“They have hijacked it!” I said to my partner as we walked past a derelict home in Parkhurst, a few vagrants sitting on the porch. The house looked stripped of most of its assets, the outer wall was gone, and the grass had not been cut in a very long time. We have occasionally seen waiters who work at the various local restaurants congregating at this neglected house, and we always presumed it to be their lunch hour. Today, the smiles on the faces of the people who were there, accompanied by a suitcase or two, suggested more than a temporary visit. We swiftly walked past to one of our favourite restaurants.
We have had similar experiences driving home along Killarney Road and Oxford Avenue which connect the posh suburbs of Hyde Park and Sandhurst. A few properties there appear to have been abandoned, and on at least one occasion that we drove past, scores of poor people were on the pavement, with their belongings, clearly having been ejected from the neglected buildings that had fallen into visible disrepair. We assumed that these too were unlawful occupiers who were now being removed by the owners or someone with the requisite interest and authority to do so. Beyond that, as with the folks on the porch in Parkhurst, we didn't think too much of what we had witnessed.
If you read The Blinded City — Ten Years In Inner-City Johannesburg by Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon, you could never again simply walk or drive past abandoned buildings, with desperate people seemingly living in them, and not think about the stories that those buildings host and archive, the very real human beings whose struggles at the margins of society play out within those buildings, and the larger questions of justice that these so-called hijacked buildings raise for all of us.
It is a book in which Wilhelm-Solomon, an excellent social anthropologist who has spent many years studying Johannesburg as one of the most astute writers and academics of his generation and who moves between here and Brazil, simply tells the stories of the people who have used lawfare, and other political tools, to be seen and treated with dignity by the City of Johannesburg, and property developers. The apparent simplicity of his writing style is a writing superpower. When your research material, and personal insights and critical reflections, are genuinely powerful, then there is no need for ostentatious word choices, or melodramatic description of your subjects.
The book’s focus is on buildings in areas around the CBD, Hillbrow, Berea and Doornfontein. As white capital flew to the north, many of these buildings, for a variety of reasons, fell into disuse. Over time, they came to be occupied. Many of the illegal occupants were from Zimbabwe and Malawi. Some of them were blind people from these neighbouring countries. The main narrative of the book is a documentation of the legal and administrative struggles of people living within these buildings, fighting eviction by property developers and the municipality. It chronicles the major legal cases, such as the Blue Moonlight case, over a 10-year period or so, that aimed at developing the jurisprudence on housing, based on the fundamental value of dignity that is the cornerstone of the final constitutional text adopted in 1996.
Mercifully, the author is neither condescendingly didactic nor grandiose in his recall of the larger legal and political movements. He chose to stay with the individuals, at a micro level, who were the names and faces of these struggles.
Mercifully, the author is neither condescendingly didactic nor grandiose in his recall of the larger legal and political movements. He chose to stay with the individuals, at a micro level, who were the names and faces of these struggles. We are introduced to a blind teacher from Zimbabwe, a black woman from KwaZulu-Natal desperately looking for a better life for her and her child in Johannesburg, an intriguing Zimbwabean woman whose son tragically, got murdered; and many of their friends, neighbours, and peers. The knotty circumstances they find themselves in, compels them to learn, despite the tensions that arise in all our communities, to strategically co-operate with each other, form political alliances and working groups to achieve mutual aims, and to do so with the assistance of skilled and passionate left-wing civil society organisations, and legal outfits like SERI. The book is a testament to marginalised communities’ refusal to be rendered invisible, and treated as disposable, just because of the structural conditions of poverty into which they were born or thrust.
The book delivers multiple insights and opportunities for adjacent research and further debate. The most beautiful disruption is the piercing of our false middle-class moralism in the face of unlawful occupations. We are no different to the Red Ants and Afrophobic former mayor Herman Mashaba, or the rapacious property developers. They might be the ones who actively assault, round up, evict, and raid the residents of the dark buildings, but our silence, as suburbanites, makes us morally complicit. In the best-case scenario (which is not a defensible scenario), our moral stain is just a little smaller than that of the private hired goons who do the physical assaulting and destruction of the belongings of the poor. Our silence is not neutral. The Blinded City implicates us in the urban housing crisis. Choosing not to leverage our power as moneyed classes, tax and ratepayers, and professionals with more political clout than the destitute, means we are choosing the wrong side of the moral divide in the struggle for a metropolis that is inclusive and just.
One way we sustain our false sense of moral superiority over unlawful occupiers is to repeat the language used by populist politicians, language that criminalises the poor. Wilhelm-Solomon, in the most understated way, calls our rhetorical bluff. Not every dark building is a hijacked building. Some buildings are indeed taken over by criminal syndicates who extract illegal rent from occupiers. Calling them “hijackers” is not a stretch of the word’s more familiar reference to stealing a vehicle when the owner is driving it or near it when the theft happens. But if you call every unlawful occupant a hijacker, then you let yourself off the hook, giving yourself permission to not think carefully.
Some unlawful occupiers, for example, even get their names registered for the provision of electricity and water to the buildings they are staying in. They want to be known by the municipality and brought under the legal fold. They are not in the same category as criminal syndicates. They do not aim to make money from the occupation. Here, the blunt use of legal terminology allows for the conflation of “unlawful” and “illegitimate”. The struggle of thousands of unlawful occupiers is a morally and politically legitimate struggle. The “unlawful” part of the phrase “unlawful occupiers” does way too much heavy lifting in our repetition of the old moral panic discourse when it comes to people living under conditions of poverty.
Instead of interrogating our class prejudices, and the structural injustices that cause the urban housing crisis to proliferate, we regard the most precarious victims of apartheid spatial planning as criminal monsters to be swept away from the urban landscape. By contrast, we leave intact the nexus between an uncaring black political elite, apathetic middle-class residents of all hues, and capitalists parking off in Sandton.
Wilhelm-Solomon’s writing quality matches the best of both Jacob Dlamini and Jonny Steinberg. The author leaves us with larger moral and political questions to tease out and answer for ourselves, rather than collapsing into polemical essayist voice with hasty answers and commands. But even if you are averse to reading with comprehension, you cannot miss the clear and devastating implications of the stories about people, many of us see as objects of social policy and anthropological study. We should recover our own humanity by learning to truly see the blind man at a traffic spot, rather than rolling up your window or staring into oblivion.
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