Testimonies from South Africa

This densely populated district on the outskirts of Cape Town is called “Crossroads.” The name goes back to the road junction here where workers from a nearby farm built their dwellings in the early 1970s. By 1977, about 18,000 people had settled in the area; today the population has more than doubled. Because the area was not intended for Blacks, police used to chase away the residents regularly. Beauty Skefile, who lived there for years in a canvas shack, shares her memories.

We had to hide the shack every day and we had to keep on moving from the one place to the other. Because the police kept coming to find us. The did not want us in Crossroads. They said, Cape Town was just for the white people and we could not put our shacks there. They were always trying to chase us away.

Every morning we had to wake up and pull the shack down before the police inspectors came. Then we hid everything we owned beneath some rocks. This was to stop the police from destroying it all. Later, when they went away, we had to rebuild the shack all over again. We had to do this every day for about four years, because if the police found our shack, they just pushed it over and kicked sand over everything, trying to ruin it.

But then we had to move our house somewhere else, because the police would come back. They even came with their dogs. Sometimes they came during the day, sometimes in the afternoon and sometimes at night, many of them at once. When the police came at night, sometimes we were naked and we ran, just like that, because the dogs were running after us, running after us. We just had to get up and go, or the dogs would bite us. One day I fell and they bit me here on my leg. I was very angry, very angry, and I was crying, I was crying.

The dogs bit me two times. I don't know what we had done, that they didn't want to give us a place to stay, just to chase us with dogs. We could hear when they were coming, with their sirens going ‘whee, whee, whee.’ The first person who heard them shouted out, ‘Kubomvu,’ meaning ‘It is red, they are coming!’ It was a warning, us black people’s warning to each other.

One day five or six policemen came, sometimes even 20 or more. We saw them on one side and ran, but they came from the other direction. We ran away again, but there they were on the other side. The policeman in charge was a tall man with black hair and a long face, called Mr. Basson. We knew this Mr. Basson because he always came and he was always swearing and shouting at us. We were very scared of him.

The first time they came I was sleeping. I heard a big noise outside and people shouting angrily. When I went outside, I saw lots of people pushing Mr. Basson away. But the police came back, many of them, and pushed over the shacks with their bulldozers. They were much stronger than us, with their dogs and guns and machines. The dogs were more scary than the guns, because the dogs were chasing us and biting us. But after a while they left us alone.

They were trying to scare us. Once they put us all on many big trucks, government trucks. We were a lot of people but they were just pushing, pushing us onto the trucks. We had no time to grab anything to take with us. The truck traveled out near Stellenbosch, and the driver stopped to get petrol. We were in the back singing loudly. When the truck stopped, we banged and banged on the door. ‘What do you want?’ the man said. ‘We want to go and wee,’ we said. He let us out and we ran away and hitched back to Crossroads, all of us.

Source: southafrica.co.za/apartheid-experiences-attempted-forced-removals.html