Mal 🇿🇦🏳️🌈🇮🇪🏳️⚧️🇸🇪People reading here can mainly afford #Gautrain and #MyCiti tickets. We can afford to live in gated communities whose roads, power, water and security are maintained by HOAs. Many of us live a weird point-to-point existence - shops, houses, schools, banks, holiday destination, even churches - all separated out and provided specially for we who can afford them.
But have you been to #Hillbrow?
I've been through Hillbrow to help my migrant friends get transport in and out of #SouthAfrica. It's a base for intercontinental taxis. Hillbrow has been abandoned by the city 'fathers'. Rubbish hasn't been collected for years, the roads are potholes filled with a soup of sewage. The people of Hillbrow live jammed twenty-to-a-room in the remains of early 20th Century flats. Many buildings don't have power or water, and are administered by ganglords. The police circle the streets looking for bribes and sexual favours. Most people don't have formal work, but everyone is selling something.
This is the cost of how we live in our fortress. It's a cost for everyone else: living outside. And it results in a specialised kind of police state in which #ZamaZamas are starved underground by the cops, who think that this is what their paymasters actually want them to do.
That's US, people. WE are the ones who pay for our security from the dispossessed. WE are the ones who 'pay our taxes' so that the #SAPS will keep the hoipolloi under control.
And I acknowledge that as a wealthy #white South African, I shouldn't be writing this. But then, who the hell will?
Jarrett Stewart
General Strike Now
Danie
Danie van der Merwe