Nairobi

Thick smoke hangs above the access road to The Westgate – the up-market shopping mall that serves mainly expats, UN staff and Kenyan elites.

Sporadic gunfire and explosions are clearly heard from the direction of the compound; overtaken on Saturday 21 September, by Somali fighters from the Muslim militant group Al-Shabaab.

Police forces and military duck for cover, and new troops are being bussed in order to take part in the operation.

Combat helicopters are circling around the site. Even higher than them, almost above the clouds, one can spot small airplanes. The sky is very busy. And it is overcast; the weather is gloomy and when the clouds are high up, aircraft are hardly visible.

Dozens of reporters, local and international, are shouting their dispatches into mobile phones. Some are Tweeting, or recording interviews with rescued hostages, nurses, and security officers.

Everything appears to be surprisingly well organized, including the supply of food, water and medicine. A Chinese clinic is offering help, as well as several voluntary organizations. People are donating blood. There are blankets and tents readily available.

But the gunfire keeps raging.

There are all sorts of speculations: the leader, the commander, is the ‘White Widow’, an English lady who was married to one of the Muslim attackers of the London Underground. Other ‘unconfirmed reports’ speaks about American jihadi fighters. And then, there is of course that semi-confirmed information about Israeli commandos, about US involvement and UK participation.

Who is inside that most luxurious shopping complex in East Africa? They say, there are no more than 10 attackers holed up inside, mainly Somalis, but there also others, some coming from outside the African continent. The rumors and official reports first speak about a few dozen hostages, then about 200. The number keeps swelling.

The armed forces and reporters are interacting.

“6 soldiers died”, one army officer whispers into my ear. “They do not admit it, but I know, I was just there”.

At one point I spot my Indian-Malaysian dentist, next to her son, also a dentist, who is said to have saved several people in the course of the first day. She is visibly shaken and her eyes are red, from lack of sleep, or maybe from tears.

It is all very emotional, very raw. Days and nights are blending together.

Al-Shabaab is Tweeting. It tells the world that the pain inflicted during those days is just a tiny fraction of what Kenya is inflicting on Somalia. Twitter is quickly shutting down all the sites of Al-Shabbab, but new sites are being instantly created.

***

Since 2011, Kenya has been occupying a substantial part of Somalia, and many analysts are questioning the legitimacy of this action. Oil rich southern Somalia is perhaps seen as the trophy by both Kenya, and the Western powers.

For years and decades now, the West has been destabilizing Somalia. Kenya and Ethiopia, two staunch allies of the West in the region, are playing a deadly game, incessantly. Thousands of civilians have already died.

Kenya is one of the closest allies of the West in Africa, with both US and UK military bases all over the nation, and with Israeli intelligence personnel on the Swahili coast and elsewhere.

That brutal invasion is not discussed, of course: in the Kenyan media and in the international press, the war and the attack on the shopping mall are carefully separated, disconnected.

And so is the brutality factor of the Kenyan troops in the territory of occupied Somalia: one can only judge from the stories told by refugees in Dadaab and other camps. The battleground is fully off-limits to foreign war correspondents – for our own protection, of course!

***

Efficiency appears to be only on the surface.

Dig deeper and chaotic pictures emerge.

Japanese acquaintances working for the UN, recalled how awfully unhelpful the local UN security system has been, since the attack:

“We were held in a bookshop, inside the Westgate. “ As the gunfight was raging all around, she and her little daughter were held for over two hours. She called the UN security. Their reply was chillingly laconic: ‘stay safe!’”

It took the Kenyan police 30 minutes to get to the scene. Their excuse was; they got stuck in a traffic jam!

A retired Peruvian UNICEF staff member was shot to death while inside a car, and his 13-year-old daughter was shot through her arm. She had to remain inside the car with her dead father for two hours, before being rescued.

It had been common knowledge among the expat community in Nairobi that the attack against the Westgate Mall was very likely to come. Al-Shabaab had been threatening almost ever since the Kenyan invasion of Somalia, that it was ready to blow up tall buildings in the capital. All local media carried these threats. Still, the security at all the shopping centers of Nairobi remained ridiculously lax.

And how is it possible that it took several days for the entire army and police to defeat a small band of insurgents, and even after that, only after foreign forces got involved?

***

By the latest count, around 130 people lost their lives, but the real number could still be much higher.

Rumors are there, still. Interpol issued arrest warrants and the hunt for the ‘White Widow’ is just beginning. And that despite the fact that one body, of a white woman, an insurgent, has already been found.

More bodies are being pulled from the rubble. Some people working inside the compound said that they could not exclude the possibility that several insurgents are still hiding in the rubble of the Mall.

But the most important question now is what will happen to war-torn Somalia. And what will happen to over two million Somalis (exact numbers are constantly being disputed) who are living in refugee camps like Dadaab, behind barbed wire, as well as in depressing neighborhoods around the Kenyan capital and other cities.

Westgate burning.

Westgate.

Soldiers before storming Westgate.

Nurses from Chinese Hospital.

Kenyan army and foreign element.

Jehova Witnesses taking advantage of chaos.

Helicopter near Westgate.

Battle scene.

Andre Vltchek is a novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His discussion with Noam Chomsky On Western Terrorism is now going to print. His critically acclaimed political novel Point of No Return is now re-edited and available. Oceania is his book on Western imperialism in South Pacific. His provocative book about post-Suharto Indonesia and market-fundamentalist model is called “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. He just completed feature documentary “Rwanda Gambit” about Rwandan history and the plunder of DR Congo. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and Africa. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter.

Nkosinathi Mngomezulu was shot  in the stomach on Saturday morning. He was shot at the Marikana land occupation at Stop 1, Cato Crest in the city of Durban, South Africa during an eviction. He’s currently in the Intensive Care Unit of the King Edward Hospital. His comrades fear that he may be attacked in the hospital. They’ve not been allowed to post their own guard but they’re making sure that he’s always surrounded by a large group during visiting hours.

Mngomezulu’s comrades are not paranoid. He’s been threatened with death if he recovers and returns home to the occupation. On the 26^th of June Nkululeko Gwala, like Mngomezulu a member of the shack dwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo, was assassinated in Cato Crest. Just over three months earlier another activist, Thembinkosi Qumbelo was gunned down in the same area in similar circumstances.

And hospital is not necessarily a safe place for someone who has crossed the African National Congress (ANC) in Durban. On the 30th of June last year Bhekimuzi Ndlovu was shot in the Zakheleni shack settlement in Umlazi after a series of protests against the local councillor and for land and housing. The Unemployed People’s Movement reported that the next day he was visited in hospital by a delegation from the local ANC. They said that they wanted to pray for him. Shortly after they left he became violently ill. The doctor diagnosed poisoning.

Murder has been part of the repertoire of political containment in post-apartheid Durban since Michael Makhabane was shot in the chest at point blank range by a police officer on a university campus in May 2000. Political killings have been undertaken by shadowy assassins since at least April 2006 when two former South African Communist Party activists were assassinated in Umlazi after supporting an independent candidate against the ANC in the local government elections. And the armed mobilisation of ANC supporters against people organised outside of the party has been given de facto sanction from the police and senior politicians in the city and the province since at least September 2009 when Abahlali baseMjondolo were attacked in the Kennedy Road shack settlement in Clare Estate.

The attack on Abahlali baseMjondolo in 2009 was also the moment when the language of ethnicity began to be openly used by the local ANC, including senior figures in the Municipality like Nigel Gumede, to legitimate exclusion and violence. Abahlali baseMjondolo, an ethnically diverse organisation, was misrepresented as an Mpondo organisation and it was made clear that this designation rendered it illegitimate. Ethnic claims were mobilised in a similar way when people were burnt out of the kwaShembe shack settlement in Clermont in March 2010 and in the repression that followed sustained organisation by the Unemployed People’s Movement in the Zakheleni settlement in Umlazi last year.

Death threats are now a routine feature of political discourse in Durban. They are not only part of the arsenal of increasingly heavily armed local councillors and their party committees. In September 2007 politically connected businessman Ricky Govender, a man who has often been described as a gangster, was reported to have threatened to have a journalist at the Mercury, a local paper,  killed. He had previously been reported to have threatened to have local Abahlali baseMjondolo activist Shamitha Naidoo killed. Nigel Gumede, who chairs the housing committee in the eThekwini Municipality, has never denied the claim that he openly threatened S’bu Zikode from Abahlali baseMjondolo in a meeting in the City Hall in October 2011. On a number of occasions ANC members bused in to court appearances involving independently organised activists have openly issued death threats against activists.

Witnesses say that Mngomezulu was shot by a manager of the Land Invasions Unit, a municipal force used to crush land occupations. Cities across the country have similar units and they routinely and often violently destroy shacks in brazen violation of the law. The police are claiming that Mngomezulu was shot after he stabbed one of the unit’s members. Witnesses emphatically deny this. The police in Durban have been so habitually dishonest for so long when it comes to giving accounts of their own violence, and to violence against people organised outside of the ANC, that nothing that they say should be taken seriously in the absence of credible evidence. But even if Mngomezulu did put up some resistance to the Land Invasions Unit he would have been within his right to do so. There is a clear right, in law, to defend one’s home against illegal attack.

The land at Stop 1 in Cato Crest was occupied, and the occupation named Marikana, in March this year after a large number of people were made homeless as their shacks were destroyed to make way for a housing development. As has been typical for years shack owners were given houses but tenants were (illegally) left homeless if they couldn’t pay a bribe to get a house or didn’t have solid connections to local party structures. In this case the eviction of the tenants was also given an overt ethnic inflection with politicians from the local councillor to Nigel Gumede and the mayor, James Nxumalo, openly mobilising a discourse that presents people from the Eastern Cape province as alien intruders in Durban.

Some of the people that were illegally rendered homeless earlier this year had lived in Cato Crest since as far back at 1995. They had work in the area, their children were in local schools and Durban was where they were making their lives. The local ANC had told them to ‘go back to Lusikisiki’ – a village in the Eastern Cape Province. They decided, instead, to occupy an adjacent piece of land. Their shacks have been demolished on eight separate occasions, often violently, and they have rebuilt them each time. As I write (on Tuesday 24 September) the ninth demolition is in progress. They have been to the High Court five times to request the Court’s intervention against these patently unlawful evictions. The Municipality has brazenly violated all of the assurances it has given the court, as well as three court orders.

People who have tried to defend their homes have been beaten and shot with rubber bullets. When they have gone to the streets they have been arrested and beaten in the local police station. When the court ordered lawyers from both sides to meet at the Marikana land occupation on Tuesday last week to identify which shacks were protected by its orders local ANC members were mobilised by the local councillor to disrupt the process. Intimidation, including death threats, made the process mandated by the court impossible.

This drama is not simply about the state using violence to try and sustain the duopoly that it shares with the market with regard to the allocation of land. It’s also about protecting the interests of the ruling party. Party supporters have built shacks in the same area without consequence. These are political evictions. And politics is being openly mediated through ethnicity. Mpondo people are being presented as having no right to this city and the Zulus amongst them as disloyal. S’bu Zikode from Abahlali baseMjondolo has concluded that “To the smug politicians in their suits in the City Hall, and their thugs hunting us in the shacks, you are not a proper human being if you are not Zulu and if you are a Zulu living and organising with Mpondo people then you are not a proper Zulu”.

For Zikode “The City Hall is red with blood”. But on Monday last week Abahlali baseMjondolo brought its own tide of red shirted resolve to the City Hall in an impressive march. The movement has 1 560 members in good standing in Cato Crest and its members from across the city are holding meetings at the Marikana occupation, cooking together and rebuilding the shacks after each demolition.

Zuma’s increasingly violent and predatory state has its firmest urban base in Durban. But despite the authority that the ANC wields in this city its power is not exercised with patrician assurance. On the contrary the scale and intensity of political violence here, much of it carried out in power struggles within the party, far exceeds that of any of the other major cities. The law remains an important terrain of struggle in Durban but neither it nor the Constitution offer any guarantees. The local state and the local party are both willing to crush dissent, perfectly lawful dissent, with violence. The silence of higher authority has served to sanction this violence. Nonetheless it is here in Durban that the most sustained popular resistance to the brutality and venality that has metastasized through the ANC has been organised. There has been remarkably innovation, tenacity and courage from below. But although the future remains unwritten it seems certain that there will be blood.

Richard Pithouse teaches politics at Rhodes University in South Africa.

Links:
[1] http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/africa/south-africa
[2] http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/africa/nelson-mandela
[3] http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/africa/cuba-africa
[4] http://www.blackagendareport.com/sites/www.blackagendareport.com/files/southafrica_greets_obama.jpg
[5] http://blackagendareport.com/content/march-23-anniversary-beginning-apartheids-end-battle-cuito-cuanavale
[6] http://blackagendareport.com/content/how-ancs-faustian-pact-sold-out-south-africas-poorest
[7] http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/sharpeville-massacre-21-march-1960
[8] http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/africa/marikana-massacre
[9] http://freedomrider.blogspot.com/
[10] http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.blackagendareport.com%2Fcontent%2Ffreedom-rider-obama-mandela-and-dangerous-mythology&linkname=Freedom%20Rider%3A%20Obama%2C%20Mandela%20and%20Dangerous%20Mythology

ADDENDUM

Anticommunist Cubans have tried to this day to stain and muddle the memory of Cuba’s honorable and generous intervention in Angola, Namibia and South Africa against the Apartheid regime and colonialism/imperialism in general.

Below, in Spanish, a note that sums up the truth about the Cuban international solidarity effort:

antes que todo disculpen mi español

Creo que están alejándose un poco del verdadero motivo de la guerra de Angola, que no fue por ningún interés de gloria ni de honor para cuba, ni para ninguno de los cubanos, ni con ánimos de lucro y saqueo como ocurre en las guerras actuales, lo único que los cubanos trajeron de Angola fue, el amor incondicional de su pueblo y los cadáveres de sus muertos, en primer lugar fue para la liberación definitiva de angola y la desaparicion de una vez y por todas del regimen del Apartheid de las tierras africanas, los mas de 300 000 hombres y mujeres cubanas que pasaron por angola lo hicieron de forma voluntaria, incluyendo los oficiales del ejercito cubano, fue por el basico principo de solidaridad huma hacia un pueblo que lucha por su libertad, de esos mas de 2000 muertos cubanos se encontraban de todos los sectores sociales, murieron desde generales( como Raul Diaz Arguelles) y coroneles cubanos hasta sus propios hijos, los hijos del che y de otros comandantes del ejercito rebelde participaron en esa lucha, tanto es así que el hoy coronel de los servicios de inteligencia cubanos Alejandro Castro Espín hijo Vilma Espin Presidenta de la FMC y héroe de la República de cuba y del actual presidente y general de ejercito Raul Castro perdió un ojo en los combates de Luanda, creo sencillamente que han estado leyendo la historia de los mal intencionados, en cuanto a la educación te puedo asegurar que todos los que pelearon en Angola eran ya bachilleres ya que la educación en Cuba es gratuita y obligatoria.