by Holly Wren Spaulding

June, 2006

A Note from the Roasters: Higher Grounds Trading Company recognizes the urgency of access to water throughout the world, as well as in the communities where our coffee beans are being grown. Water needs are acute among coffee farmers in Chiapas, Mexico, where many growers scramble to meet their basic needs as well as to process the raw beans, which need to be depulped via a process which requires clean water. Twice a year Higher Grounds have taken interested individuals on delegations to these communities where, among other things, we see evidence of this need first hand.

Our friend Holly joined the delegation this past January, having already spent many years working on the issue of the right to water. In the following essay, she shares a story from her time in South Africa where she was documenting the life and death struggle for water in that part of the world, while relating it to similar conflicts closer to home. We offer it here with hopes of alerting our coffee drinking network of friends to the seriousness of just one facet of the water crisis: the privatization of public water.

--------------------------------------

The settlement of Chatsworth flanks a dusty hillside outside of Durban, South Africa. The dully painted cinder structures are the most basic shelter for the urban poor: those whose boats the neoliberal tide has not yet lifted and will likely never lift.

Among gutted cars, broken bottles, weeds and dirt paths, a vibrant community life unfolds. People gather around an improvised fire pit to sing songs, eat from a common pot, and to be together as neighbors. Here, even the very poor and the sick and those regarded as “illegal” by the rest of society know how to cultivate and keep alive joy; how to struggle together and to win small gains, a little at a time, because their survival depends on it.

But what does that mean to the mostly Indian inhabitants of this racially segregated public housing project?

I am visiting Chatsworth after learning about this community's outstanding resistance against the disconnection of water and other essential services. It is late 2002--eight years since Apartheid officially ended--and over a million people have had their water cut nationwide. Others simply have no access to safe or affordable water where they live-- in shacks or urban tenements—because they are not considered a viable market by the water companies. Water pipes, like highways, tend to connect resources with the people who can “pay to play”. Quite clearly, transnational “water services” corporation like Suez have decided that there is little to be gained by bringing water to people who will sooner organize themselves than tolerate the kinds of prices that only the very wealthy can afford.

As privatization of water supplies becomes the vogue, peddled to the global south by the overdeveloped world, more and more South Africans are relying on dirty streams, rivers, and even puddles for their basic water needs. Water-born illnesses are common. The woman with lesions on her skin at the public standpipe is suffering from poor sanitation at this very water source. Those suffering from HIV and AIDS are especially vulnerable when there is no water, and from a public health point of view, the risk to the whole community is something which should be of concern to even the most cynical of bureaucrats. In more rural places, cholera is on the rise and the numbers of dead are increasing as they always do under these conditions.

In theory, water is available in the flats. But lately, officials for whom accounting ledgers are the only moral code have relinquished control of the water board to a for-profit concession. Next, the “Black Jacks” --private security guards-- began arriving by the van load, guns at the ready to shadow the guy with the wrench whose job it is to cut water services to those who can't pay the skyrocketing rates. One young man has already been shot and killed during one such “disconnection”. He was seventeen and his grandmother was being disconnected. He and the people who lived around her had gotten in the way. A little revolt didn’t seem unreasonable.

This is precisely the kind of story that has brought me from my home in the heart of the Great Lakes Basin, to this urban wasteland in the southeastern tip of Africa. People in Chatsworth take the position that it is untenable to deny the human right to water. Even if the newly drafted South African constitution didn't guarantee this most basic of rights, I have the sense that they'd be just as convictive. This community is clear enough about this point that they have built barricades to prevent water company employees from entering into the area (few community members have cars so it was not a problem to block the roads in anticipation of future incidents). They are certain enough about these matters to learn to plumb, and then train others the skills so that when cut-offs do happen, there is always a ready crew of “struggle plumbers” who will turn the water back on.

“Thats the beauty of neighborhoods: this idea of sharing with, and defending each other, and then something beautiful and precious is born.” I'm getting the specifics about all of this while walking around and being introduced to people by my friend Ashwin Desai. He’s been working within the community movements which are resisting “cost recovery” measures for a long time. On our way around the place, comrades-they still use this term to refer to someone who is a trusted supporter of the cause-call out to us and share news of their families. A little girl in a fake fur coat and bare legs runs into his arms, smiling shyly at this man who asks her how her granny is doing and if she has been a good girl. Tomorrow is her birthday. She is almost six but I’d have taken her for three.

I have been working on some related issues back at home. In particular, we're fighting a massive water mining operation while simultaneously agetting to know people in inner city Detroit whose water is being shut-off for the same reasons that the South Africans are being targeted: they are poor, and so are not “consumers” in the same sense as the wealthy. And they are politically voiceless.

Or so it seemed at first. In both cases, I am in awe not only of the determination of the aunties and youth and elderly who are defending their right to water--in the streets, and on the path to their beleaguered flats--but I am also struck by the fact that they are not going to apologize to anyone for being poor, and so are not ashamed and quiet about what troubles them. The system is the problem-- they are not animals though they have a long history of being treated as such--and so deserve what every human deserves: to live with some dignity.

Ashwin spent many years in the liberation struggles of the Apartheid era and has deep ties with people becuase of it. During those years, the target was the illegitimate and racist state. Now, he notes, it is not so different, but the targets include the multinational corporations who are flooding into his country to profit from the misdirection of the African National Congress which has been auctioning off the country's natural and public assets, eager for the market to sort everything out. “There's a sense that the state won't deliver what was promised when we got our freedom in 1994 and people are making connections at the local level. Incredible bonds are being built between people as they imagine a new world. These are small things, but they're very big things.”

The problems are so similar between here and home and perhaps the solutions will be too, but in South Africa there is growing and very visceral sense of indignation that the people have been sold out by the very party which was meant to finally deliver this country from bondage.

Here, I am learning, people are achieving positive forms of change by focusing on the most basic things required for human survival: water, housing, electricity. They take this route on their way to other struggles because any other form of social or political change is moot if at home people are failing to feed their children, tend to the ill, or maintain a healthy environment.

Still, I'll need to go home to Michigan before I can be sure if the “poors” of Detroit are ready to put their bodies on the line in quite the same way.

Back in Johannesburg, the poet Lesego Rampolokeng puts it to me in these terms: “If you deny people water, or even shelter, the intention is to kill them.”

In South Africa, as elsewhere, the struggle for water is indeed a struggle for life.