Dhoya Snijders:The Building of Borders

The Central Methodist Mission in Johannesburg was once perceived to be the flagship of the Methodist Church in Southern Africa. The massive, six-floor building was religiously clean with devoted spaces, unsoiled floors, and a hushed sanctuary. This is no more. In recent times, it has opened its doors to provide shelter for those who cannot find roofs elsewhere. Many of the needy individuals are foreign nationals, mainly Zimbabweans. After South Africa ‘hosted’ the xenophobic attacks of 2008, some 3000 people sought nightly refuge at bishop Paul Verryn’s church. Since then, as SA hung its head in collective shame, this number has halved - more than a thousand individuals still sleep in the hallways, on the stairs, on the floors of the church each night. On the streets, rumours of rape, abuse, corruption and violence are flung at the church. “That place,” a taxi-driver tells me, “it is Gomorra on earth!”.








Nevertheless, without saying a word, we leave our cameras, wallets, cell phones in the car and walk towards the entrance. A man with a thumb-piano greets us and starts chanting “nkosi sikelele Africa”. Julia takes our hands and shows us around. People are everywhere. They cook food on electrical stoves for consumption and business, fuming up the whole building. Kids are everywhere, in bucket-bathtubs, under benches and on mother’s backs. Plain blankets are everywhere and have colourfully substituted proper beds. We get to see the soup kitchen where hundreds of people receive free food, the clinic, where many an illness gets cured, and the crèche, where we swiftly make some little friends. Children play in a grand foyer with plastic bikes, toys and ropes hanging from a scaffold. People look cheerful and invite us for quirky conversations. This is not Gomorra. We see no sinister passageways or creepy characters, drinking, drugs or dealers. It seems like a well-organized institution which could use lots and lots more resources.

Paul Verryn is emotional when speaking about the people staying in the Pritchard Street building. “The CMM is not about providing foreign nationals with shelter. It is about South Africa’s confrontation with poverty, amongst which is the issue of foreign nationals”. Since Verryn let persons stay in the CMM, he has stepped down as a bishop and, recently, has been suspended from his church. The official reasons for this are unconvincing, to say the least. Verryn is charged for speaking to the media and starting up a legal procedure (to authorize official child-support in CMM) without consent of the new bishop. On hearing the church’s accusations, Verryn immediately stopped his legal procedures. This had no effect on his suspension. Without backing from his own church, Verryn’s future, as well as the building’s, has become uncertain.

Newspapers comment on a city-council lobby to close the church as well. The chilling rationale seems to be that soccer tourists would not want to see disorderly refugees. But where should the church-inhabitants go? Many of the people that live in downtown Jozi buildings live in far worse conditions. Buildings are run by slumlords; gangsters who exploit and abuse, instead of trying-to-do good churches. After our visit to CMM we join Paul for a debate titled ‘survival on arrival’ with Prof Adam Habib, Cosatu’s Zweli Vavi and others. Foreign nationals, says MRC’s Dr Thomas, try to be undetectable, ‘they find protection through their invisibility’. If they access basic institutions, they may be exposed as illegal and lose their cover. The CMM attempts, often unsuccessfully, to provide immigrants with access to such basic needs. Verryn acknowledges rape, abuse, exploitation, love, romance, friendship and all other complexities of societies behind his church doors. The question that lingers though, is why these ‘invisible’ people stay at the CMM (or in SA for that matter)? Why can Johannesburg not accommodate them in better ways? And how does this reflect on SA’s understandings of, and dealings with foreigners? Thomas’ research shows that 80 percent of SA’s immigrants have economic reasons for their migration. Not, as Vavi states, because they want to be in a foreign country, not because they want to be away from their families, not because of any voluntary reasons.

All panel-members agree that Johannesburg is hardly an ideal city for economic refugees (either from other countries or from other regions in SA). The recent, or rather, continuous perpetuation of xenophobic violence is mentioned and linked to broader issues of poverty and violence. “If you think you’ve seen violence, we’ve had a Sunday picnic up until now”, says Verryn. The country is in multiple ways mistaken to be a land of milk and honey.

Verryn however would not be a religious leader if he did not carry hope. “Hear me, I have spent more time speaking about toilets in the CMM, than about Jesus”. However, “I believe that it is the immigrant who is the sacred gift.” In a country in which there is such a lack of skills - Habib duly mentions the critical lack of math’s teachers - it is a disgrace not to employ the thousands of foreign skilled workers. And besides the fact that many human resources are not adequately managed and left to waste, the foreigner has the function of challenging SA’s mindsets: it is the immigrant who “will teach us humanity”. Ghandi once talked about measuring the greatness of a nation. I would like to propose rendering the original quote to say that the greatness of a nation and its moral progress should be judged by the way it treats its immigrants.

- What are your feelings?
- How can South Africa better treat its African economic migrants?
- Will the World Cup lead to a massive migration and exasperate an already dire refugee situation?