I am finding all this fuss about the whales fascinating. I was at Longbeach on Saturday, and was struck by the similarity of the plight of the pod of 55 whales that beached themselves at Kommetjie this weekend and the 1000s of people who found themselves washed up at Soetwater at the end of May last year.
Firstly, it was so obviously a desperate situation that many hundreds of people felt the pull of fellow beings in jeopardy and came running to help. Secondly, the volunteers desperately wanted to believe that if they could just get them back in the water, they would all swim happily away into the sunset.
But these whales were too damaged to swim away. Whether already terminally ill from some sickness sustained at sea, or too irreparably injured by the pressure of the air on the beach – which causes their internal organs to start to decompose, slowly and painfully – these whales were incapable of getting back ‘into the swim’, just like that.
People sat for hours along the icy shoreline, huddled in groups around each hapless mammal, splashing seawater over them and stroking them, firm in the belief they were doing good. But was this just prolonging their agony? This family of whales had taken the decision to put themselves there, and repeatedly returned despite all the valiant efforts of the volunteers to haul them beyond the breakers. However appalling the state the whales were in on the beach, the situation in the sea from whence they came was apparently worse.
But no one wanted to hear that. No one was listening.
There are still more than 400 people beached and desperate at Blue Waters, the majority of them from the Soetwater camp, most of them female. Around 150 of them are children. They have been living isolated in a refugee camp built on sand for over a year now. These last remaining are the most vulnerable of the most vulnerable. Many of the women there have been raped repeatedly – first in the war-torn countries they originally fled from, second in the wave of xenophobic violence that swept SA last May, and again and again during their many failed attempts to ‘reintegrate’.
Last week, 5 pan-African foreigners were murdered in 3 separate incidents across the Western Cape, a large group of SA businessmen issued warnings to Somali traders in Samora Machel to shut shop and move out or else, and some of the few remaining Blue Waters children who attend school were beaten up by fellow learners in Mitchells Plain. None of this made headlines like the whales.
The mostly single or widowed mothers who remain in the camp are in a paralysing state of post traumatic stress-upon stress-upon stress. The pressure of living in SA is killing them: they feel like they can’t breathe easy here; they are mentally decomposing. They stay in tattered tents on the beach because they are too frightened to move. They live in constant fear of attack, on them or their children, in the choppy waters of Samora Machel, of Du Noon, of Khayelitsha. But our government is still in total denial about the realities on the ground.
Where are the soft hearts crying for them? And is the City’s plan to evict them any more humane than rifles to put them out of their misery?
Sam Pearce, former volunteer communications liaison for the Joint Refugee Leadership Committee of the Western Cape.
