They protested for food – the police fired rubber bullets - The Mail & Guardian

Talking to people who live in the Booysens informal settlement, it is hard to tell what has been more brutalising; the metro police’s rubber bullets — whose lesions still mark the faces, backs and legs of residents — or the fact that they have resorted to finding food in the nearby rubbish dumps.

Rubber bullet casings lie — dirty now — mingled with other detritus. A squeezed-out tube of toothpaste, mangled blue rubber gloves — the new trash of the Covid-19 era — and some autumn leaves. The JMPD members told the captain “he must open a case for us or arrest us. Then the other guy from JMPD told me to tell the people to disperse.”

At some point, members of the crowd began to throw stones, but Zwana insists that this happened after the police started shooting. Magatsela says that as people ran, some dropped their phones and ID books. Police officers picked these up and threw them into the fire made by the burning tyres. “It felt … personal,” he says.There were two streets on which Booysens residents gathered to protest. Both lead off Eloff Street Extension into the informal settlement that houses “maybe 10 000” people, says Zwana. Many of them are recyclers — they earn money by selling to scrap yards.

Implementing Covid-19 sanitation guidelines seems like a bewildering task in this informal settlement. Social distancing is almost physically impossible. Shacks are small and many of the paths between them are claustrophobically narrow, allowing people to walk only in single file.

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