Currently in the media our attention is drawn to two disparate issues.
What does the early morning market saga in KwaZulu Natal have in common with the Iranian protests? Some may describe the former as a storm in a teacup, invisible to the world but not to the tea drinker. Others may describe the latter as the storm itself causing great international outrage. Besides the geographical, religious and cultural distance that separates the two occurrences, the one common factor that runs across and binds them is the power of the people. While the market issue is a local one the ramifications for race relations in the largest province runs deep in a country hell bent to move away from its horrid past. By contrast the Iranian issue is embedded in a religious foundation of autocracy and male supremacy. But it is the people in both instances that should really matter.  From the people’s point of view quite the opposite is happening. They accuse authorities of lying and telling half truths, of little or no formal consultation, over rule, despotic management styles, police abuse of women and the aged and little concern for the rights or the will of the people they ought to be serving. It seems that in every instance the people give away power only to gain their subjugation.

 
I received an email from a former Member of Parliament:

 
“I just cannot explain my disbelief at this time and era, of how the woman, the elderly were being brutalised and shot at, just because they were standing up for their rights of survival. We need to do something for our woman, did you see in the news how our woman was hurt in the shooting, lips cut, swollen eyes, wound on the head, leg, back etc. woman, defenceless woman, this is not acceptable, in our history. I am appalled at the behaviour of the city manager who instructs his policemen to open fire on these elderly folks. City manager is lying that these protestors were violent or damaging property, they are baked the whole day in the sun, the only shade they can get is near the market gate, and to get rid of them they even gated the area. They also lied that these people used rocks to hurl at them, where do u find rocks in a tarred area?. What lies ..just to get what they want.”

This email brought back memories for me when as a young girl I stood and watched in disbelief how the white policemen opened high pressured hose pipes onto sari clad middle-aged women when they went to bid farewell to their relatives on the SS Karanja and Kampala simply because they felt that they constituted an uncontrollable crowd. I recall also how Indian women then referred to, as Coolie Mary would be chased with their baskets of vegetables for selling their wares in non-designated areas. They were referred to as squatters and hence the term squatters market originated. My 94-year-old mother recalls how the Indian market gardener brought back seeds from India to grow the rare vegetables like peerkunkai, podalankai, sorkai and vendakai. All these rare and unusual vegetables are rarely known outside the Indian community.

 
When I went on a recent trip to the market accompanied by the Amafi group of architects and town planners I took a stroll down memory lane. The old gate was still there at the entrance with its guard hut. Every Saturday my father would drive my mother to the market and return with three full baskets of fruit, vegetables and flowers for the week. Sometimes we would accompany our parents and watch in awe as they moved through the crowds checking the various stalls for the best produce. Now as I walked through the market and talked to the various stallholders I was amazed to find that some of them had been around for between 50-60 years. Many of them had worked there from the age of 7 and 8. The character of the market had changed somewhat but I was amazed to find the place clean and orderly inside amidst the municipal garbage outside. It was also heart warming to experience the sheer congeniality in the relationship between the African and Indian people as they supported each other in their poverty. I asked many of the stallholders if they felt safe in the area and their response was unanimous. We are safer here at work with our fellow workers than in our own homes. One had a sense that relationships of long standing were forged on the basis of mutual trust and survival across the racial lines. They were the Poors as Ashwin Desai so succinctly expressed in his book by the same name. The Early Morning Market has a long history of a heritage that a good caring city council should be saving not uprooting and demolishing. A good government builds around a people not despite the people. According to French wisdom ‘the more things change the more they remain the same. In the case of the plight of the local market stallholders this saying couldn’t have been more apt.

 
What is happening in the market issue is nothing new. The so-called non-white communities in the past have had a history of removals and land grabs through the Group Areas and Separate Amenities Act. What is new however is the climate in which this is being done. In the 21st century where human rights are god given, the treatment of the poor as effluents is simply outrageous. Of particular significance to us in Kwa Zulu Natal is the repetition of horrid aspects of our past.

 
 The issue of the closure of the early morning market is a disgrace to all of us. Firstly the city managers have behaved abominably in bulldozing their decision with little consultation with the various stakeholders. In turn the stakeholders have reacted understandably so, with uncontrollable hysteria. Wouldn’t you if you felt that your livelihood of long standing was at stake? It would be very different of course if you earned as much as our city managers did.  Then you too would be cool and dignified and wouldn’t consider resigning in the face of ubiquitous protests over non-delivery, questionable transactions and deals and autocratic management styles. The unspoken message is clear: ‘Forget about democracy and the will of the people since I am the King of the castle and you are the dirty rascals. I will decide for the greater good of an untested, amorphous constituency of largely bus commuters’. Enough said. We should stop hallucinating and concentrate on the real objectives of management that aim to make changes that will be recorded in the ledgers as the “price of progress”. In case some of us rebel rousers are missing the message the argument is clear. It is about those who are anti development and those who are pro development. This simplistic argument presupposes that the protesters and their supporters are against progressive change for the larger good of the majority. On the contrary they are merely anti destruction, anti forced removals, and pro the preserving of a cultural way of life that depicted an entrepreneurial spirit of the past. Their demands are modest. We want to continue feeding ourselves through our honest labour. We are not dependent on the dole. We want to trade peacefully in the heritage site of our forefathers. This plea is particularly poignant since 2010 will mark the 150th year of the arrival of Indian indentured labourers to this country. Tourists will be searching for original sites eager to experience history first hand. They will not be pleased to find one shopping mall after another. If it is not safe make it safe. If it is not clean make it clean. And finally we need to question ourselves about the concept of change for the sake of change.
 
 We saw how much damage the Nationalist government had done to the Indian people in particular when it uprooted them, breaking up the extended family system. The damage to a community is still being felt as the aftermath of cruel community destruction. Then it separated people along colour and racial lines so that many of us had become strangers to each other. Have we not learnt our lessons from our past? Where is the sensitivity? Where is the heart? Where is the soul of a city if it not with its people?

 
Dr.Devi Rajab is a leading South African journalist and can be reached at rajab@cybertek.co.za