Two townships near East London in the Eastern Cape, Mdantsane and Duncan Village, went under water on the first weekend of the new year. Government termed the incident as floods but it is yet to officially affirm it as a disaster. At the time of writing this article, more than 10 people had died from the floods and thousands of homes had been completely destroyed.
One of the deceased was a grade 12 pupil, Yonela Pamla, who was waiting to receive her matric results at the time of her death. The affected families from these townships, black families, have lost children, clothes, furniture, food, toiletries, and identity documents, to mention a few. But essentially, they have lost human dignity.
There is currently no national conversation nor any trending astonishment from the public about this tragedy. This is largely because the existing national consciousness of SA in general does not care about the misfortunes of life that occur in rural provinces, especially to black people who are living under poverty.
Two things are now clear from this disaster.
Firstly, the colonial legacy of urban planning remains in place. This racist legacy is actually being accelerated by the current administration of the public service.
Local government as an institutional arm of the public that controls much of the space and assets in the city does not translate its political power into a tangible programme of urban transformation to benefit the oppressed class. It does the opposite. It uses the public purse to incentivise the property class with the best municipal services and it also uses its malleable laws to keep the most conducive areas of urban land in the hands of this establishment.
In other words, urban land in the entire city centre and its suburban neighbourhood has been designed in colonial terms, and maintained in democratic terms, for the sole purpose of pricing out the underprivileged to the periphery. It is this exclusive commodification of urban space, its untransformed character, its inaccessibility and unaffordability to black people that shapes its high value.
This psyche of governance is different from what the apartheid administration carried as its urban mandate. The apartheid state was intentional and heavily in control of the flow of capital in cities. It is the apartheid’s capitalist class that carried the urban objectives of its political administration – which was to categorise physical space and mobility between blacks and whites – with the main target being to deliver all urban privileges to whites.
The democratic state on the other hand is failing to fulfil its own mandate – a mandate it is given by the vote. It does not use the available laws to expropriate local land for a just public purpose nor does it agitate for the inception of more alternatives to achieve this mandate. The everyday purpose of the public service is not fashioned out with an urgency to do anything productive for black people on the subject of land at all.
This is at the core of the reason why black people who move to the city in search for livelihoods end up residing in the furthest informal settlements located on the most hazardous areas of the urban margins. These are the areas that are mainly hit by floods as a result of their inconducive geography and historically racialised modelling.
Secondly, the conversation about climate change is now right here at our doorstep. This climate crisis should no longer be an aesthetic debate between Euro-American elites and Harvard activists. It is about our African humanity right here – a humanity that has potential to vanish in our lifetime unless we act.
Clearly, western modernity and its global project of colonial industrialisation has destroyed our natural environment and our communities. Week-after-week, Africa’s villages and townships are all of a sudden being held hostage by pandemics and disasters from a crisis that originates from elsewhere. Many households in the global South have seen their farms, graves, villages, homes, and foods go under water from this crisis.
Mass manufacturing and greed markets have brought high levels of uneven human development and they have redefined how we structure families, time, love, friendships and aspirations. Our tools of interpreting our own reality have been heavily infiltrated .
In essence, at the core of the climate emergency is the landlessness of black people, their geographic enslavement, their dispossession and exploitation by the profit class, and the design of economic life from the logic of maximisation at all costs.
The key task ahead is to question. We must question imported concepts such as “natural disasters” that seek to present this crisis as a neutral phenomenon. This is a political disaster invented by power and it has serious consequences to the natural environment and to all of us. We must pay attention. We must be active. We must get angry.
• Dr Mzileni is research associate in the faculty of humanities at Nelson Mandela University.
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