Eviction or Arson Threatened : S. African Blacks Face Rent Strike Dilemma

Caesar Mbele is caught in a terrifying dilemma.

If he does not pay his rent, now three months in arrears, the Soweto City Council is threatening to take back his four-room house and evict him, his wife, their four children and two nephews. All eight would be left homeless.

But if he pays the rent, Mbele says, his neighbors are likely to burn him out for breaking the rent strike.

“Damned if you do and damned if you don’t--that’s what life has become in Soweto,” Mbele, a high school teacher, said in his little matchbox house deep in Soweto, the black satellite city of nearly 2 million outside Johannesburg.

“But philosophizing about it doesn’t solve the problem, and I’m afraid that if I don’t come up with an answer we will all be on the street, either evicted or burned out,” he said.

Puts Rent Aside

Mbele’s interim solution--it is that of many Sowetans--is not to pay the rent and utility charges, to bank the money so that it will be ready if the rent strike ends, and to hope that the government backs away from this confrontation with the “comrades,” the young activists who have organized the rent strike in the name of the United Democratic Front, a coalition of anti-apartheid groups.

“On paper,” Mbele said, “this strategy looks great--nonviolent, community-wide, aimed at the apartheid institutions that keep us oppressed. But any strategy that is so effective is going to bring the full might of the system against us, and that sort of pressure will be very hard for us to withstand.”

The dimensions of the confrontation became clear Tuesday night when the police clashed repeatedly with groups of youths in the White City section of Soweto, where municipal officials reportedly had tried to evict several families but had been thwarted when hundreds of other residents filled the streets in a long-planned “defense action.”

13 Dead in Rioting

The rioting left at least 12 dead and 70 injured, according to the government’s Bureau for Information, and was the worst since President Pieter W. Botha imposed a national state of emergency June 12.

“The community will not accept people being put out into the street and their homes taken away from them,” black nationalist leader Winnie Mandela said after visiting riot-torn White City. “If this government thought it had a fight before, it should see what’s coming if it proceeds with these evictions. . . .

“The rent issue is the most sensitive as it touches the inner core of our oppressed people. Evictions could well bring the insurrection the regime fears so much.”

For the government, the rent strike is both a challenge to its authority and one of the black activists’ most effective steps yet to make the country ungovernable in their fight against apartheid.

More than 300,000 black households, probably representing nearly 3 million urban blacks, have stopped paying their rent and utility charges, according to research by the University of the Witwatersrand’s Community Resources Group, and the strike is spreading rapidly.

$80 Million in Arrears

Parliament was told last week that rent payments were about $80 million in arrears in black townships nationwide, but the Community Resources Group estimates that the total may be nearly twice that and growing at the rate of more than $12 million a month.

Tom Boya, the mayor of Daveyton, a black township east of Johannesburg, and vice chairman of the Urban Councils Assn., says that about 35 local black governments are bankrupt and have collapsed largely as a result of the rent strike. Local black officials are widely perceived as collaborators within their own communities, and their ouster has been a prime objective of black activists over the past two years.

“Man, we’ve been working and working to get those corrupt bastards out,” said one of Mbele’s nephews, Max, 19, one of the “comrades.” “It’s not enough that they cooperate with the system, it’s not enough they put all these taxes and charges and higher rents on the people, but then they help themselves to that money. . . . Man, a rent boycott is something the people understand.”

The rents charged for government-owned houses vary from township to township. In Soweto, the cheapest four-room house, a matchbox like Mbele’s, costs about $20 a month plus utilities, which total about $30, and a new six-room house costs $58 a month plus utilities. A black factory worker might earn $40 a week, less taxes, and a fairly well paid office worker about twice that.

Went Door to Door

Max said that he and other activists had spent long hours over the past three months organizing the Soweto rent strike, going door to door to talk with residents about the need for the protest and to reassure them that others would come to their defense if the government threatened to evict them.

“We understand the problem--people don’t want to lose their homes,” Max said. “But we try to educate people so they understand that the difficulties we face today are bigger than those of any individual or family, and that if we stand together then we can defeat the system.”

But those who reject the comrades’ call and continue to pay their rent risk firebomb attacks on their homes, Soweto residents say.

“Frankly, it just goes against my grain, not paying the rent and utilities,” said an accountant who asked not to be identified by name. “But what’s the choice? Most nights, the kids with the petrol bombs are next door and the police are miles away.”

Government Cautious

Despite the reported attempts at eviction in White City, one of Soweto’s poorest areas, the government has moved cautiously against the highly successful rent strikes, apparently fearing just such a reaction by angry blacks.

In Soweto, where more than two-thirds of the 75,000 registered householders have not paid rent since June 1, some for much of this year, only a handful of families--fewer than 20, according to municipal officials--have been evicted from their government-owned homes.

In the Vaal River industrial region, about 50 miles south of Johannesburg, where the rent strikes began in September, 1984, at the start of two years of civil unrest, no more than 40 famili1702043752according to local officials, although eviction notices have been sent to more than 4,000 households.

The government’s tactics in these and other areas seem to have been to carry out a few well-publicized evictions, using black township officials supported by heavily armed riot police and soldiers, in the hope of frightening other residents into resuming their rent payments.

Utility Cutoffs Failed

Earlier efforts to force payments by cutting off electricity and water supplies and letting garbage pile up failed as health hazards mounted. The government also asked employers to deduct rent and utility payments from their workers’ pay, but organized business refused.

The government also tried, with little success, to set up rent offices in downtown areas and to encourage people to pay by mail so they would not be seen breaking the strike. It also bought television and radio time for commercials on the civic virtue of paying one’s rent.

When these measures did not work, the Soweto City Council voted to establish a local “vigilante” force, in addition to the township police, to protect citizens who paid their rent.

“What are they going to do? It would take more men than they have in the army to throw a million people out of their homes in Soweto,” an Anglican priest in White City commented, asking not to be identified by name. “On the other hand, they must feel they need--absolutely need--to break this rent strike before it gives the people the sense that they can take over these townships, force the system out and run them themselves.”

Warn of More Clashes

Community leaders, meanwhile, warn that further eviction attempts by the government in an effort to break the rent strike could lead to even fiercer clashes.

“The people’s anger has never been greater,” Mandela said after visiting White City on Wednesday, “and the regime should tremble with fear at the explosion that is coming if they pursue these evictions. Let me put it plainly: The people will fight back, and the casualties will not all be on our side, far from it.”

For blacks, the rent issue has become a “political time bomb,” said the Rev. C.F. Beyers Naude, the general secretary of the South African Council of Churches.