PEDRO MZILENI | African cities are mass graveyards for Black people

The interconnectedness of capitalism, colonialism and neoliberalism entrenched in the last century were the seeds of the growth of the modern African city.

An African city was a site of production, the extraction of minerals, the concentration of cheap labour, and the accumulation of wealth. It is a site of settler economics, where European colonisers pulled cheap black labour into its centre in massive numbers to maximise production, profits and the development of Europe.

When Walter Rodney correctly diagnosed that Europe developed at the expense of Africa, he was referring to the exploitation of the mass of African labour in the African city  to secure the tranquility of the metropolis in Europe.

Apartheid SA formalised this colonial  underdevelopment of the African city by crafting a series of racist laws – the Natives Land Act of 1913, the Minimum Wages Act of 1925, the Black Consolidation Act of 1945, the Group Areas Act of 1950, the Bantu Education Act of 1953, and the Black Labour Act of 1964 – to name a few.

White people created these laws to convert black people into animals – where black people are placed in a permanent state of enslavement and exploitation as cheap labour. This influx control system stretched to the  entire continent – where the dispossessed, colonised, enslaved, and landless black people were taken from Malawi, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Lesotho, and as far as Congo, Nigeria, and Senegal to come work as horses and donkeys in the mines, factories, and farms of occupied SA.

Every major city in Africa emerges out of this colonial design. The African economy  is based in African cities that still operate with the colonial pattern. Raw materials are still being extracted using black cheap labour,  to be transferred to the Global North to create wealth for Europe while Africans remain in poverty.

Despite every African country claiming to be free and independent today, the reality on the ground is that the colonial order of Africa has not ended. The death of 77 black people in a building that caught on fire in Johannesburg last week is a manifestation of the modern condition vomiting its colonial seeds.

Large numbers of Black people, working as cheap labour, die every week in major cities – from shack fires, building collapses, massacres, hospital calamities and police violence, among others. We recall Marikana, Life Esidimeni and Enyobeni, Boksburg and the recent deaths from the burning of over 1,000 shacks at Kennedy Road informal settlement in Durban.

The colonial imagination of the African city normalises all these weekly tragedies facing black people and it perpetuates them to maintain itself as a site of profit accumulation. The corporate media treat these tragedies as minor stories placed on the back pages as nobody cares about the loss of life  of poor people.

It is no accident therefore that the majority of the black people who died in that building are immigrants from across the continent who are in SA to work in the retail sector of Johannesburg as cheap labour – street vendors, sex workers, Uber drivers and informal traders.

Attempts made in the past by the City of Johannesburg to evict them have thankfully been rejected by the courts. Our constitutional democracy recognises a human being first, and their right to life, housing, dignity and movement.

The city must therefore stop masking its failures with war talk against human rights organisations – and it must begin to do the difficult work to perform its constitutional obligation to transform cities and  break with their colonial  history in meaningful terms.

This moment calls upon all of us to revisit the two most difficult questions of our times:  what was the purpose of the struggle against apartheid colonialism in SA? And did we lose so many freedom fighters in battle and in exile for Africans to remain stateless and disposable people who roam around the continent like animals?