No freedom for the poor

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04 July 2006 11:59

Ziyanda Busuku moved to the Foreman Road settlement from the Eastern Cape to
be closer to her mother, and to give birth to her baby, Zasekhaya. (Photo:
Rafs Mayet)
The Foreman Road informal settlement nestles in a ravine leading down to the
Palmiet River on the edge of the middle-class suburb of Clare Estate in
Durban. From the top of the settlement the view across the river is of a
swathe of trees and bushes, yet that is where the idyll ends.

Descending from Foreman Road into the narrow, steep alleys between shacks
built with scrap metal, wood and (ironically) election posters, the stench
from open sewage and rotting rubbish is inescapable. Young children with
mucus-caked upper lips play in the filth and mud, their laughter only
interrupted by hacking coughs.

This, tragically, is the emerging South Africa. Many of the facts relating
to changes in South African households that appear in the government’s
recently released discussion paper on macro-social trends in the country,
South Africa: A Nation in the Making, live out their realities here.

According to the document the nuclear family is disintegrating, while
extended family households, single-person households and households with
non-family members living together increased between 1996 and 2001. The most
dramatic increase has been in the extended family households, which went up
7% while there was a corresponding 5% decrease in nuclear families.
Household size has also declined, from an average of 4,5 persons to 3,8
persons per household.

The role HIV/Aids is playing in redefining familial structures in South
Africa cannot be understated. Sixteen-year-old Bukeka Zulu* is painstakingly
washing clothes while keeping one eye on her 12-year-old niece, Xolisa*, and
the other on the spaza shop her mother runs in the settlement.

Bukeka is on school holiday and her mother is visiting Xolisa’s 10-year-old
sister, Sikithi, who is in hospital “because she was coughing”. Both
Bukeka’s sister and her husband died last year: “I don’t know what they died
from,” she says. A neighbour intimates that HIV/ Aids-related diseases were
the cause of death.

The Foreman Road settlement started in 1988 and today houses about 7 000
people, the majority migrants from the Eastern Cape and rural KwaZulu-Natal
who have moved to Durban to look for jobs. They have found only unemployment
and menial labour, perhaps reflecting the statistics that show that while
income poverty between 1995 and 2000 in rural areas declined by about 5%, it
increased in urban areas by about the same figure.

For 24-year-old Pateka Mahawuza, sharing a one-room mjondolo with two women,
it is a purely economic decision. While her shack-mates are cleaning chicken
gizzards and intestines for their supper of amathumba and rice, Pateka
carries her three-month-old baby, Inathi, on her back as she builds a fire.
A plastic lid is burnt over the collection of sticks and branches to
kick-start it: “Her father gives me R150/ R100 a month but after I’ve bought
the formula there isn’t much left. I don’t want to be with him,” says the
single mother.

Pateka says that in three months she will resume her job as a domestic
worker, which pays R400 a month — she works five days a week,
eight-and-a-half hours a day: “My mother died in 1997 from witchcraft and my
father died in a car accident a year later, so I was alone, so I left
Flagstaff [in the Eastern Cape] and came to Durban to look for a job,” she
says.

While the discussion document concludes that “how to mediate the tension
between a market-based economic system premised on cut-throat competition,
and the desire to build a caring society is one of the critical issues that
identify themselves” in this evolving country, many of the people in the
Foreman Road settlement blame local government for their plight, it being
the closest sphere to them.

In Foreman Road, the grand speak of a “caring society” is mere words on
paper. The urban migrant experience is one of poverty and dislocation, with
government services almost impossible to access. In fact, many here perceive
authority as acting against them.

In a precariously slanting one-room shack with a number scrawled in red
spray paint on the door, 18-year-old Nokubonga Camen is spending her
holidays looking after her sister Nosphiwe’s two children. Nosphiwe is out
looking for work: “My sister was an informal trader in Albert Street but the
eThekwini [Durban] council sent the police there to clear them out,” she
says. “She hasn’t had a job since then.”

Nokubonga says that R100 of the R190 social grant that her sister receives
for each child is spent on day care for each of them.

The fissure between community and municipality runs deeper. Mnikelo
Ndabankulu, PRO for the Foreman Road branch of the Abahlali baseMjondolo
Movement (Shackdwellers’ Movement) — an overarching body that draws
membership from the various informal settlements around Durban — says that
the community has been struggling against the municipality since last year:
“We started demanding land and housing and we resisted forced removals
because the municipality wanted to relocate us to Mount Moreland, which is
near Phoenix and too far away for us.

“We have been here a long time and many people have jobs in the garages, the
market, and our mothers and sisters are working in the houses all around.
They can’t afford to take two taxis to come here and two to go back home.
What time must they wake up in the morning?” he asks.

In November last year city manager Mike Sutcliffe banned a march from the
Foreman Road settlement, and when the community decided to march against the
ban it was, according to Ndabankulu, met with live ammunition and beatings.

In the same month a fire ravaged the settlement, leaving 700 people
homeless. Ndabankulu points to a plastic cover over a hydrant box in the
ground where the municipality had promised to pipe water into the settlement
in 2001: “They said there were no funds to connect it to the main pipe
across the road, so they still haven’t done anything. I tell you, there is
no freedom for the poor,” he says.

* Not their real names