I live in Soweto's Dube Village and on Saturday just after 3am we set off for Mpumalanga to attend a 6am funeral.

It was just by sheer luck and quick thinking that I avoided my car being damaged by rampaging Dube hostel dwellers who threw bricks and stones at us.

How do these people expect us to respect them, let alone sympathise with their cause? Mayor Amos Masondo must just send in bulldozers and flatten all the hostels. After all, they are a product of apartheid and we know how many of our brothers were killed and maimed in the 1990s to accommodate certain people.

Hostel residents do not pay rent, or for electricity or water.

When a reporter asked one man why they were protesting, he said because his family had grown and the government should build him a nice decent house.

When are we going to learn that there is nothing for mahala on earth?

I believe that some railway tracks were damaged and I also saw the traffic lights at Maponya Shopping Centre had been broken. I won't even mention the filth the protesters left behind.

I guess we can all blame this on apartheid, not so? A wise man once told me that if you want to kill a person, deprive him of education. I don't know how true that is.

Tshifhiwa Khashane, Soweto