Mohamed Halfani teaches at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Dar es Salaam. He visited South Africa in April 1992 as part of a team consulting with the ANC and popular organizations about urban policy. He is currently a visiting professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto.

A view from Morogoro

Growing up in the Tanzanian town of Morogoro during the immediate post-independence period one was exposed to the elements of apartheid at a very early age. Even when I started primary school, I was aware of young South Africans in town, with their characteristic shaved heads and oversized clothes, the women wearing berets. The combatants not only brought new fads to the local youth; they also introduced an awareness of the situation in South Africa.

As the combatants integrated with the town resident we learned about the agonies of living under apartheid and the necessity of rising up to confront the regime. The location of the ANC office in the midst of our poor neighbourhood brought the fate of the people of South Africa very close to us. Thus, young as we were, we could relate to the grief of the Sharpeville massacre. We were easily convinced of South African complicity when napalm bombs were dropped on villages bordering Mozambique.

As I matured and became more exposed to the magnitude of the problems within South Africa and their effects on the countries around the sub-region, I started to see apartheid as social poverty, political alienation, and racial segregation. I was convinced that my own background was sufficient for an understanding of South Africa's rampant poverty. I thought it would be easy to understand the helplessness of a people disenfranchised and denied basic human rights. I was confident I could relate to institutionalized racism, having been born into the structures of colonial segregation and having visited societies where some degree of racism prevails.

It was with these conceptions and emotions that I landed at Jan Smuts airport in Johannesburg in April 1992. I arrived with three other colleagues from Canada at the invitation of the ANC and the civic movement of South Africa.

At the gate of apartheid: victory or surrender

My first encounter with a representative of the South African government at the airport immigration desk was a soul searching moment. It brought back all the memories from the old days in Morogoro. I was not sure whether it was a moment of surrender or victory. Was the person behind the glass counter at Immigration still an enemy, or a partner in search of a solution for change? Was my entry through the same door as my Canadian colleagues a capitulation on the part of the apartheid structures or was I yielding to a facade? How could I explain what I was doing to my folks back in Morogoro, to my illiterate mother who had given away the only family rooster to the liberation fund.

Race poverty and the apartheid city

One hour after landing in Johannesburg I found myself embroiled deeply in conflict. The receptionist at our hotel asked me to put down three times the deposit demanded of my Canadian colleague. Both of us were paying in cash. When we protested, a supervisor intervened only to inform me that the issue was about my deposit and not a comparison with the other guest. He argued that the amount I was asked to put down was less than what the hotel required. If this had happened in Tanzania I would have interpreted it as outright incompetence or an attempt to solicit a bribe. In the case of South Africa, I was tempted to concur with a passer-by who attributed the whole incident to the fact that I was black. This left me flabbergasted; the receptionist was a black sister!

My first challenge on entering South African society was to come to terms with a reality perceived largely by three shades: white, black, and coloured. I heard no discourse devoid of the element of pigment. The notion of "a person" does not exist in South Africa; instead there is "a black" "a coloured" "a white." No wonder, a certain Peter who lives in a shack in the ghettos of Capetown is popularly known as "Whitey." The abnormality of his situation is captured only by his caucasian origins and white complexion, and nothing else. Similarly, the gradual movement of young black professionals into the Johannesburg city centre is described as the "greying" of the city.

In the first days of our mission there were many points where I had to reconcile my earlier conception of apartheid with the reality I was encountering. I became aware that even from the distance of Tanzania, I had also become a victim of apartheid. I had failed to get beyond a perception of the South Africa situation mediated by colour. The correspondence of the oppressor and the oppressed with the colours of white and black was so deeply ingrained in me that I was not aware of any other possible relationship in apartheid South Africa. I was convinced that factors such as class or ideology were more or less subsidiary, that they could not disturb the inherent antagonism between every black and every white, and vice versa.

I realized quickly that my Tanzanian perception was overly simplified, basically focusing on the racial camouflage of the system. I discovered, to my happiness, that there are more white South Africans actively engaged in the anti-apartheid struggle than I had thought. I began to appreciate the necessity of penetrating the colour barrier and discovering the heterogeneity of the social and political forces in South Africa. And I realized that in the course of its development, the system had also undergone a process of internal change, with many forces fractionalized.

Coming from a post-colonial society which has been in the least developed category throughout the twentieth century, I believed that I had a fair experience of what constitutes poverty and misery. My confidence proved to be unfounded. I was amazed with the poverty in South Africa, a wretchedness uncharacteristic of other parts of Africa. Capetown resembles the best part of the French Riviera and houses only a few thousand people. It poses a stark contrast to the sprawling shack colony just a short distance away. Here more than a million people are packed into makeshift housing without proper infrastructure, except for powerful security lights to monitor them, and tarmac roads which ensure rapid deployment of armoured carriers to quash any riots. Shacks are constructed out of waste materials such as plastic sheets, packing cases, cardboard boxes and aluminium cans. Old garments are used to partition the sleeping places and provide some kind of privacy. Here infants, teenagers and old people freeze through the cold winter nights. Most of the shack compounds lack schools, clinics, water facilities and even proper toilets. The image of poverty would shock even a resident of Mathare valley in Nairobi - one of the worst squatter settlements in the continent. The contrast between the "white city" and the "black compound" is so profound that it is hard to believe the two places are in the same country.

The poverty and deprivation are aggravated by the density of the settlements, where people subsist in marginal economies like petty trading, brewing beer, and plain criminal activities. Apartheid has made conditions worse by destroying the peasant agricultural sector, evicting people from their lands. The result is a massive movement to the townships, now crammed with heterogeneous groups of residents, hostel dwellers, squatters and those living in shacks.

A striking revelation to me was the internal heterogeneity of a township such as Soweto or Alexandra or Mndetsane. The local population in a township is divided into the residents, the hostel dwellers, the squatters and the shack dwellers. The residents are comprised of tenants in the council houses and a few plot owners who have built or bought their own houses. "Black" and "Coloured" residents live in separate compounds.

The hostel dwellers are the labour recruits from the homelands who are supposed to be single and are expected to be accommodated only during the brief period of their employment. Of late, the hostel dwellers have become more permanent and have brought their families to live with them in the single room structures. Squatters and shack dwellers are both illegal settlers who have invaded land around the township. While the former have more or less stabilized, the latter are still struggling to get established and their tenements are even more temporary.

The numbers involved in the different categories and the gravity of the social problems and contradictory interests of each group create a serious problem of urban land in the post-apartheid South Africa. While in other parts of the continent the land issue has been largely a rural problem, in South Africa the problem may well be more intense in the urban centres. In addition to the challenge of integrating the bifurcated apartheid city into a single city, there will be a broader challenge of integrating the millions relegated now to the fringes into a single set of economic and welfare policies.

The problem of the city in the future South Africa will be aggravated further by the current inattention to rural development programmes which could check the rural exodus to urban centres. At this point, understandably, more attention is being given to the question of land ownership. This problem is the more urgent because the apartheid regime is rapidly selling away "public" land to private corporations. At the same time, white farmers are consolidating their usurpation rights by evicting the local population "renting" the largely uncultivated farms.

While acknowledging the urgency of the land problem, any resolution of the land question has to go hand in hand with preparation of a multi-facetted rural development policy. The experience of Zimbabwe, Namibia and even Zambia is too fresh to be ignored.

A revitalized civil society

The three-decade ban on anti-apartheid organizations and the disenfranchisement of the black population left a serious void at neighbourhood level. Local communities lacked a legitimate institution to articulate their interests. While in the workplace the trade union movement was a strong force for promoting the struggle, residential areas did not have an equivalent mobilizing machinery. The existing institutions of local government in the townships were imposed and controlled by the apartheid regime and hence considered illegitimate.

Communities therefore could only turn inwards. They had to organize and push through their demands. Organizing through their common identities as squatters, as women, as church goers, as youths, or simply as neighbours, they succeeded in building a social movement capable of mobilizing the people to wage a successful boycott against rent and service charges, to organize alternatives to the services they were deprived of, to resist evictions and to plan for land invasions.

Within a short period, almost the whole black population throughout the country was galvanized into forming community organs called "civics." Nowhere else in the history of post- colonial sub-Saharan Africa has civil society become so revitalized. In the process, it has turned into a potent force that supersedes even the emergence of major organizations like the ANC, the PAC, and the Communist Party. With empowerment and popular participation gaining prominence in the discourse on Africa's development, the evolution and role of the civic movement in South Africa will provide useful lessons for other countries.

The vibrancy of the civil society in South Africa has generated an intellectual discourse which is either missing or weakly developed in the rest of the continent. Intellectuals in other parts of Africa are still searching for effective ways of empowering communities through structures of local government, decentralization, civil associations, or community organizations. The discussion in South Africa, however, is conducted from a non- statist perspective focusing on the social configuration of the civil society, its organizational potential, its relationship with the state and political parties, and the future role of the civic movement. The concrete experience of South Africa has enriched this debate to a level unsurpassed anywhere else in the continent.

At the same time, the strength of the civil society has reached a level that also allows for re-examining the relationship between intellectuals and society. Some civic organizations are raising concern that there is a danger of intellectuals substituting for the people through their monopoly of skills and expertise, subordinating the people's felt interests and promoting their own technocratic way of thinking. The movement is also guarding against the possibility of intellectual exploitation. They have recognized that as the civil society liberates itself and engages in policy negotiations, the need for intellectual and technical skills will intensify. Correspondingly the civic movement will need to avoid situations in which the benefits of research and consultancies accrue mainly to those with intellectual and technical expertise. There is a need for constant review of the partnership between the latter and civic associations. In few other African countries has this issue been so cogently raised.

Adjusting the frame

On entering South Africa I immediately realized I had to adjust my perception of its realities. As I travelled around the country I was shaken and depressed by the depths to which one group of human beings can reduce another. Towards the end of my stay I discovered a ray of hope. I realized that a society does not simply give in, even to the most vicious oppression. The resurgence of civil society in South Africa is the most precious endowment to emerge out of the apartheid system. I had a yearning to replicate this resurgence in my own country.

Absorbed by these afterthoughts as I boarded the plane out of Jan Smuts, I was given a parting shot by the apartheid regime. I handed over my ticket at the check-in counter. A moment later, the airline staff shouted to my Canadian colleague two meters behind me, "Madame, tonight there are two flights to London and yours is the second one. It will leave an hour later." When my colleague angrily responded that the ticket belonged to the person who gave it to him, the poor fellow casually explained, "Oh, I thought he was carrying your luggage." All I could do was laugh.

Exhausted but glad to be back in Canada, we landed at Pearson International airport. While the more than three hundred passengers of our Boeing 747 were waiting to pick up their luggage from the carousel, I felt a jerk on my shoulder and turned to see an identification badge flashed in my face. "Can I have your travelling papers sir?" I pinched myself, confirmed that I was awake, and again all I could do was laugh.

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