SANE Views

Vol.7 No.16, 21 June 2007

IS THIS INTOLERABLE OR JUST UNFORTUNATE?

SANE VIEWS

Margaret Legum

‘We find street people dead on the street often’. That statement, attributed to Cape Town Councillor J.P. Smith, referred to events that led to the death from exposure, in Wynberg, of Maria Visser, a homeless woman. What shocked the Councillor was the ‘malicious’ claim that her death had resulted from law enforcement. It required ‘a stretch of the imagination’ to link it to a Metro police operation, during which her bedding and other possessions were confiscated.

The Councillor is said to have explained to a Cape Times reporter that homeless people ‘should make an effort to secure a bed at a shelter’, failing which they should ‘contact an outreach worker to prevent dying from exposure’. If they fail to do that, the law requires that they ‘leave the area’, and any personal possessions are ‘bagged and tagged to be returned later’. It is not clear where they should go, having left ‘the area’. Are we talking here about selective suburbs being ‘cleared?’

Other homeless were interviewed who had survived the ‘bagging and tagging’ of their protection from the elements , including cardboard shelters. Their accounts - ‘they just came and took everything’ - differ considerably from the authorities’ description of patient helpfulness, followed by last resort application of perfectly reasonable laws.

I would like to see reported every morning in the media the names and circumstances of every one of those ‘dead street people’ throughout South Africa. Where is it happening and on what scale? Alongside the shock reporting of crime and its victims, let us hear about the crime that people die quietly of an economic system – not some kind of national disaster - that, in conditions of abundance, excludes them from access to the basic necessities of life; and allows them to expire of exposure - untended, unremarked, in pain, helplessness and fear.

A charge of murder against the Minister of Safety and Security is mooted by the Homeless Peoples’ Crisis Committee. Meanwhile, here are some facts that some people may not know. First, you don’t get into a homeless shelter without money: variable in amount, but actual rands, which must daily be begged, borrowed or stolen. Second, there is a risible relationship between the number of available outreach workers and the need for their help everywhere.

Most important, homeless people live without proper shelter because they cannot pay for homes. Our economy offers them no paid employment, but provides no grants - in order to preserve their dignity. Homeless people have no choice – despite the comforting myths about ‘gentlemen of the road’ choosing freedom over confinement. They have no regular income that would enable them to pay for homes, rates, rents, energy, water – let alone food and clothing. Not because they are work-shy but because the economic structure excludes them.

This will continue while we tolerate it. This is not a party political matter, nor one of race. Currently the socio/political culture in South Africa accepts that some people – with human skins, like you and me, not fur or feathers like animals – will have to live outside in bitter weather, or shiver in slender shacks. It will continue while we do not feel the same shock at the death of a ‘street person’ as we would if a family member – or a pet – died of exposure.

It will continue while our solution is to hope the weather improves, or to rely on temporary disaster management or the Red Cross. It will continue while we kid ourselves that destitute people are somehow different from us, that their poverty is inevitable, and/or that our proudly flourishing economy will somehow reach poor people some time.

All of that is illusion. Human history is replete with examples of political economies that intentionally ensured that no one lived without the basic necessities of food, shelter, clothing and social acceptance. All of them were poorer than ours. Death by exposure is intrinsic not to human societies, but to our special kind of global competitive ideology.

But the illusion helps us to swallow the next delicious mouthful from a range of sources of nutrition; to pass by in our heated cars the bedraggled humans drifting past our prosperity. It helps us to disassociate the abundance – the free lunches, the delightful invitations, the delicacy of our palate for all good things – from the gross suffering and the humiliation and dehumanisation that poverty brings. It even helps us to believe we deserve prosperity and they don’t.

During the Vietnam war the famous picture of a naked child on fire from napalm changed the minds of a generation worldwide. The Western case that, unless we held the line in Vietnam, the ‘domino effect’ would spread Communist dictatorship was replaced by simple revulsion that said ‘nothing, and no outcome, can justify that child’s experience.’ If that was the price of holding the line, it was too high – not just for that child, but for us who inflicted her horror.

When we calculate the costs to ourselves, in terms of callousness, of our chosen economic dispensation, we will discover that the price is too high.