Schwartzerwitz: Cape Town takes down tents as storm clouds gather

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Cape Town takes down tents as storm clouds gather

With the weather bureau predicting the Cape’s first massive winter storm this weekend, the City of Cape Town has decided to start dismantling the last remaining tents still housing about 400 displaced foreign nationals in the Blue Waters refugee-camp outside Muizenberg.

More than a year after hundreds of thousands foreign nationals were displaced in the Cape, about 400 mainly Somali and Congolese nationals -- including about 150 children -- are still in tents and have refused to integrate back into Cape townships. They want to return to their countries of origin because they fear for their lives in South Africa.

These people have been living in tents for more than a year. Last week the city of Cape Town served orders on the camp saying that they will evict people still living in Blue Waters.

With black rain clouds gathering over the Atlantic the city has put its disaster management teams on full alert. But it has also sent large numbers of Metro police to Blue Waters camp to take down remaining tents.

Pieter Cronje from the City of Cape Town could not be reached for comment on Thursday afternnon. - M&G

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Every Pogrom needs an Armband....

Welcome to Schwartzerwitz. The inevitable consequence of 4 million illegal immigrants arriving in South Africa. More desperate than our local folk they are willing to work longer harder faster for less. The immigrants are more reliable than South African unskilled labour and have outcompeted the local folk. No matter what anyone says it's not FAIR on our locals. Adding 4 million hungry mouths to the country has exacerbated the rocketing food prices felt across the globe. Adding 4 million potential electricity users to the mix has undoubtedly worsened the electricity situation. Having 4 million people send home money to their family drains the economy of money which should stay within the borders. Adding 4 million people and not registering them as taxpayers has cost the country billions. What chance does our government of ridding the country of shacks as per the Millennium Development Goal when 4 million immigrants build/rent shacks. Murambatsvina in Zimbabwe....? Just move to a shack in South Africa. On an individual basis this site condemns violent acts against individuals. However as a collective the illegal immigrants deserve no sympathy and should be deported back from whence they came. These people are economic refugees - "not real refugees" - and they are(generally speaking) in South Africa illegally.

kwerekwere.

The inside cover of my Oxford English dictionary features a word with which I have become all too familiar: the word is kwerekwere.

(It may be more familiar to you with one of its vernacular language–dependant prefixes prepended — the Sotho singular being le– and plural ma–, the Nguni singular being i– and plural ama–). This word is used to refer to black (in the morphological sense) Africans who are not South Africans — South African being defined as Sotho, Nguni, Venda and Tsonga ethnic groups (by that measure the Swazis, Batswana, etc. would be South African?). This word has a very negative sting to it and is often used with contempt. From what I gather it has undertones which speak of how black Africans are believed to be sub–human, too dark and have a pungent smell.