LISTEN: Coloured communities plan to shut down Gauteng
Several coloured communities in Gauteng, including protest-hit Westbury, are planning a total shutdown on Friday.
Activists are mobilising people from Eldorado Park, Newlands, Ennerdale, Eden Park, South Hills, Riverlea, Davidsonville, and other areas.
A team, which calls itself the Gauteng Shut-Down Coordinating Committee (GSCC), attended a meeting on Thursday, during Police Minister Bheki Cele’s second visit to Westbury.
This comes after three days of unrest in the area sparked by an alleged drug-related shooting which resulted in 45-year-old Heather Peterson being shot and killed and her 10-year-old niece injured.
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Cele introduced a team of 133 Tactical Response Team members, also known as amaBerete, which has been deployed to Westbury to deal with drug-related crime and gangsterism.
“We appreciate the minister deploying amaBerete, why did a woman have to lose her life for us to get this help? Why did an innocent child have to be shot and why did a community have to protest for our women and children to be recognised? Why are we not taken seriously? How many more women and children do we have to lose before we are heard? Are we saying coloured people’s lives do not matter? This is not the first death,” said GSCC’s Romila Harris.
The activists say the shutdown will send a message to President Cyril Ramaphosa that coloured people also want their land back.
“The objectives of this particular shutdown are non-negotiable. We want a progressive collective voice to effectively address the socio-economic exclusion of the so-called coloured people, to challenge the oppressive structures of the neo-liberal economic system. We also want to reject sustained inequality and marginalisation of those classified as coloured, we want to bring the entire state to account urgently and the president and the ruling party to understand that we want the land to be returned to the people,” said GSCC’s Anthony Williams.
The group would not go into much detail about the planned shutdown except to say that this only the beginning and that coloured communities across the country are mobilising for a greater impact.