Lindela (G 10)

Name: Lindela

The Lindela repatriation centre in Krugersdorp has been ordered to pay R40 600 damages to a South African man illegally arrested, detained and deported to Zimbabwe after his identity document was stolen.
A Pretoria High Court judge granted default judgment against Bosasa Operations (Pty) Ltd, which runs Lindela, ordering the company to pay damages to David Phadlela, 26, of Yeoville.
Bosasa did not enter any appearance to defend the matter. Phadlela’s civil claim against the Ministers of Home Affairs and Safety and Security will continue in the High Court in August 2008.
Phadlela said in court papers he had been walking through Hillbrow on his way home from work in March 2003 when what appeared to be police and Home Affairs officials closed off the street and started questioning pedestrians on their nationality.
He was arrested as a suspected illegal immigrant when he could not produce his identity document, which had been stolen when he was mugged a few days earlier.
The officials had ignored him when he told them he had reported the theft of his identity document to the Yeoville police, given them a case number and shown them the receipt issued by Home Affairs when he had applied for a new ID. He was taken to Lindela, where officials also ignored his pleas that he was a South African, he said.
Phadlela was detained for 14 days – during which time he lost out on wages from his workplace, he said – and then deported by train to Zimbabwe, where he was left without food, money, passport or any way to contact his family.
He had had to sleep outside and beg for food for two days, before hitchhiking back to Johannesburg.

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Lindela is a deportation centre (euphemistically renamed a ‘repatriation centre’) at the bottom end of a system primed to filter out poor Zimbabweans and Mozambiquans as well as all other ‘illegal’ immigrants (mostly all from the African continent). The police arrest anyone who they suspect of being an immigrant, using the stereotyped markers of a darker-than-South African complexion, language proficiency or simply self-referential ‘identification’ - Verstaan jy! Many ID-card carrying South African citizens are of course also detained. Like the dompas before it, the ID book must be done away with, or apartheid continues to be real.
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