An organisation called Housing Assembly, which fights for houses to be built in informal settlements and for improved service delivery, marked Mandela Day with a protest that saw them build a shack in front of Premier Helen Zille’s official residence at the Leeuwenhof Estate in Gardens, various outlets have reported.

According to organiser Mihlali Xalisile, “everyone is expecting everyone to do something useful [for] other people and [for them to be] giving back for their 67 minutes for Madiba”. Xalisile explained: “We thought about it in a different way, that we should express our anger and make our country see that there are some people that still live in this kind of shelter.”

Residents joined the protest from areas including Crossroads and Khayelitsha.

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According to a protester, Amanda Makolwa from Crossroads, “the City of Cape Town say in their five pillars that they are a caring city, but they do not care about us in poor areas”.

“In my community there is a high rate of crime. The way we are living in my community is bad,” Makolwa continued.

“We are living in [badly built] houses, we don’t have safe spaces, we don’t have communities likes this which are at least at night at quiet. Now today I come here to show this woman that [we] are living in this crisis,” she said.

We approached Zille for comment. She was unavailable at the time of publication. We will update our readers with what she says.

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