black man.”

This constitutes a major retreat from the longstanding policy of the ruling National Party to prohibit black settlement in western Cape province and to prevent residents from Ciskei and Transkei, two of the nominally independent homelands on the South African coast, from migrating to the highly desirable, white-dominated Cape Town region.

“This is what we have been struggling for all these months and years,” said Mali Hoxa, leader of the 12,000 Cathedral Squatters, a Crossroads group that got its name through a long sit-in by 57 members at Cape Town’s Anglican cathedral three years ago. “We trust the government to keep its promise and not to try to deport us in 18 months.

“It is a compromise, of course. We would like to see an end to apartheid so that people can live and work where they want, but meanwhile we have to get along with this government and do the best we can. We may not have permanent residents’ rights yet, but the government has yielded significantly on our demands.”

These concessions began in September, when President Pieter W. Botha ended a government policy that permitted black workers to be hired in western Cape province only if there were no whites, Asians or Coloreds (those of mixed race) available in the region.

Later, the government scrapped plans to move the 210,000 residents of three black townships near Cape Town out to Khayelitsha and said that they could buy their homes outright or on 99-year leases, giving them additional security in the Cape Town area.

The government also said that those moving to houses in Khayelitsha--5,000 small, two-room “core houses” have now been built there, with Crossroads residents getting first priority--could buy them on the same terms.

Finally, it pledged to upgrade a portion of Crossroads--putting in sanitation, roads and community facilities such as schools and clinics for the 3,000 families, about 20,000 people, who will remain.

Taken together, these measures represent a fundamentally new government approach to the flow of blacks from rural areas to South Africa’s cities and the squatter areas that result. The Crossroads-Khayelitsha move is being closely watched to see whether the same policies will be applied nationwide.

Until now, the official approach has been to limit this urban influx by strict controls. These have included laws that declare cities to be “white group areas,” that require blacks to get permits to live or work there and that punish those without a valid pass by fines, jail or deportation back to the homelands--most of them in remote, economically unviable areas.

The tolerance of “controlled squatting,” as the self-built housing at Khayelitsha is termed, and the willingness of the government to grant residence and work permits to those who have been living here illegally are regarded, even by critics, as significant moves to ease mounting black anger in urban areas.

“Urbanization is relentless, and the government finally realized that it must deal with it and not simply and futilely try to prevent it,” said George Ellis, a mathematician at the University of Cape Town and a researcher for the South African Institute of Race Relations.

Timo Bezuidenhoud, chief commissioner for cooperation and development in western Cape province, who negotiated the compromise with the squatters, observed the start of the move from Crossroads to Khayelitsha with considerable satisfaction.

“This problem of urbanization and influx control may just be soluble after all,” he said. “If we succeed here--and Crossroads has been the toughest case in point because of the huge numbers--then we may be able to deal with another crisis facing the country, not all the crises but at least one.”

Squatters moving out of Crossroads at the rate of more than 100 families a day now leave a squalid shantytown.

Their homes are built of whatever materials they can gather. When it rains, roofs leak and floors turn to mud, and in the summer heat, not a breath of fresh air is felt.

Water comes from a few hundred taps, perhaps one for 30 or 40 families. Sanitation depends on outhouses, open latrines and roadside piles of garbage. Schools and medical clinics are few.

“Crossroads is really a measure of how bad things are in the homelands,” said an Anglican priest who works in the community. “They must be worse. Otherwise people would not come here and would not stay here. This is the type of place any person wants to flee as fast as he can.”

But until last week, Crossroads residents resisted all efforts to move. First, there was the fear that the illegals--those lacking permission to live in the region--would be sent back to the homelands. Then there was Khayelitsha’s barrenness and the higher costs there.

“Khayelitsha is not paradise,” said an ambivalent Agnes Dwebea, surveying the sand dunes on which her shanty was to be rebuilt. “It is not so crowded and we have space. There is plenty of water, more outhouses and other things. But we are much farther from the city, and there are not so many buses, and we have to pay more. We don’t have so many stores and many of the things being built, like the clinics, are not finished yet. And I am afraid what the weather will be like in the winter.”

For a plot of 800 square feet, Khayelitsha residents will pay the equivalent of $7 a month--most pay nothing in Crossroads except $1.50 to a community association--and the fee will include subsidized bus service there for at least a year. Those in line to rent houses will pay $16 a month.

“This may not be Garden City, but in terms of the health and welfare of its residents it will be 1,000% better than Crossroads,” Bezuidenhoud said on an earlier tour of treeless Khayelitsha. “Give us a bit of time, and people will be begging us to move them here. The women in Crossroads are sick and tired of the congestion, the filth, the disease and the misery of that place.”

Leaders of Crossroads’ various communities were, in fact, asking Bezuidenhoud to move their group to Khayelitsha next.

“Half a year ago, people were predicting we would have to call out the army to move them out of Crossroads,” Bezuidenhoud said. “People said it would be the biggest forced resettlement South Africa has carried out at one time. They said hundreds would probably die, maybe even thousands in resisting the move. Almost nobody thought we could work things out, but that is what we are dong.”

Bezuidenhoud expects that Khayelitsha will house 250,000 to 300,000 blacks by the year 2000 and that the government will spend the equivalent of $250 million on the project. By the end of this year, its population will probably be at least 75,000, he said. About $45 million has been spent on the first phase.

The deal is far from complete, however, with four of the 10 principal Crossroads groups still not satisfied with the government’s terms. And within those communities that are moving, there are some holdouts, mostly young men.

“I am staying right here,” said Jacob Langa, 22, as his neighbors on Mahobe Drive took down their shacks. “This government lies and lies. How can we trust it now? If they mean we can stay forever, why do they stamp 18 months in our passbooks? When they stamp ‘forever, permanent rights,’ then I will move.”

New homes in Khayelitsha cannot solve all problems for the residents of Crossroads. Although the squatters will be able to seek regular employment in Cape Town, South Africa’s deepening recession means fewer jobs for everyone. And amid worsening conditions in the homelands, more and more people--perhaps 1,500 or 2,000 a week--are moving to Cape Town in search of work.

“The government has not dealt with urbanization itself,” a social worker at Crossroads said, “but with the backlog of people and of problems from past migrations.

“Come back in six weeks and you will find half of the old Crossroads population living out at Khayelitsha and their places here taken by new arrivals from Ciskei, from Transkei and the hinterlands.

“In many ways, Crossroads is more a symptom of the problem, the poverty and starvation in the homelands, than the real problem. And so far, nothing has been done about that.”