Station commissioner of Umbilo police station, Ian McCall, has targeted Dalton hostel as a major source of crime in the city
Paul Kirk The rats scampered away with a pride of feral cats in hot pursuit as the police stormed the municipal beer hall. Adjacent to Durban’s notorious Dalton hostel, parts of the hall have long served as an informal abattoir, where cattle are regularly slaughtered for food or for their hides. Cowhides hang from washing lines in the hostel, in preparation for being made into drums that will be sold on the city’s streets. Even in the darkness of pre-dawn they are covered in flies. Dalton hostel is run by the Durban municipality and was originally built to house about 1 500 of Durban’s black labourers. Now a refuge for the homeless, the building is regularly raided for suspects and illegal immigrants, who hide among the 4 500 inhabitants. The newly appointed station commissioner of Umbilo police station, Superintendent Ian McCall, pulls off the raids, having identified the hostel – and the adjacent beer hall – as a major source of crime in the city. The buildings, which are being renovated, are filthy beyond description. Every second week an average of 18 tons of waste is carted away from the pavement outside. McCall, only recently appointed to his job, is determined to “take the streets back” and he maintains his first target is Dalton hostel. So determined is McCall that he has arrived at his police station at 3.30am and faces a full day at work after an early- morning raid on the hostel. “It is the major hiding place for criminals and illegal aliens in this area,” says McCall. Although the hostel is terribly overcrowded, the municipality has no problem with packing more residents in. As long as they pay the rent residents can find their own place to sleep – the floors, the passages or anywhere else.
McCall is prevented from handing out statistics in terms of a temporary gagging order from the national commissioner on the release of police statistics countrywide. But the local police community forum says that since the pre-dawn raids on Dalton there have been no incidents of house- breaking in the Umbilo area. The week before there were nearly 30. Every raid on Dalton hostel has produced scores of illegal aliens. Many of them have been deported more than once and come from as far afield as Liberia and the Great Lakes region of Central Africa. The diversity of illegal aliens in Dalton is such that the Department of Home Affairs sends its most experienced alien hunters to assist McCall. They don’t want their names printed, but are keen to talk about their jobs. In addition to knowing how to spot forged papers the officials also have to be experts in geography and languages. Nearly all illegal aliens at Dalton claim to be from Mozambique. If deported to Mozambique the trip back to South Africa takes less than a day. If deported to Liberia it is another matter. As soon as McCall’s team arrives, the first illegal alien bolts for freedom, but is caught by a soldier. As policemen and soldiers step over the piles of litter and puddles of urine and faeces, the residents all silently point at one block of the building. A quick bolt over the wall and McCall’s men find a group of illegal aliens who are sleeping in the corridors of a section of the hostel. After a short raid the aliens are hoisted into the truck McCall drives himself. Back at the police station the scene is comical as those with dodgy papers are questioned by home affairs officials. The first alien claims to be a South African citizen. But a quick inspection of his forearm shows a Mozambique health department immunisation scar. He is carted off for deportation, mumbling in Portuguese that McCall is a “donkey”. He has no idea that the burly policeman marching him off to the cells can speak the language, but realises his mistake when the cop screams at him in Portuguese to not come back. The second alien also claims to be Mozambican, but slips up when he says that Charles Taylor is the president of Mozambique and Monrovia his capital. He is put down as a suspected Liberian, a nationality to which he later admits. The next suspect is a Mozambican and a suspected housebreaker. None of his fingerprints come out clearly as he has cut every one of his fingers in the recent past. Probably not by accident, but in an age-old trick to make his fingerprints illegible to detectives.
According to the Department of Foreign Affairs, illegal aliens are prepared to endure all sorts of pain to escape extradition or arrest. Most recently illegal aliens from farther afield have taken to burning themselves with cigarettes on the forearm to imitate a Mozambique immunisation mark. It may not save them from deportation, but it will at least see them deported to a country close by. At the end of the morning McCall has caught 22 illegal aliens, most of whom are suspects in other crimes. Repeated attempts to contact a Councillor Zungu, in charge of Dalton hostel, failed. The city’s health department referred queries on the conditions in the hostel to him.