Joel Bolnick and Walter Fieuw
On August 4, Patrick Hunsley breathed his last. His life and times encapsulate much of the quintessential life of a poor black South African childhood under apartheid and adulthood during a time of turbulent and exciting change.
His life was dedicated to the work of community mobilisation, network building and deal making. Those who knew and worked with him, will remember his persuasive oratory, marvellous sense of humour and his poetry.
Hunsley was rooted in a history long before his birth in Melmoth, KwaZulu-Natal.
His father, a British army general had an illegitimate child with one of his black farmworkers. From that moment on, the homestead had two Hunsley families – the white bosses and the black servants.
Hunsley’s idyllic rural life, which he recalled with nostalgia, came to an abrupt end when his father died when he was still in his teens.
His uncles conspired to chase his mother and her three children from the farm.
Having drifted into the cities, he was cared for by his mother’s extended family and sent to a Catholic seminary. Rebelliousness and misconduct took him down a path of delinquency. After participating in a botched robbery, he was sent to reformatory in Cape Town.
As Hunsley recalls in his writing*: “I picked up a lot of survival tricks in the boarding schools and in the rough world of the rural bushes.”
After two unsuccessful escapes from Porter school and then Ottery in the Western Cape, he resigned himself to seeing out his two-year term in the reformatory. He was 16 when he moved back to Durban. The year was 1976.
He lived in Inanda close to a mushrooming informal settlement on the banks of a river called Piesang because of the banana trees that grew there.
The settlement fell under the control of an Inkatha warlord and Hunsley, along with other young men, was forced to become an urban impi whose mission it was to kill ANC sympathisers.
Not prepared to accept these controls, he sought to run away. He was chased down and in the ensuing struggle, stabbed in the chest – an injury that bedevilled him for the rest of his life.
After his recovery, Hunsley focused his political efforts on community-based organisations. This coincided with the inception of the Piesang River Civic Association aligned to the United Democratic Front. His leadership and popularity ensured Piesang River was an ideal focal area for progressive land and housing development.
After initial close collaboration with the Built Environment Support Group in the early 1990s, the Piesang River Civic Association, under his direction, linked up with an initiative called People’s Dialogue on Land and Shelter.
The People’s Dialogue had emerged from a shack dweller conference in 1992 where Hunsley met land and housing activists from every part of the country and from several countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Between 1992 and 2000, under Patrick’s leadership, a new social movement built more than 4 000 houses in Durban, of which 1 431 were built in Inanda and Piesang River and more than 10 000 countrywide.
Hunsley’s life experiences drove him to want to start a new social movement for the urban poor, wishing to replicate the actions of slum-dweller leaders of a previous era. Indeed, in his early twenties, Hunsley adopted the name Magebhula after one of the leaders of the Sofasonke and uMfelandawonye movements of the 1940s and 1950s.
In 1994, he gathered like-minded comrades from informal settlements in Durban, Joburg, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town and many secondary cities to form uMfelandawaonye Wabantu BaseMojondolo, the South African Homeless People’s Federation.
Through his inspiration, a new strategy of progressive negotiation began to take root. While few had his nous, his guile and his charm, informal settlement leaders throughout the country began to engage state institutions in tactical and strategic negotiations leading to many policy and delivery-related achievements.
Hunsley’s approach to secure well- located land was premised on the need for organised land invasions, not only in KwaZulu-Natal but also in the Eastern Cape, Western Cape, Gauteng, Mpumalanga, North West and Free State.
While many invasions ended in demolitions, scores of South African settlements – some upgraded into formal township neighbourhoods – owe their origin to his obsession with securing land for the dispossessed.
During these contested years, Hunsley often interacted directly with government officials and politicians, winning many over, opening their hearts and minds to the realities facing the urban poor.
Mandela visited the Homeless People’s Federation in Oukasie, North West in 1995 where he remarked: “In approaching this task, we have learnt a great deal from the homeless themselves.
“We have learnt the value of partnership between ourselves and the people in their communities.”
In addition, the 1990s was marked by the emergence of a global movement of the urban poor, known as Shack Dwellers International (SDI).
This network of the urban poor spread across countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Hunsley, whose leadership was self-evident, played a crucial role in the birth of federations of urban poor communities in several countries from Namibia and Zimbabwe, Brazil and Bolivia to Kenya and Uganda.
In 2009, Patrick founded and chaired the Informal Settlement Network (ISN), an agglomeration of settlement-level and national-level organisations of the urban poor in the five major metropolitan municipalities in South Africa.
The ISN continues to mobilise communities at city scale, about access to services, land and incremental development of informal settlements.
The Homeless People’s Federation (renamed the Federation of the Urban and Rural Poor or Fedup in 2006) has been the largest civil society organisation constructing People’s Housing Process homes for the urban poor in South Africa’s 20 years of democracy. More than 15 000 houses have been built in two decades.
In 2010, Hunsley served as special adviser on policy and practice to then-minister of human settlements Tokyo Sexwale.
Fedup has secured a long term “subsidy pledge” partnership with the Department of Human Settlements, to enable housing savings schemes, primarily women-led, to access subsidy finance directly to construct houses.
In 2011, he was asked to serve on a ministerial task team on water and sanitation, to address issues of open-air, incomplete and dilapidated toilets in poor communities across South Africa.
Hunsley also presented at international conferences, such as World Urban Forum 7, held in Medellin, Colombia, in April.
Hundreds of fellow activists, friends and comrades, including Minister of Human Settlements Lindiwe Sisulu attended Hunsley’s funeral on August 16 in KwaMashu, Durban.
At this occasion, she pledged R10 million to the Federation of the Urban Poor and committed to redouble efforts to work with the South African SDI Alliance.
Her department honoured Hunsley for his excellent contributions with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the annual Govan Mbeki Awards Ceremony in Joburg on August 14.
Hunsley’s contribution to civil society and reforms in government relations with communities has been marked by the contradictory nature of development.
In his poem, While the Band Played(2001), he reflected on the state’s partnership with communities:
While the band played, we danced out our tune/ The band is ours, but the music is not ours/ We will dance to our music/ We must compose our own songs and ask the band to play them/ While they played, we danced out of step
It is hard to imagine a future without his humour, his fiery oratory, his capacity to find common ground with one and all and his deep compassion for his fellow human being.
A flawed genius has passed on.
For the next weeks, there will be mourning for Hunsley in hundreds of informal settlements, backyard shacks and pavement dwellings in dozens of countries.
There will be mourning for him in places of power where his sparkle and his candour, his determination and his unwavering commitment earned him enemies but won over many, many more.
* (These are available in the form of the short publication Memoirs of a South African Slum Dweller(2013) available on www.sdinet.org/)
l Bolnick is co-founder of Shack Dwellers International and manager of the SDI secretariat. Fieuw is city fund manager at the Community Organisation Resource Centre, support NGO to the South African SDI Alliance.