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Outcry over oppression in Cato Crest

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To James Nxumalo, the mayor, of eThekwini municipality; Senzo Mchunu, KwaZulu-Natal premier; and President Jacob Zuma.

We are writing to you to express our grave concern at the events unfolding in the Cato Crest shack settlement in Durban.

After an illegal eviction in Cato Crest by the eThekwini municipality in March this year, shack dwellers occupied an adjacent piece of land.

They named the settlement “Marikana”. Since then, two activists, Thembinkosi Qumbelo and Nkululeko Gwala, have been assassinated A third, Nkosinathi Mngomezulu, is in critical condition after being shot by the land invasions unit.

A number of activists have been seriously beaten by the police. Other activists, including Bandile Mdlalose and S’bu Zikode of the shack dweller movement Abahlali baseMjondolo, who have been supporting the residents, have been threatened with death.

On September 30 2013, Nqobile Nzuza was shot dead by the Cato Manor police services. She was 17 years old, a student at Bonella High School. When Bandile Mdlalose, the general secretary of Abahlali, arrived at Cato Crest to extend solidarity to the Nzuza family, she was immediately arrested.

This extends a pattern of lawlessness by the police and municipal authorities. As the chairperson of the General Council of the Bar, Ishmael Semenya, has noted in an open letter:

“The residents have urgently approached the high court on no less than five occasions, claiming that their eviction was unlawful. They have obtained three interim court interdicts restraining the Durban municipality from evicting them again without a court order, and have subsequently rebuilt their homes.

However, on each occasion, the municipality's land-invasion unit has returned to the settlement and destroyed the residents' homes once again.”

A number of ANC leaders have made dangerous and reprehensible statements that present those who were illegally driven off their land and had their homes illegally demolished in March as ethnic outsiders who should not be in Durban.

After Thembinkosi Qumbelo’s assassination, the local councillor’s office was burned down. This act of property damage by persons unknown has been used to justify murder, violence, destruction of activists’ homes and brazen political repression.

There is a well-documented history of illegal and violent repression of grassroots struggle in Durban that has included assassination, torture, driving people from their homes and arresting people on fabricated charges. It has done tremendous damage to the democratic credentials of the city administration in Durban and the South African government in general.

We write to inform you that we are watching the situation in Cato Crest very closely and to urge you to move as fast as you can to halt the violent attacks on activists and their homes, to fully investigate the assassinations and other incidents of violence and to commit to resolve the tensions in Cato Crest through democratic negotiations rather than the gross intimidation that is taking place. — 

Noam Chomsky, professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Slavoj Zizek, senior researcher at the Institute of sociology, University of Ljubljana; Gill Hart, professor of geography and co-chair of development studies, University of California, Berkeley; David Szanton, emeritus, executive director of international and area studies, University of California, Berkeley;

Judith Butler, professor, departments of rhetoric and comparative literature, University of California, Berkeley; Wendy Brown, professor of political science, University of California, Berkeley; Silvia Federici, emerita professor, Hofstra, University, Hempstead, New York;

George Caffentzis, emeritus professor, University of Southern Maine, Portland, Maine; William Robinson, professor of sociology and global and international studies, University of California at Santa Barbara; Jane Gordon, University of Connecticut and president-elect of the Caribbean Philosophical Association; Lewis Gordon, University of Connecticut and Mandela visiting professor (2014-2016), Rhodes University;

Staughton Lynd, independent scholar, Youngstown, Ohio; Andrej Grubacic, associate professor and department chair, anthropology and social change, California Institute of Integral Studies; Ananya Roy, professor, city and regional planning, University of California, Berkeley; Nigel Gibson, Emerson College, Boston; Raj Patel, Centre for African Studies, University of California, Berkeley; Faranak Miraftab, professor and director of PhD program, department of urban planning, University of Illinois.

Caption: Survivor: Nkosinathi Mngomezulu recovers in hospital after he was shot in Cato Crest by the land invasions unit this year. Photo by: Rogan Ward