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| Casspir: South African-designed armored troop carrier. |
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The shelter was a framework of Port Jackson brushwood staked into the loose sand of the Cape Flats and covered by plastic sheets--black plastic near the base for privacy, translucent plastic over the roof for light. Neatly, without touching the contents of the home or its occupants, a team of five overalled Black men, supervised by an armed White, lifted the entire structure of frame and plastic skin off the ground and placed it nearby. Then they pulled off the plastic, smashed the framework and threw the pieces onto a waiting truck. Hardly a word was spoken. While they could legally destroy the wooden framework, they were forbidden, by the quirk of a court decision brought against the State seeking to prevent these demolitions, from confiscating or destroying the plastic. So it was left where it fell.
Then the convoy--a police Landrover, the truck with the demolition squad and broken wood, and a Casspir with policemen in camouflage lolling in its armored back--moved towards the next group of shelters.
For a while the woman lay with the child. Then she got up and began to cut and strip the branches of Port Jackson bush to make a new framework for her house. The child slept.
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