This week’s guest writer, Hein Marais, paid a visit to a private deportation centre near Johannesburg
A COUPLE of kilometres outside Krugersdorp lives a town of ghosts. The winches that once hoisted gold ore to the surface of Randfontein rust in fields of long grass. Lining the main street are grimy, melancholic buildings. It’s hot, and time seems to be slowing to a crawl.
Your car bounces past figures shuffling from one spot of shade to another. To your left a South African flag droops over a building that has been honoured with a fresh coat of paint, a sign announcing it as the Dyambu Training Centre.
Then you spot the electrified fences, razor wire and guards. You explain yourself, the gate swings open and Frans le Grange appears at your side, issuing a torrent of introductions and commentary.
You step into a dim, long room. Officials are hunched over the long counter, a few heads nodding sleepily to a Boom Shaka tune crackling from the radio. Behind them hangs a framed portrait of Home Affairs Minister Mangosuthu Buthelezi, his expression hovering somewhere between a smirk and a taunt.
“Welcome to the Lindela Accommodation Centre,” Le Grange says proudly.
He’s one of the managers of this euphemism, a privately-run deportation centre for illegal immigrants. He informs you there are 720 people behind the brick-red metal door. Seven hundred-and-twenty surplus people, you think.
And he tells you: “We try to make people feel at home here.” That they can move about, that “this is not a prison”, that “from this phone they can call anywhere”. He points to a gaudy logo on a door: “It says that all nations, all colours are leaving South Africa, back into the world.”
And when that door opens, it’s in to a twilight zone, like those 1950s sci-fi flicks where the aliens lumber down emptied streets, transfixed by their displacement. Every head seems to turn, trying to decide whether you’re good news or just part of another day. You’ve stepped across a threshold, on to the brink of the world. Before you, defined by state power, is the Other.
It’s an old hostel compound, adapted to the exigiencies of economic decline. It no longer hosts workers, but serves as a launch-pad for their expulsion – to a favela in Rio, an apartment address in Monrovia, a hovel in Xai Xai. And it squats there like a lesson in moral ambiguity.
In five-and-a-half months, 15 000 people have passed through here. Down one side run offices where the act of expulsion is legitimated, organised and catalogued; nine Home Affairs staff work there, nine more will join them soon.
There’s a square of lawn patches, a couple of thatched shelters and a matchbox spaza shop. Separated, the women sit on one patch of grass; the men aren’t alowed to talk to them. In the distance, a train rattles by.
Lindela began operating on August 18 1996. According to Le Grange, it happened like this … A company called Meritum Hostels had taken over much of Randfontein after the Wesrand Cons mine went belly-up back in 1989. The hostels were then bought by the Dyambu Trust, run by a group of high-powered African National Congress women.
At first, some of the hostels were run as a kind of hotel residence for a miscellany of workers from surrounding areas. Last June, when Police Commissioner George Fivaz announced his scheme to capture South Africa’s 10 000 most wanted criminals, a flash-bulb of inspiration lit up some heads.
Le Grange recalls the thinking: “If he caught them, where was he going to put them? You had all these “illegals” being held in prison, where they didn’t belong because they’re not criminals …”
Why not privatise part of the eviction exercise, and convert one of the hostels into a deportation centre? Fivaz liked the idea, says Le Grange. “We have the premises, why should the government spend money to go and build new ones?” Within a few weeks, Home Affairs gave the scheme the nod, and the trust was contracted to run the country’s first central deportation centre.
You step down into a pall of puzzlement and anticipation. Lindela’s unit leader, Judas Kgotse, has taken over the commentary, pointing out murals painted by deportees. He feels almost … cosmopolitan.
“I’ve experienced the world here. We’ve had Africans from just about every country, we’ve had France, Japan, Britain, Brazil” – he pauses, with what sounds like regret – “but no Americans … and no Germans.”
Most people spend a week here. On Wednesdays the train for Mozambique is loaded (“605 went this week”), on Thursday it’s Zimbabwe (“201 yesterday”), on Fridays it’s Lesotho (“33 this morning”) and Malawi (“35 by plane” – a private contractor flies them out of Lanseria airport). The others take longer, much longer.
Some come back. “We’ve had people who’ve been here three times, Mozambicans mostly.” These are lives propelled by structural realities that no high-voltage perimeter, no army of pen-pushers, and no cop with an ear for accents or an authenticating eye or a desire for a quick buck can alter. But orders are orders. And at Lindela, business, it seems, is business.
Slumped in the shade of the far wall are the Mozambicans. They’re all young men, in their teens to late 20s. The Zimbabweans loll on their own patch of grass. To your left, people huddle by region – West Africans in one spot, Pakistanis and Indians in another.
You wonder aloud what it feels like working here – and for the first time, Kgotse looks you in the eye: “Most of the people here are poor – I feel pitiful, I’m sorry to say.” You see him stiffen back into PR-mode, but not before he asks, rhetorically, “As an African, how can I feel?”
It’s lunch time – 3pm, the last meal of the day – and guards are haranguing people into line.
Kgotse and Le Grange have other business to attend to.
Suddenly, everything changes. That air of compressed resignation is gone. Someone’s thrusting photocopied documents at you.
His name’s Abdul Sattar. For five years, he’s lived in Bophuthatswana and Johannesburg, he’s in import-export (“leather jackets, shoes”), he’s an African National Congress member (“Mayfair branch”), he paid a Home Affairs official called “Peter” R200 for his papers in Mafeking. Now, Home Affairs says they’re false.
“I’m no thief, I pay taxes for five years,” he says. He was robbed in jail and can’t afford the R5 Lindela charges for a phone call; can you call this number and tell Ashrid he’s here?
Someone else starts towards you, then ducks back into line when a guard approaches. Food being slopped on to trays is the only sound: conversation is banned during eating.
Later, Le Grange introduces you to Joao-Carlos Manuel, and saunters off. He’s a Brazilian sailor who’s been in and out of the country for six years, he says. In October, he went to Home Affairs in Cape Town to apply for permanent papers and was told R3 000 would do the trick. He refused, and was arrested as an “illegal”.
After weeks in Sea Point police station, he was moved to Pollsmoor, then to Lindela. On the advice of a Nigerian, he paid a Johannesburg lawyer R2 500 to get him out. There were arguments with the lawyer and he hasn’t seen his money since.
When you check out his case with the lawyer, you’re enveloped in a haze of contradictions. He told Home Affairs he was Angolan, then that he’s Brazilian. He applied for refugee status, then retracted his application. You’re faxed a copy of his statement. Manuel says he didn’t know what he was signing. Home Affairs says they think he’s wanted for armed robbery in Angola. You wonder why, if that’s the case, he hasn’t been deported – he’s been in Lindela for a month. The legal firm says they paid him back R1 500 on January 20, via a “Tony Mambabela”. The Nigerian’s name was “Tony”, Carlos has told you.
And you think, somewhere in there is Manuel’s life, the story of the knife scars on his shoulders, his broken front teeth, his swollen lip.
But right now, he wants out. “Lindela is OK,” he says, “but the guards are shit, they treat people like animals, especially the Mozambicans, they beat them every day.”
They tried to beat him once for speaking to a woman, he says. When he resisted, he was told to stop acting “like a white man, like a gentleman”. He laughs: “Like a white man? I’m a Brazilian.”
Sheik Mohammed, a Burundian, joins the conversation and backs the allegations. He says the Home Affairs officials are almost as bad as the guards, except for a Mr Morris who “respects people”. “This company is a business, they’re making money,” Mohammed sneers.
Compacted around you is not so much misery as 720 versions of fortitude. Some, like John Yeboah, the wiry and startled-looking young Ghanaian, have washed up on these shores thanks to a false South African passport bought off a South Korean church group in a bid to find work in the Far East.
Others, like the Mozambicans that crowd around you in their murky room, dare not step off this treadmill of survival.
Earlier in the day, seven of their compatriots were dumped at Lindela. They had valid papers, but had refused to hand them to the police. Le Grange has already told you that “some of the cops are a problem – they tear up papers or keep them” when foreigners refuse to grease their palms. The seven furnished their papers at Home Affairs and were released.
The men around you have learned to make do without papers. Sandra, a Liberian, has not. Abandoned without a passport by her mother in Lusaka in 1994, she slipped into Zaire, sneaked back into Zambia, then declared herself at Beit Bridge, all in search of a Liberian embassy that will verify her nationality.
You make some small talk, and tales flow … of supervisors who pocketed their pay packets, then reported them to the police as “illegals” … of random arrests on the street. In the corner you spot someone hugging the clock he’s taking back to Mozambique. No-one else seems to have baggage.
“I’ve been inside for eight years,” someone volunteers behind you in perfect English. You turn. “Car theft,” he helps.
“Shit, it was probably my car,” you say. He doesn’t skip a beat, steps up to size you up and shakes his head. “No, it was a family car.”
The room cracks up. And you blush, asking, “You guys coming back?” There’s silence, until someone deep in the room says, “You know why?”
You walk back to the office, feeling a numb anger. As you step out of Lindela, you still can’t figure out whether it was a question or a statement.