spaces of resistance: informal settlement, communication and community organisation in a cape town...

Spaces of Resistance: Informal Settlement,Communication and Community Organisationin a Cape Town Township

Andrew Skuse and Thomas Cousins

[Paper first received, October 2005; in final form, July 2006]

Summary. This paper examines struggles for urban permanency in an informal settlement on thefringes of Cape Town in the run up to the South African national election of 2004. It focuses on therapid emergence of the settlement of Nkanini (Forceful) and the key social, cultural, political andcommunicative dynamics that framed the ensuing bitter struggle between residents and local Cityof Cape Town authorities over claims to occupy the land. Analysis frames this struggle in terms of alocal appropriation of basic human rights legislation that informs community action and thereinclaims to residential formality.

Introduction

The contemporary pace of informal urbanis-ation in developing countries is placing signifi-cant pressure on local and national authoritiesto deal with influxes of internal and regionalmigrants whilst ensuring that basic standardsof human settlement are met (Harris, 1992;Kothari, 2002; UN-Habitat, 2003a, 2003b,2004). South Africa is no exception and facesa range of complex yet compounding issuesassociated with rapid urbanisation, attemptsby the state to provide low-cost formalhousing and the parallel persistence of wide-spread informal settlement, urban inequalityand poverty (Apuzzo, 2001; Bekker andCross, 2002; Berner, 2000; Durand-Lasserveand Tribillon, 2001; Peberdy et al., 2004).

In addressing these complex and interlock-ing issues, this paper explores the waysin which communities struggle to claimurban space and in the process battle toredraw the urban boundaries between inform-ality and residential formality (Guillaume and

Houssay-Holzschuch, 2002).More specifically,it argues that such struggles are revealing offormative historical processes, discrete modesof community organisation and, therein,unique communicative ecologies and localisedclaims to rights (Slater et al., 2003). Furtherstill, such struggles reflect diverse notions and‘ideals’ of community and legitimacy, withcompeting groups seeking out vantage-pointsfrom which the better to articulate themselvesand their claims to various facets of the largerurban system and polity.

The analysis draws upon detailed qualitat-ive ethnographic research conducted over aone-year period (2004) in both formal andinformal areas of Khayelitsha, Cape Town.1

In keeping with the principles of ethnographicpractice, research design was principallyexploratory and iterative, in the sense ofseeking to integrate a fine-grained understand-ing of the often-competing communicationand information flows within complex

Urban Studies, Vol. 44, Nos. 5/6, 979–995, May 2007

Andrew Skuse is in the Department of Anthropology, University of Adelaide, North Terrace, Adelaide, South Australia, SA5005. Fax:þ61 8 8303 4285. E-mail: [email protected]. Thomas Cousins is in the Department of Anthropology, Johns HopkinsUniversity, 3400 North Charles Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA. Fax: 410 516 6080. E-mail: [email protected].

0042-0980 Print/1360-063X Online/07/5-60979–17 # 2007 The Editors of Urban Studies

DOI: 10.1080/00420980701256021

claims to rights and social development, suchas those evident in claims to housing andtenure. For example, new residents of infor-mal areas such as those that flourish on themargins and unclaimed spaces of Khayelitsha,typically pursue multifaceted strategies, alli-ances and livelihoods as they seek to ‘hedgetheir bets’ with local power structures, whilstsimultaneously attempting to manage the vul-nerability they routinely face.One such strategy that is addressed in detail

within this paper examines the ways in whichthose staking a claim to informal urban spaceactively resist ‘being known’ or ‘understood’by local authorities. ‘Being known’ is oftenviewed by residents of informal settlementsand their community leaders as counterproduc-tive to the promotion of coherent ‘informalsettlement discourses’ that may assert,amongst other things, that regardless of theactual complexity of settlement patterns all resi-dents come from a given urban location charac-terised by poverty and marginalisation. In turn,the structuring of coherent discourses enhancesthe potential of a ‘successful outcome’ interms of claims to tenure, with collectiveaction and cohesion constituting fundamentalfeatures of both historical and contemporarytownship community resistance and resiliencepractices. Whilst processes of face-to-faceeveryday social communication remain funda-mentally important to the structuring of such dis-course, to resistance and to the dynamicprocesses of communication that are born ofstruggle in informal areas, such processes nowintersect with rapidly deepening communi-cations technology access, even in the poorestof urban areas. The confluence of resistance,social communication and technology thatemerges in the context of the claims to informalsettlement currently occurring on the urbanfringes of contemporary Cape Town lies at theheart of this paper and the detailed ethnographicdata presented therein.

Locating Rights in Community Discourseand Action

In post-apartheid South Africa, deep-seatedsocial and economic inequalities persist within

both rural and urban areas. The capitalistfree-market principles upon which the nationaleconomy rests remains reliant on certain sec-tions of society being incorporated into boththe polity, and especially the economy, on fun-damentally adverse terms (Hulme et al., 2001;Bracking, 2003). For the poor, despite the rheto-ric of equality and inclusion, this incorporationis expressed in the form of unequal access torights, goods and services and in particular toformal employment, formal housing andaccountable local and national governance.From this perspective, struggle and resistanceare reflective of both community attempts toclaim such rights and of the complex difficultiesand dialogues—state to citizens and citizens tostate—associated with staking such claims.Such struggles resonate to the context of thenumerous informal urban settlements that con-tinue to spread out across the Cape Flatswhere more positive orientations to polity andeconomy are being urgently and activelysought (du Toit, 2004; Natrass and Seekings,2001).2

Whilst the notion of ‘adverse incorporation’has been usefully employed as a term and con-dition that rightly questions the limitations of‘social exclusion’ theorising (see de Haan,1998; de Haan and Maxwell, 1998), the termerects perhaps too neat and coherent a divisionbetween notional cores and peripheries, bethey economic, spatial, political or otherwise.From this perspective, the state into whichinformal urban locations and poor people areintegrated may be far from the well-cohered,identifiable and locatable entity with whichresidents strive to engage and struggle toimagine (see Anderson, 1983). Indeed, in acontext such as South Africa, it couldbe argued that the state, its limitations andresponsibilities are being continually rede-fined through negotiation with a significantportion of its urban territory, informal urbanareas in particular, on a daily basis. Whilstproblems of legality and security of tenurehaunt informal settlements and their statusand orientation to local and national auth-orities remain fraught and contested, commu-nity mobilisation and activism force inclusionin dialogues that are at the vanguard of a range

980 ANDREW SKUSE AND THOMAS COUSINS

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of critical debates concerning rights, povertyand housing (Escobar, 1997; Ferguson,1994/2001; Messer, 1993; Wright, 1994).

Rights-based approaches to developmentposit an interesting intersection between theglobal and local that is well expressed in thecontext of South African claims to urbantenure (Hausermann, 1998). If we conceiveof human rights treaties as global cultural pro-ducts that are disseminated widely, appro-priated locally and incorporated into discretestrategies and discourses of political activismand community action, then it is quite reason-able to concur with Rapport (2002) whosuggests that increasingly communities areable to adapt normative ‘national and essentia-lising’ culture and legislation in pursuit ofhighly localised outcomes. From the perspec-tive of human rights, their perceived univers-ality is rendered relative in processes ofhighly localised claims, to things such asrights to housing, tenure, water and sanitation.So whilst rights-based approaches to develop-ment provide a reasonable means of quantify-ing progress against discrete goals and targets,greater recognition of ‘how’ claims to rightsare actually staked in contexts in which devel-opment does or does not ‘happen’ to poorpeople needs deeper qualitative elaboration.

If transnational culture in the shape ofuniversal rights conventions is interpretedlocally, then attempts to promote ‘good gov-ernance’, transparency and accountabilitycan be thought of as ‘supply-side’ factorsthat enable certain of these rights to berealised. In a sense, ‘good governance’ at alllevels is thought to help to produce the insti-tutional conditions in which, for example,equity of service delivery of the very samelegislatures may be scrutinised. In apparentlydemocratic societies such as South Africa,given its brutal history of state-sanctionedoppression of the majority Black population,transparency, accountability and the realis-ation of rights are critical agendas in processesof addressing areas of previous disadvantage,in efforts to promote Black economic empow-erment and therein a more positive and equalincorporation into the economy and polity(Southall, 2004). A case in point is the issue

of informal urban settlement, an issue that istirelessly mediated, debated, interpreted andreinterpreted within many of the criticallocal and national dialogues occurring withinSouth Africa. One such urban area is thenew informal settlement of Nkanini (Force-ful), a panorama of weather-beaten shackslocated on the fringes of the township ofKhayelitsha, itself a peripheral suburb on theoutskirts of Cape Town.

Since Khayelitsha’s founding in the 1980sas a ‘strategy’ for the apartheid state to copewith an urban resistance movement that wasbecoming uncontrollable in areas such asCrossroads, it has exploded into a sprawlingsuburb that some argue is both socially andeconomically disconnected from much of therest of Cape Town (Cook, 1986). It continuesto grow, with waves of new, predominantlyXhosa migrants, placing significant pressureon the surrounding unoccupied land.3 This isevidenced both by the frequency of internalmigration within Khayelitsha, a process thatis often overlooked, and by the sheer diversityof housing types, from privately built andowned formal housing, to the uniform andformal Reconstruction and Development Pro-gramme (RDP) houses that are colloquiallyknown as ‘matchboxes’ by residents, to acomplex array of informal housing styles,each of which reflects a complex socialtypology.4

In December 2003, Nkanini did not exist;but within only a few months of the initial set-tlers erecting their rudimentary shacks, some9000 other shacks had been built, effectivelytransforming a scrubby area of bush land onthe edge of Khayelitsha into a dense informalurban environment. The ensuing communitystruggle to occupy this marginal piece ofland reflects a larger ‘conversation’ occurringin South African civil society over the socio-economic rights to which citizens are entitledand over the roles and responsibilities ofnational and local governments in deliveringsuch rights. Liebenberg and Pillay (2000)highlight the extent to which rights issueshave become enmeshed, as it were, in the‘delivery of the state’ and identify the ‘Groot-boom case’ as critical to the contemporary

SPACES OF RESISTANCE IN CAPE TOWN 981

definition of informal urban areas and resi-dents’ security of tenure in South Africa.The case gave expression to a set of obli-

gations under section 26 of the SouthAfrican Constitution, which gives everyonethe right of access to adequate housing, andsection 28(1)(c), which affords children theright to shelter.5 In effect, informal structuresthat have stayed in place for longer than 48hours cannot legally be destroyed withoutthe state taking responsibility for the mainten-ance or provision of basic shelter and otherservices (water and sanitation). Debate sur-rounding the ‘Grootboom case’ in locationssuch as Nkanini constitutes a key stimulusfor the generation of discrete discourses thatchallenge the South African state to deliveragainst its stated legislation and objectives,which are in turn tied to wider global commit-ments to basic standards of decency and rightsin human habitation.

Nkanini: The Emergence of an InformalSettlement

Nkanini is named for the attitude that imbuedthose early pioneers in their determination toclaim a space for themselves within theurban landscape of Cape Town. In English,Nkanini, quite appropriately, translates as‘Forceful’. The coastal Baden Powell Driveand sprawling suburbs of Kuyasa andMakhaza bound Nkanini on each side, withKuyasa a relatively new government-plannedlow-income RDP housing estate, whileMakhaza is older and has a mix of formalbrick houses and informal shacks. The earlyrationale given by Nkanini residents for theirland-grab was that ‘most’ were living in‘backyard shacks’ in neighbouring Makhaza.The building of ‘backyard shacks’, simplythe building of a smaller shack adjacent to atenured larger shack or more typically, aformal township house, is a well-establishedincome-generating practice in townships.Typically, a backyard shack rents for R150(US$20.75) per month, exclusive of servicessuch as water, sanitation and electricity.6

In this early phase of settlement (betweenDecember 2003 and March 2004), one’s

origins from Makhaza and ‘backyard shack’credentials were initially used as a ‘gate-keeping’ device for excluding opportunistswho might threaten ‘their’ (people fromMakhaza) claims to the land. Indeed, mostof the early settlers ‘were’ in fact fromMakhaza and their agitation to invade theland was the spur for rumours concerningthe occupation to spread around the city, aswell as for subsequent settlers to chancetheir arm with the local authorities and alsobuild a shack. Their motivations for settlingNkanini, within this early logic, were clearlyrooted in real marginalisation and chronicpoverty. Amusi, a young man in his earlytwenties, moved to Nkanini from a backyardshack in Makhaza in January 2004, havingfirst arrived in Cape Town from the ruralEastern Cape in 2002, looking for work. Hefirmly believes that the government has ahumanitarian duty to provide for those lessfortunate, but equally takes a swipe at thoseformal residents of Kuyasa and Makhazawho stand to profit from building shacks torent out

If someone can build a shack and not movein, it means they are not desperate. ButI am! The government must understandthis! We have children, parents, families,other dependants—not only are we young,but we don’t have a place to stay!

This is a common refrain that highlights how,in practice, rights are claimed by tapping in todiscourses surrounding identity that have acertain contemporary valency and legitimacy.Valency here is defined by the fact thathousing is a pervasive issue in South Africathat has both historical and contemporary res-onance, its expression being that many poorBlack people have still no access to tenuredand adequate housing. Legitimacy is framedin terms of being a ‘backyarder’ in Makhazaand being able to stake a claim to somethingto which there is a perceived right. Nkaninithus has become a microcosm of manylarger urban processes at work in townshipsacross South Africa. For example, processessuch as those emerging from the sub-lettingof backyard shacks that in turn serve to


create often deeply exploitative patron–clientrelationships between a layer of better-offresidents (landlords) and a layer of particu-larly vulnerable poor people (tenants) (duToit, 2004; Murray, 2001).

As Nkanini flourished, it became clear thatnot everyone was indeed from Makhaza andthat laying claim to the discourse of originin Makhaza was a mechanism for gainingaccess to this emerging community that latercoalesced into a coherent community-widediscourse suitable for articulating to localauthorities. Namely, this is a claim to theidea of the impoverishment of Makhaza,which was perceived to have potentiallymore moral credibility in the face of citycouncil scrutiny. Consequently, people nowliving in Nkanini privately admit to comingfrom other formal and informal townshipson the Cape Flats—for example, from theneighbouring RDP houses of Kuyasa, orfrom areas as far as the long-establishedsuburbs of Langa, Nyanga and Philippi.Also, some residents are newly arrived fromother parts of South Africa (the rural EasternCape) and others who are popularly referredto as ‘African brothers’, those hailing fromcountries such as Nigeria, Democratic Repub-lic of Congo and Mozambique. Whilst thismakes for a cacophony of languages, dialects,styles and fashions, all have one thing incommon: they promote the notion, whethertrue or not, that they come from Makhaza,and because of this they need a house oftheir own. This also implies a basic familiarityand literacy with rights in South Africa—ulti-mately stemming from the Grootboom case,but in practice, and experientially, from anumber of other land invasions that occur fre-quently across the country.

Timing was critical to the settlement ofNkanini and the proximity of the nationalelection in April 2004 can be regarded as akey trigger for movement. Many early settlersrecognised that it was a clear gamble stakingout a land claim and then going to theexpense of erecting a shack only to have itpotentially removed by force. Since the areabeing settled was City of Cape Town-ownedland, which had already been set aside for

Kuyasa 2, many felt that the governmentwould be reluctant to challenge the informal-ity of Nkanini and risk condemnation by thepress. The hope was that in time residentsmight have their shacks upgraded to formalRDP houses like those in neighbouringKuyasa. Here, the issue of the credibility ofone’s poverty and suburban origin resurfaces.For example, claiming to be a backyarderfrom Makhaza, whilst actually being an RDPhouse-owner from Kuyasa, appealed as a per-fectly reasonable strategy through which onemight actually come to possess two RDPhouses. This strategy is made possible by theownership complexities generated by thesale of RDP houses on the open market, aswell as through existing RDP house-ownersinserting a near relative into the emergingcommunity as the shack ‘occupant’.

The manipulation of formal politics isanother key theme in the struggle for urbanspace across South Africa, Nkanini included.Such a manipulation featured prominently inthe basic strategy of those co-ordinating thesettlement efforts for Nkanini residents andthis was reflected in discussion during initialmeetings of the fledgling ‘community’ heldin January 2004. Efforts by the governmentto get citizens registered for the upcomingApril national elections prompted those inNkanini to consider declaring themselves asresidents of Nkanini, even though a fixedand permanent address is an essential require-ment of such registration. This conditioneludes many marginalised voters enmeshedin a long and complex history of migrationand works to create significant pockets ofunregistered voters and therein a locallymanipulable electoral politics.

In openly conveying to the ANC-controlledcouncil that Nkanini residents had no otherplace to live, and thus no formal addresswith which to register to vote, the messagewas sent to the ANC that they might missout on a significant number of votes (about10 000) that would otherwise go their way.The 2004 national elections proved to be anhistorical moment in Western Cape politicswhen the ANC for the first time was able towin an outright (albeit closely fought)




majority—thus avoiding a coalition govern-ment with more conservative parties such asthe Democratic Alliance (DA) or the NewNational Party (NNP), who largely rep-resented Coloured working-class people andWhites. Thus these 10 000 votes became a sig-nificant tool in the hands of those demandingresources and attention from the state.In November 2003, a meeting had been

held in Makhaza amongst a group of backyardshack occupants so that they could ‘share theirpain’ of poverty and insecurity. At themeeting, it was decided that an initial groupof 18 households would move to occupywhat would ultimately become Nkanini. Thisgroup claimed that their actions were intendedto alert City of Cape Town officials to the dif-ficult and degrading circumstances in whichbackyard shack dwellers live. However, theCity claims to have had no knowledge of thesituation in Makhaza. This moral claim bythe ‘backyarders’ makes implicit referenceto the politics of the Grootboom case. Inmany ways, the case of Nkanini can be seenas a communique writ large to the govern-ment: we are poor people in Makhaza andwe need decent housing. Word of Nkaninispread quickly by word-of-mouth (facilitatedby cell phones) around Cape Town and soonpeople were flocking there.Ward 98, into which Nkanini falls, consists

of about 30 000 people and the primary modesfor communicating bureaucratic informationand news about the community at large arethe two key forums, the South AfricanNational Civics Organisation (SANCO) andthe Khayelitsha Development Forum (KDF),as well as through community radio (RadioZibonele) and township newspapers (such asVukani and vastly popular free soccer tabloidssuch as Laduma), which are locally based andfocused (see Pieterse and Oldfield, 2002). TheKDF and SANCO have parallel and devolvedstructures from street-level committees,through sections and wards to the whole ofKhayelitsha; thus, they act as powerful chan-nels for community dialogue, informationflows and organisation.7

Whilst some wards and streets have highlyactive and effective organisational structures

and committees, others exist only in nameand even then only serve as tools in the machi-nations of very local battles for power andresources. Some residents decry the dilapi-dated state of many of the SANCO commit-tees in particular and refer back to a timewhen they were more active and representa-tive of actual community needs (Cole, 1984,1990). Nonetheless, the forum of the ‘commu-nity meeting’ in Khayelitsha has a particularlocus and role that is deeply embedded inthe diverse and divisive politics of resistance,removal, dislocation and migration. The storyof Nkanini is thus remarkable because in bothorganisational and discursive terms it refer-ences that history in novel ways.

Organising Community Coherence andResistance

At early community meetings, residents wereasked to contribute R1 (US$0.15) each tocover the cost of transporting the committeeto the city centre offices of the City of CapeTown unitary council. At the first meetingR235 (US$32.50) was collected and at thesecond, R350 (US$48.50), with names of allof the donors duly recorded by the committeesecretary. By contributing to this coffer, acommitment to the ‘idea’ of Nkanini was col-lectively created and demonstrated. Inaddition to the cost of travel, the committeedecided that the purchase of a cheap loudhai-ler would be strategically useful in communi-cating with the burgeoning number of newresidents of Nkanini. Whilst many peoplehave access to cellular phones, due to the rela-tively high charges associated with them(R2.75 [US$0.40] per minute) they are usedprincipally to receive, rather than make calls.Whilst key community committee members,critically, did use cell phones to arrange theactivities of the core group, communicatingwith the community writ-large was more pro-blematic and demanded the more convention-al response of the loudhailer. This strategywas complemented by the topography ofNkanini, with its occasional sandy dunesrising above the shacks, which made foruseful vantage-points at which to rally a


community response to potential emergenciessuch as the bulldozing of shacks.

The communications ecology of low-income urban and rural residents is one thattypically relies on cellular telephony andradio technologies (Skuse and Cousins,2005). As of July 2004, Nkanini did nothave electricity, which meant that residentswishing to charge their valuable cell phoneshad to draw on a range of social networksspread across the city for their energy needs.Because of the difficulty of rechargingphones, some residents rely on neighbours’and friends’ cell phones for checking theirmessages by switching their SIM-cards over.This aside, nearly all calls made by Nkaniniresidents are from ‘container-phones’, subsi-dised public phone outlets made from con-verted shipping containers. There are threecontainers (two Vodacom, one MTN) withina 20-minute walk of Nkanini, these being situ-ated in the neighbouring suburbs of Kuyasaand Makhaza. So, whilst disadvantaged interms of infrastructure (electricity, water andsanitation) Nkanini residents were nonethe-less able to tap in to extended social networksthrough telecommunications in particular, toadvise others of the availability of land forinformal settlement and to organise essentialsupport in terms of cash, transport, labourand building materials.

From community meetings early in 2004,the Nkanini committee can be seen to havebeen actively pursuing a number of discretecommunication strategies: money was col-lected from residents for the purchase of theaforementioned loudhailer that could effec-tively summon Nkanini to meetings, or toannounce the latest news or co-ordinatecrowds in response to law enforcement visita-tions. In addition, Radio Zibonele featurednews pieces on developments in Nkanini,hosted chat shows with the local councillorsand debated the key issues during phone-inprogrammes. Residents of Nkanini gleanedwhatever information they could from theradio, local newspapers and neighbours orfamily who had contacts within local govern-ment. It was on Zibonele, for example, thatNkanini residents first heard that the mayor

and two local councillors had been lookingfor alternative land to which the squatterscould be relocated and the current crisisameliorated.

By mid January, the flurry of buildingamongst the thick dune bushes signalled anearly victory for the new arrivals in Nkanini.Over the previous month there had beenseveral attempts by law enforcement officialsto destroy new shacks—although it appearedthat in halting their visits to Nkanini, theywere implicitly acknowledging that theyneeded a more coherent strategy—bruteforce simply would not suffice. As previouslymentioned, one of the principal repercussionsof the Grootboom case for housing issues inSouth Africa is that any informal structurethat has been in place for longer than 48hours invokes the state’s responsibility toprovide ultimately both alternative and suit-able shelter and basic services. This earlyvictory prompted many people to invest var-iously in ready-made shacks costing as muchas R2500 (US$345), in less ostentatious build-ing materials with which to erect shacksand ultimately to begin moving furniture—although the risks were by no meansdiminished.

Towards the end of January, bright pinkletter Xs were sprayed on the side of someof the houses, marking them out for demoli-tion. It later transpired that on 27 Januarythe original 18 shack-dwellers had beenserved with an eviction notice issued by theCity Council. Two Coloured officials, with aBlack translator, had previously been seenmapping the area and now returned to servean eviction notice to these original residents.This notice was intimidatingly large and alie-nating in the sense that it used a highly legalis-tic discourse that was inaccessible. Theeviction notice referenced early warningsthat had been issued within the two-daytime-frame allowed in law before the statebecame responsible for housing provision.The notice gave the initial residents sevendays to remove their shacks or have themdestroyed. It also notified them of an impend-ing court hearing on 26 February at which the18 ‘named’ shack-dwellers, who had invaded


the land as early as November 2003, would beformally charged with occupying privatecouncil-owned land. It seemed that if thecity authorities could have the initial land-grab declared illegal, then the entire occu-pation of what had become Nkanini wouldbe placed in grave legal jeopardy.In response to these developments, a com-

munity meeting was held on 28 January2004 at which a rallying call was made toresist the evictions and develop a strategy ofaction. Accordingly a committee of 10 waselected to make a formal approach—in theform of a delegation with a written submissionstating their case—to Nomaindia Mfeketo, thethen mayor of Cape Town, to plead for accessto land and housing and to overturn the evic-tion order. Turning to the mayor of the cityas the one person who personally had thepower to overturn a municipal law exhibits,on the one hand, a familiarity and fluencywith the bureaucratic processes and loopholesof the state; and on the other an orientationtowards formal politics that relies on personalconnections, affiliations, clans, heritage andother constructions of identity, which per-vades southern African politics more gener-ally (Lodge, 1999). In this instance, thepeople of Nkanini, through the astuteRobert, the chairman of the community com-mittee, were hoping to make a special claimon the Mayor’s sympathies because, as thefirst Black woman in this position, theyexpected ‘access’ on the basis of a sharedexperience of living in informal townships,of a history of discrimination and poverty,that would make her sympathetic, if not totheir cause, then to the political threat theyposed in local politics.This attempt to connect to ‘Nomaindia’, as

she is familiarly referred to, is an attempt toenliven a (potentially) shared experience of astate that was brutal and unjust (i.e. a refer-ence to apartheid ) and in essence an attemptto realign their relative powerlessness andtap into her power. Whilst the committeevisit to the City of Cape Town offices wasunsuccessful in as much as they failed tomeet with the mayor, the deputy mayor,Gawa Samuels, assured the committee that

their shacks would not be destroyed on thedate set out in the eviction notice. Nonethe-less, officials in the local council had been sur-prised to hear that the committee representedsuch a large group of former ‘backyarders’from Makhaza.On 29 January 2004, a further community

meeting was held at the ‘big sand dune’ thatwas attended by approximately 500 people,to let them know what had happened withregard to the attempt to see the mayor. Atthe meeting, Robert, the elected head of theNkanini community committee, publiclystated that “Nkanini will not be moved onMonday” and that everyone should buildtheir shacks as quickly as possible before thecourt case on 26 February. He exhorted that“the area must be full of shacks” so that itwould not be so easy to destroy many if a con-frontation with the police transpired. Withemotions running high, many speakersvoiced their right to occupy the land andtheir dire need for formal housing and ser-vices. To this effect, a woman at the meetingshouted out “if we have to go back to wherewe came from [backyard shacks] it showsthe government doesn’t care and it looks badfor them”. In response to this, Robert, theleader of the committee added that the landhad been bought some time ago by the govern-ment (in 1998) and that nothing had happenedsince and that it was only the land invasionthat had prompted the government to act andpush for the commencement of Kuyasa 2.Although the pivotal community meeting

on 29 January ended with a sense that theshacks would not be targeted for demolition,the tension within the community was raisedpalpably in the lead-up to the eviction date.Despite this, the committee had stressed thatthe community should respect the police andnot throw stones at them, even if they didmove in to demolish shacks. At this point,the concern to build within what were popu-larly perceived to be the permissible limitsof Nkanini was reiterated. It was suggestedby the committee that any shacks erectedbeyond the ‘blue sign’—a notional boundarythat ironically proclaimed ‘No Dumping’—should be relocated as they were on land set


aside for Kuyasa 2. Here, a sense of commu-nity differentiation emerges very clearly,with those deemed in ‘desperate need’ ofhousing being encouraged to occupy plotsthat had already been staked out but whichhad yet to be built upon. It was subsequentlysuggested that many of the Makhaza andKuyasa existing house-owners who had pro-spectively staked out a plot in Nkanini werenot really serious about building, this beingevidenced by their hesitancy to commit toerecting shacks.

This meeting at the end of January saw theintroduction of another threat: an internalstruggle for power. It emerged that anothercommittee had been established, with its ownleader, on the far side of Nkanini—in fact,the area of the original settlement of shacks.That these two committees had no knowledgeof each other’s existence speaks to the com-plexity of communicative ecologies inKhayelitsha: the settlementwas physically dis-persed enough that disparate and conflictingprocesses were at work. The collection ofshacks was still loose and not yet formedaround a broader sense of community, word-of-mouth had failed and telecommunicationswere so difficult and expensive that two separ-ate committees emerged, each with its ownstrategy and agenda. While Robert emergedas a legitimate leader for the whole ofNkanini (being able to reference his experiencein the labour movement, amongst other per-sonal qualities which undoubtedly broughthim to the fore of this group), events in latermonths demonstrate the temporary and fluidnature of legitimacy and contests over power.

At a community meeting a week later, on 5February, the committee stressed the need forshacks to be completed by 16 February so thatthe committee could develop a list of allshack-dwellers because local officials wouldbegin registering people. This was purport-edly in support of the court hearing in Febru-ary and served to add weight to the squatters’claims to reside and at minimum would atleast ensure some kind of formal recognitionof the significant numbers involved from theauthorities. In the meantime, a rumour thatthe mayor had promised them alternative

tenured land was circulating throughoutNkanini. The role of rumour in shaping the com-municative ecology and thus the trajectory ofthe establishment of Nkanini needs to be under-stood in the context of severe uncertainty—which can be reinterpreted as a ‘lack of infor-mation’—and need. In one sense, rumourserved to galvanise hope, muster support, stirup emotion and influence the decisions individ-ual householdsmake in the everyday calculus ofsurvival on the margins. Thus, to hear that ‘thegovernment’ had already decided on alternativeland for Nkanini, or that there already existedthe necessarywater and sanitation infrastructureunder the ground (but that the government intheir meanness was withholding it from them),or that committee members had embezzled themoney collected from the community, consti-tute examples of how particular kinds of‘stories’ affect community processes, as wellas giving expression to the relationship thatsuch marginalised people experience vis-a-visthe state.

Connecting to the Mythos of Communityand Struggle

Over several days in early February, City ofCape Town police had visited Nkanini todemolish shacks in areas that had earlierbeen designated as off-limits for informalbuilding. During this time, the residentsbegan a strategy of intimidation, as they gath-ered together to watch the police do theirwork. On 18 February, immediately after thecommunity committee cut-off date for resi-dents to have completed their shacks, thepolice, aided by a gang of young Colouredmale prisoners from nearby PollsmoorPrison, arrived and began demolishing newlyerected homes on the Kuyasa side ofNkanini. Due to the presence of an increas-ingly large crowd, they decided to retreat tothe far side of Nkanini (closer to the sea).However, by this time, a combination of stra-tegic cell-phone calls and word-of-mouthresulted in an even larger crowd materialisingin the place where the police had starteddemolition afresh


We heard people toyi-toying, ja, so then wedrove over there and we saw everyonewalking over that sand dune, because thebulldozers had been on that side, beyondthe blue sign . . . and then they destroyed acouple of shacks there and they took somematerial and then the police and theseguys, the prisoners were going to the otherside . . . the police like were attacking theshacks, they were attacking the shacksthat weren’t finished, but in the processpeople were saying even the shacks thatwere finished, they’ve taken them out andthey’ve taken the material.

When a critical mass had accumulated, peoplein the crowd started with more daring tactics:laying cut bushes across the road and settingthem on fire, burning car tyres, throwingrocks. The police truck drivers becamenervous of being trapped and within 15minutes a group of 30 police and 10 largevehicles arrived, including armoured caspirs(a large vehicle synonymous with crowdcontrol during the apartheid era), equippedfor crowd control with visors, batons, rifles,tear gas and dogs.The situation, unsettlingly similar to

township scenes from the height of the anti-apartheid conflict, contained a number of sym-bolic gestures, which conjured up powerfulemotions and experiences for these townshipresidents and imbued the larger dynamic witha political flavour that resonates strongly withthe current politics of elections and represen-tation. A number of images stand out fromthat afternoon: the Coloured prisonersleaping down from trucks with crowbars inhand to prise apart the walls of shacks thathad just been erected, and the ensuing chant– referring to the militancy of the Sowetouprising—went up in response, with fists inthe air: “Youth of ‘76! Youth of ‘76! The Col-oureds sold us out then, and they are selling usout again! Youth of ‘76!” The aforementionedconflicts of the 1970s and 1980s in the town-ships, the state-sponsored division of Blackcommunities and the duplicity of theColoureds in the Cape (or rather, the manipu-lation of race by the White government to

manufacture betrayals and broken allegiancesto weaken opposition), are a dark undersideof the apartheid struggle that does notreceive significant critical attention in the‘new South Africa’. Here, in a conflict overthe basic resources of human survival—aroof over one’s head—something struck achord—some dead hand of the past, which isconjured up because it serves to unite the‘afflicted’ around a common discourse andcause—namely, that we are Black and we arecontinuing to be persecuted because of ourBlackness and our associated poverty andthat Coloureds are to blame.8 To this end, asthe police attempted to destroy shacks, a palp-able connection is made across generations tothe apartheid struggle. As one member of thecrowd explained

It was like . . ., 1976 youth, the Colouredsscrewed us in the apartheid days andagain in this new South Africa, bladdie Col-oureds, people are starting to swear at Col-oureds, even these unhealthy colouredprisoners, bladdie fools, they are going torot in jail. The Coloureds are always thedogs of the Whites.

With the image of a visored policeman firing atear-gas canister into the crowd, the fullweight of recent history comes crashingdown on the City of Cape Town Council inthis the 10th anniversary year of SouthAfrican democracy. The itinerant crowd atthis moment are united in their persecution,in their collective memory of being at thereceiving end of a historically unjust and,popularly perceived, contemporary uncaringstate system.Cole (1984, 1990) suggests that within

communities in South Africa such as Khaye-litsha, there seems to be a visceral resistanceto telling younger people about the past,perhaps because the memories are too horrific,or perhaps because the younger generation issimply not interested. According to this argu-ment, younger people do not have the confi-dence to try and stake a claim to rights,goods, services and a legitimate place in thecity. The ‘hooks and linkages’, Cole suggests,simply are not available through which to


make a connection to a historically groundedsense of community. However, the evidencepresented herein suggests otherwise. Itwould appear that in fact when faced withsimilar levels of pressure, contemporary gen-erations can and do identify with the youthand militancy of previous generations. Thissuggests that, rather than a loss of memory,or some other breakdown in the transmissionof stories about the painful apartheid past,connections are forged when they need to beforged and, at that critical moment, thepresent is imbued with a sense of the spiritof the past. It is at this point that, as Appadurai(1981) has pointed out, the past becomes auseable, but not endlessly symbolic andplastic resource—in other words, the point atwhich the legitimacy of struggle in thepresent aligns with the legitimacy of past con-flicts. Thus, in order to understand the impactof the police intervention, it is necessary toview that moment as charged with a valencyrooted in a particular experience in the past.Thus, the police intervention was not onlyabout maintaining law and order; it was alsoabout the failure of an attempt to negotiate asettlement. The inability of the communitycommittee to stem the tide of building alsorecreates anew that sense of invasion thatapartheid planners fought so hard to quell.

The essence of that day was captured in thescene of a young man lying on a mattress inthe ruins of his shack; the walls are intactaround him, although horizontal now. Theshopping trolley that transported the shinynew ‘zinc’ corrugated iron sheets stands inwhat was his front door. Although the crowdmanaged to keep the police from destroyingany more houses, the air of uncertainty overthe settlement was palpably raised, yetagain. Nonetheless, the police interventionwas strategically timed. Whilst Robert, thechairman of the Nkanini committee, wasmeeting with mayoral officials in the citycentre, the police had been moving in ontheir mission of destruction in consultationwith a rival Nkanini committee, apparentlywithout Robert’s knowledge. Fortunately,he had received a well-timed call on his cellu-lar phone alerting him to the fact that the

police were firing tear gas into the crowd ofNkanini residents that had accumulated.Naturally, he quickly rushed out to Khayelit-sha by taxi and was able to intervene, tocalm the crowd and persuade the police tostop destroying shacks.

Events in Nkanini rekindle memories fromapartheid-era township struggle, especiallythe conflicting dynamic evident between thetwo competing community committees andthe city authorities (see Marinovich, 1998and Robins, 1999, on the divide-and-ruletownship control tactics of the apartheidera). Later, it emerged that an alternative com-mittee had had a meeting with a council offi-cial in charge of the informal settlementdemolition and had come to an arrangementthat they would start to dismantle shacks onthe Baden Powell Drive side of Nkanini,which as it turned out was on the furthest poss-ible side from where this particular committeewas located. The demolition then effectivelytargeted the Nkanini households representedby Robert’s committee. Unbeknownst to himand the rest of Nkanini, the council officialhad met with an unspecific Nkanini ‘streetcommittee’ at ‘Stocks and Stocks’, the localcity authority offices in Khayelitsha, the daybefore. In clarifying with Robert in the heatof the confrontation, the police retorted:“That’s the problem with you people—you’re fighting for one place but you havetoo many street committees. The other streetcommittee that was there, you don’t knowabout that, but they were there”. To whichRobert replied: “Who said to do this?Because I was in a meeting with the Mayorand she was here on Sunday, saw this place,this area, and she promised that she woulddo something”. Inevitably, the city authoritieswere surprised to hear of the incident, claim-ing not to have given authority for this tohappen, which highlights that either com-munication problems exist at the level of thecity council or that they decided to pay lipservice to the Nkanini residents’ claims andneeds.

In time, a deal was struck with the citycouncil to stop building new shacks by acertain date. The fact that community leaders


encouraged residents to build as fast as possibleup to that point exhibits a community literacyin interacting with the state that is built ondeep and often bitter experience of the politicsand practice of establishing an informal resi-dence. It also exhibits a kind of elasticity inthe process, one in which both sides understandthat deadlines and decrees are there to be chal-lenged and may be interpreted differentially.This in turn establishes grey areas beggingfor an interpretation that maximises benefit,especially for the community, who potentiallyhave more scope for manoeuvre than the citycouncil. Thus the discourses of ‘don’t buildbeyond this point’, or ‘don’t build after thisdate’, or ‘you can’t move this shack becauseI’m living in it’ are eminently flexiblebecause they tap in to known rights, such asrights to shelter or rights not to be evictedfrom a shack in which you are resident formore than two days. Further, the examplespeaks very powerfully to the notion that thestate and informal communities are enmeshedin an on-going dialogue that is continuallyconstructing and amending discrete powerpositions.To complete the story, it emerged later that in

fact Robert ‘did’ know that the police wouldarrive in Nkanini on that day, thus renderinghim in some way complicit, albeit not todestroy the shacks of his own constituents,which in turn reflects again the competitionbetween opposing committees. The story ofNkanini thus becomes, to an extent, a story ofan individual’s rise to power, through afluency in the ways of battles with bureauc-racies. Whilst Robert was lured to the ANC bypromise of political office, reputation and astable income, he also encouragedNkanini resi-dents to carry on building, to carry onmoving inand carry on establishing themselves as a ‘com-munity’. In many ways, Robert’s story reflectsimportant dimensions of the struggle forhousing, for legitimacy and community in con-temporarySouthAfrica. It is deeply revealingofboth the ecology of local communication prac-tices and also of the depth and diversity of con-testation and consensus building withinemerging informal communities such asNkanini. Here, we can perceive of community

organisation, protestation and claims to specificrights or services in terms of multivalent strat-egies that at any one time may win out or var-iously implode, forcing reassessment,recalibration and new anchor points, perhapswithin an alternative claim to communityeffected through a different and competingsocial network or alliance.By August of 2004, Robert was offered a

formal position within the ANC party struc-tures, either as a reward for having provedhis mettle, or as a strategy to neutralise him.Either way, he became unpopular on thesandy streets of Nkanini, as some saw himas a sell-out—absent, not pushing theiragenda, subservient to the ANC. Nonetheless,through his increasing intimacy with theformal powers in the city, Robert was ableto make sure that water-stands were builtthroughout the community in June and thattoilets arrived on the outskirts of Nkanini inmid July. This alleviated the immediate press-ures around water and sanitation—althoughnot for long, because the toilets worked forroughly 3 weeks before collapsing under thestrain of more than 100 users per toilet.By September 2004, it became widely

known that alternative land for Nkanini hadbeen found, although its exact location waskept secret in case others decided to invadeit. In preparation for this, another round ofcounting and registering of residents tookplace—this time with all the trappings ofbureaucracy. On 7 October, the first 1000 resi-dents went to the Solomon Mahlangu Com-munity Hall in Khayelitsha to fill in variousforms to register officially for an RDP govern-ment house.9 At this registration, single menwere being turned away: only those with cer-tifiable dependants, under the rights made tan-gible by the Grootboom case, were eligible.One room in the hall had a long queue ofpeople wanting to make photocopies of theirprecious documents; another queue wantedto get their documents certified by filling outan affidavit with the councillor; the lastqueue contained those waiting to fill in theactual housing forms. Finally, after nearly ayear of struggle, the community of Nkaniniwas here taking its first step towards formality


and tenure, maybe not in Nkanini’s currentphysical location, perhaps elsewhere. ForNkanini’s residents, the ‘where’ was not soimportant; what was important was that inthis particular challenge to the state their col-lective action, their literacy and coherence ofclaims carried the day and ultimately thestate was held accountable. Whilst a victorythat is deeply reflective of highly localisedstruggles to realise basic human rights and ser-vices, it should not be forgotten that the stateinto which the residents of Nkanini are ulti-mately incorporated, perceived here asformal and tenured state-provided housing,remains barely adequate.

Conclusion

The ‘idea’ of Nkanini as a community thatworks—for in practice it has been shown towork—is borne out through the everydaymicro-conflicts and responses to crises thatthreaten both individual and collective exist-ence. For example, the fight between a groupof women and a group of young men inearly February 2004 over a particular plotthat had been staked out was resolved even-tually by the women acceding the plot to themen in exchange for their assistance infinding, clearing and marking out a new one.At a collective level, the experience ofmeeting en masse on one side of Nkanini towitness the destruction of shacks demon-strates a togetherness that helps to forge col-lective ideas and ideals about human rights,dignity, solidarity and community.

The imaginary of the community of Nkanini,as a viable idea, speaks to the tensions andstresses of competing and various identities—for example, “we are from Makhaza, they areamakwerekwere” (a derogatory term forforeigners)—as well as claims to power andauthority, between residents over a plot ofland, between competing committees,between the committee and city council thatlie within the idea of Nkanini. In reality, itsboundaries are porous in the extreme—phys-ically, socially and ideationally. It continuesto act out ‘forceful’ processes and its existenceas an evolving space is mediated by the ways

that ideas and information are communicatedamong residents, between representatives andauthorities, and between competing commit-tees. Nkanini’s existence on the fringes ofKhayelitsha, itself a seemingly peripheralplace, ultimately contradicts both Cole’s(1984, 1990) and Cook’s (1986) version ofKhayelitsha as a somehow inherently discon-nected community. Khayelitsha rather is verymuch connected to the rest of Cape Town:the political economy of labour, livelihoodsand migration is such that residents of localessuch as Nkanini do in fact form an integralpart of the economy and social life of greaterCape Town, albeit on very unequal, exploita-tive terms and strictly delimited in a numberof ways—through constructions of space,urban geography, language, class and race.

From this perspective, we can see eventssuch as the sudden reference to ‘street com-mittees’ emerging in Nkanini by May 2004as signalling an important moment of defi-nition for Nkanini. It is generally acceptedby township residents that informal areas donot have street committees. This is a civicstructure particular to formal, establishedtownships and thus embodies a particular setof assumptions, values, scope for action andinstitutional capacity. Street committees area crucial tool for communication andinclusion in democratic governance processesand are viewed as such by township residents.They allow for a textured, interpenetratedexpression of traditional forms of governancesuch as imbizos, a form of traditional meetingwhere a chief listens to his people’s com-plaints and concerns, within a modern frame-work of democratic norms and values. In aninformal area such as Nkanini, references tocommunity structures rooted in formal insti-tutions speak to a desire and discourse of theneed to formalise and of the attendant benefitsthat come with fixity of tenure and state recog-nition—namely, electricity, water and sani-tation, housing and respect.

The complex interaction of demands for therealisation of rights and references to ‘strugglepractices’ highlight broader communityliteracy in ways of creating agency in thecontext of structural powerlessness and


disadvantage. There emerges a bricolage ofdiscursive practices that, in suggesting theoutline of a ‘community’, reveal an urbanform applying new strategies. They are newbecause communication technologies allowdifferent ways of relating to extended socialnetworks and mobilising both the physicalcommunity and key modes of support. Theyare new because legislation and the previouschallenges of the poor and disempowered ininformal areas have created discrete newspaces in which rights can be both debatedand potentially realised. At the same time,the dynamism of urban space in SouthAfrica is fuelled by old modes of interactionand practice. There is the continued spatialmarginalisation of those at the periphery ofSouth Africa’s racialised polity andeconomy, the traditional toyi-toying tacticsand social communication practices of thedisempowered that spread by word-of-mouthand instil in the community a sense andspirit of resistance. Further, there is the tra-ditional brutality of police engagement withits echoes to an apartheid past and militancythat the community enlists in active pursuitof highly localised claims to rights andsocial justice within the present.The ways in which informal urban spaces

are imagined, successfully constructed orultimately disintegrate reflect degrees of com-petency and literacy in community organis-ation, in framing a cohesive and ‘deserving’discourse and in the actual dialogue withlocal and national expressions of power.This paper has sought to analyse how theseexpressions interact, how they communicate,and the practices that underlie their respectiveorientations towards rights, whether they areunderstood as localised appropriations ofglobal cultural products, or absolute bench-marks of international standards.

Notes

1. In keeping with long-term qualitative researchpractices, the names of key informants havebeen altered to afford them a degree ofanonymity, although placenames have beenretained in order that the analysis may moreaccurately reflect real and critical urban

processes, such as the struggles to accessinformal housing. Research was conductedas part of a broader UK Department for Inter-national Development (DFID) fundedresearch programme (2003–05) that exam-ined information and communication usesby poor urban and rural households in SouthAfrica, Ghana, India and Jamaica. The princi-pal purpose of this research was to enhanceunderstanding of the extent and value of thediverse information flows and emerging com-municative connections forged between poorrural and urban households. In the SouthAfrican context, the research also included afocus on rural villages in the Eastern Caperegion and examined the connections tourban households in areas such as Khayelitshathat actively help to sustain rural livelihoods.

2. South Africa’s particular experience of state-sponsored apartheid urban influx controls,racial and spatial segregation constitutesperhaps the most insidious example of con-temporary social engineering and state-sanctioned social, economic and politicalexclusion (Crankshaw and Parnell, 1998;Swilling, 1997). With the advent of democ-racy in 1994, a new interventionist SouthAfrican state has emerged, one that seeks tochallenge the deep-seated, on-going andhighly racialised urban inequalities and disad-vantage that are evident in both contemporaryeconomic and social development indicators(see Beall et al., 2002 on intervention in infor-mal urban settlements).

3. Khayelitsha, meaning ‘New Home’, is largesprawling suburb about 30 km from thecentre of Cape Town that houses about450 000 people (although estimates varybetween 350 000 and 1 million). The exactnumber of people in Khayelitsha is difficultto gauge partly because of the fluid nature ofresidence that the history of the place hasgiven rise to, and partly because of thenature of the housing of which it consists.Many residents maintain a strong sense ofconnectedness with rural homesteads and asense of migrancy strongly pervades themythos of Khayelitsha.

4. The Reconstruction and Development Pro-gramme was devised by COSATU in con-junction with the ANC and SACP inresponse to their mutual socialist concernsover committing to a market economy inthe post-apartheid South Africa of 1994.Davenport (1998) notes that the programmewas designed to address some of the salientinequalities evident in housing, health, landtenure, education and service provision, suchas water and electricity. The programme wascritical to the validity and credence of the


first majority rule Government of NationalUnity (1994–99) and how it was popularlyperceived, especially by those who had beenpreviously disadvantaged under apartheid. Abudget of R7882 million was allocated forthe programme in June 1995; 1996 saw thequiet shelving of the RDP (although it offi-cially continues) in favour of the Growth,Employment and Redistribution Policy(GEAR) and Industrial Strategy ProjectRunning that sought ostensibly to stimulatethe economy and provide the additionalgrowth necessary to fund the RDP(Davenport, 1998). State-built houses underthe RDP of the new democratic governmentare intended for people who earn less thanR1500 (US$207) per month.

5. Mrs Irene Grootboom was one of a groupwhich included 390 adults and 510 childrenliving in appalling conditions in an informalsettlement called Wallacedene, Cape Town.When they were evicted from the illegallyoccupied land which they had occupied, theHigh Court found that the children and,through them, their parents were entitled toshelter under section 28(1)(c) of the Consti-tution and ordered that the national and pro-vincial governments, as well as the thenCape Metropolitan Council provide themwith tents, portable latrines and a regularsupply of water as minimum rights to shelter(High Court of South Africa, 1999; Lieben-berg and Pillay, 2000).

6. Backyard-shack dwellers are particularlyexploited and often live in appalling con-ditions at the mercy of their landlords. Theydo in many senses represent the poorest ofthe poor in modern South Africa (Beallet al., 1999).

7. Each street has a committee of representa-tives, with a chairperson who attends sectionmeetings. Each section has a committee anda chairperson who attends ward meetings.Each area has a committee with an executivewho meets at a SANCO meeting of all theother executives. It is strictly a civic structureand works in parallel to the KhayelitshaDevelopment Forum, which is made up ofWard Development Forums. The Develop-ment Forum consists of both civic bodiesand private enterprises.

8. The enmity between Coloureds and Blacks inthe Western Cape stems partly from the factthat the Western Cape has historically had alarge number of Coloureds that received pre-ferential treatment, since they were criticalto the local economy and polity and numeri-cally dominant, under the apartheid state(Worden, 1994). In the mid 1970s Coloured

Labour Preference policies were put in placein the Western Cape, in an attempt to keepAfrican migrants out of the province(Cousins et al., 2005).

9. In order to qualify, one needed to be marriedor have financial dependants, be a citizen ofSouth Africa or a permanent resident, belegally competent to contract, have a grossmonthly household income of less thanR3500 (US$484), and not have receivedprevious housing benefits (http://www.housing.gov.za/content/subsidy%20basics/qualification.htm).

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