A window on a troubled world

If you want to know what’s gone wrong with the African National Congress, come and look out of my window.

Clinging to the steep mountain on the other side of this valley (Hout Bay) is the township of Imizamo Yethu, also known as Mandela Park. It was created 18 years ago, with plots for 500 families and possibly 2,500 people. Estimates now put the population at more than 30,000.

Rubbish lies everywhere, sewers overflow, shebeens are uncontrolled and crime is rampant. This situation is replicated all over the country.

This valley is unusual, however, in that there are three communities in sight of each other: white, black, coloured. Yet the ANC has done little to address such apartheid planning. In fact, it builds on this inequality – which inflames a sense of continuing injustice.

That’s partly why Imizamo Yethu is so jammed. It’s one of the few places in this country where the unemployed have close access to suburbia, even if only to wait at the roadside in the hope of a day’s cheap casual labour. Imizamo Yethu is like an apartheid-era Bantustan: a labour reservoir for Cape Town’s wealthy Atlantic seaboard.

These three communities are virtually sealed off from one another. The black township and the coloured fishing hamlet are more like independent communes. The police have little sway in either, so lawlessness spills into white suburbia.

Many whites complain vociferously or block this reality out. Or worse. A friend who canvassed for the ANC during the last general election had many doors slammed in his face and was told: “You’re a waste of a white skin”.

In Cape Town, the ANC and the opposition Democratic Alliance have each had turns at tackling this crisis, with neither appearing to have the political will to deal with such complexity. But the people who should be the motor for real change here, our local ANC leaders, are a major part of the problem.

Some years ago, I was asked to help a destitute family who could not afford to bury their dead daughter. That evening, I met the distraught relatives, all women. The ANC leader proceeded to harangue them: “Even though you aren’t ANC, look how generous the party is to you, so you must show your gratitude at the next election.” He was very drunk.

This same leader later asked me to raise money so that his brother could appeal against a rape conviction. These local ANC bosses operate like slumlords.

Another local leader, whose cynical intrigues helped to destroy a project to re-build a poor primary school, rang me the other week. He thought I might help to pay the hefty fees he owed for his child at the local privileged school. I’m afraid I shouted at him.

Well, someone should. This kind of barefaced opportunism is what is rotting the ANC from inside. Yet those in positions of national influence remain insulated by power. It’s high time they peered out of the window again.