Tough Enforcement Cripples Rent Protest : S. Africa Blacks’ Strike Comes Unhinged

The war begins in the chilly hours long before dawn, when this black township sleeps beneath its thick, scratchy blanket of charcoal smoke.

Knock, knock, knock. A housing official raps on the door. Beside him are two armed policemen, for his own protection.

“We’d like to talk to you about the rent,” they told Godfrey Monyai one recent morning. Monyai hadn’t paid rent in a long time, and he was plenty worried as he rubbed sleep from his eyes.

Doors Removed

Monyai was evicted that day, and, to discourage him from moving back in, his doors were removed with a sledgehammer. The front and back doors went first, then the bedroom and bathroom doors, leaving rusty hinges pointing at empty space.

The 2-year-old rent boycott in Soweto and several other black townships in South Africa has been among the most successful anti-apartheid protests in the country’s history. As many as 90% of the renters have refused to pay, and losses to the government, as landlord, total an estimated $350 million.

But township officials, for the first time since the protest began, are making progress in breaking the strike, using novel methods to make people pay and to punish those who don’t. Removing doors is especially effective because it makes the house a prime target for burglars. Housing officials also now are making door-to-door visits, beginning at 3:30 a.m., to persuade delinquent renters to pay up.

The new strategy has begun to work. Rent receipts are increasing, and political activists in the townships disagree over whether to press on with the boycott. Some are looking for a face-saving way to end it before the boycott withers away and dies.

“I’m afraid if it goes on too long, we will lose all the advantages we had by default,” said Dr. Nthato Motlana, president of a Soweto group that supports the boycott.

But others advocate even stronger resistance, and a few weeks ago four policemen were shot and wounded while on a mission to arrest rent boycotters.

“The people are still steadfast,” said Kgabisi Mosunkutu, an officer in Motlana’s organization. “You see dribs and drabs going in to pay, to relieve the pressure on them. But it’s only a small fraction.”

Two Years of Violence

The rent strike began south of Johannesburg, in the black townships of Sharpeville and Sebokeng, sparking two years of unremitting political violence that left more than 2,200 people dead. In June, 1986, the boycott spread north to other areas, including the square red-brick houses and tin-roofed shacks of South Africa’s largest black township, Soweto, a teeming community of 2.2 million on the edge of Johannesburg.

Launched to oppose rent increases, the protest soon came to encompass a basket of grievances, including the national state of emergency, the stationing of troops in the townships, poor city services, dilapidated houses, and township councilors elected on a 6% voter turnout and seen as illegitimate and corrupt.

Although none of these complaints has been resolved, the boycott has succeeded in an important way: It is the one form of black resistance that the white minority-led government has been unable to crush, despite measures that have snuffed out other peaceful forms of protest.

It has become an important symbol for many black South Africans, but little more.

“This thing must come to an end,” said Monyai, 51, sitting beside a front doorway covered with stacked-up boxes of bottled beer. His new watchdog, a scrawny brown mutt with a fierce bark, nearly drowned out his words.

“Some say we must not pay rent. Others say we should go ahead and pay. And these guys (township officials) don’t give us any peace. They threatened to come take out our windows next if we don’t pay.”

Burglars Make Off With TV

Monyai moved back into his house moments after his eviction, but a few days after the authorities took his doors, burglars took his television set. Despite the threat of more break-ins, he and his 10-year-old niece refuse to move out.

Monyai is assessed about $26 a month for the three-room brick house with iron siding where he has been living since he was a boy. He complains, as do many here, that the township council let the house fall apart long before the rent boycott began.

“I don’t say we aren’t supposed to pay,” he said. “But we must get something for what we are paying.”

Some renters in Soweto, particularly elderly people and single mothers, simply cannot afford to pay the monthly charges, which range from $17 to $29, plus additional service fees for electricity and trash pickup. Power bills are especially high now, during the Southern Hemisphere’s winter, when electric space heaters are used to warm houses.

Others don’t pay because they fear reprisals by young radicals, whose threats are painted in crude letters on building walls: “You pay. We burn.” It is a threat that has, on occasion, been carried out.

Those young people fight a guerrilla rent war, nailing up new doors after evictions and rewiring meter boxes to restore power to those whom the township council has cut off, such as Monyai. Soweto is pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into making meter boxes impenetrable, and meter readers, who have been attacked, now make their rounds with police escort.

Miriam Amanda, a 32-year-old mother of three, stopped paying rent on her two-room brick house here because the city had not fixed her roof.

“When the rain falls, the roof leaks. When the toilets are blocked, we have to repair them. All the things that are normally done by a landlord are not done here,” she said.

But the authorities came to Amanda’s house recently, demanding $100 of the $350 she owed and leaving with her doors when she couldn’t pay. Five days later, burglars ransacked the house, breaking windows, setting fire to her dining room table and stealing her record player and tea set.

Now she pushes a chest of drawers across the doorway at night to keep out intruders.

Bloody Clashes

Evictions once triggered bloody clashes between police and residents. In August, 1986, when the strike in Soweto was three months old, about 20 people died in a riot after municipal officials tried to evict rent strikers in a poor section known as White City. Such confrontations have been rare lately.

About 600 people have been evicted for not paying rent here in the last year, although housing officials say they first use a variety of less drastic measures.

Sowetans find, for example, that they must pay their back rent to get a taxi license, buy a house or enter into a legal contract. As the strike continues, that requirement has become more important.

“Only those people who repeatedly don’t respond are the ones we have to reach with other, assertive methods,” Estelle Bester, director of housing for Soweto, said in a recent interview.

The Soweto council’s best weapon against the rent strike has become the “deacon action,” named for the familiar visits that church leaders make to the homes of backsliding members of the flock.

In this case, housing officials sweep into selected neighborhoods and chat with the occupants of about 50 houses before dawn. Flanked by policemen for protection, they go early to find the occupants at home, Bester explained. Then they point out the consequences of not paying rent and urge the boycotters to make a down payment on their debt with whatever money they have on hand.

“It’s a high-public-relations approach,” Bester said. It’s also very successful, operating twice a week and collecting as much as $7,000 in back rent on a single morning.

All those back payments have helped to boost the Soweto council’s monthly rent revenue, from about 20% of owed rent last year to 80% in recent months, although an estimated 70% of the renters here still owe money and electricity payments have remained very low.

Township Forced to Borrow

Bester said the refusal to pay rent and electricity bills, which has become part of the boycott, has put the township in precarious financial shape and forced it to borrow money to stay afloat.

The council has tried to head off a major confrontation over rent by selling houses to tenants. Of Soweto’s 78,000 houses, 30,000 are now privately owned, 18,000 of those having been sold by the township in the last year.

A two-room house in a lower-income area of Soweto, for example, costs $150, about what it cost to build 20 years ago. Given the housing shortage for blacks in South Africa, the tenant could turn around and sell the same house for $5,000, Bester said.

Purchasers must pay their back rent, though, before buying their house, and in most cases the rent bill is higher than the purchase price. Many argue that, in the last 20 years, they have paid for those houses--in rent--several times over and that the houses should be given to them.

The law of supply and demand is on the township council’s side. The waiting list for houses in Soweto has 26,000 names, and the township’s normal population growth creates a demand for 600 new houses every month. Yet, by October, every square foot of land available for housing in Soweto will have been developed.

Young Radicals Detained

The pressure to withhold rent has diminished lately, and many of the young radicals who had been enforcing the boycott are in detention.

“People are starting to realize that they can visit our offices without being victimized,” Bester said, “and that if they don’t go to our offices, we will catch up with them.”

The rent boycotts have waned in most townships. “People are starting to realize that whatever their expectations about what the boycott could accomplish, it wasn’t realistic,” Bester said.

Motlana marvels at “the persistence of people to continue the strike, despite government efforts to stop it.” But, he conceded, “the government has a lot of resources. The system is using all manner of tricks to make us pay, and now it is hurting our people.”