LIFE IN THE SIYANDA SHACKS

I’m back from my week living in the Siyanda Shack Settlement, where I conducted research and fieldwork on women’s activism and community leadership in Abahlali baseMjondolo, South Africa’s shack dweller movement largely based in Durban.

I spent most my time there conducting interviews, walking around to schedule more interviews, and observing the environment. It’s what you’d expect it to be–naked children running around, people going to the community tap for running water, women doing laundry and hanging clothes, cooking. When it’s warm outside, it’s hot in the shack. When it’s cold outside, it’s freezing in the shack. When it rains outside, it gets wet in the shack. The men are always sitting together and drinking and smoking. I lost count of the number of times I had been hit on or been proposed to by drunk and careless men.

I had moments where I felt so happy and accomplished for what I had done in the field and nights where I cried myself to sleep. The women I interviewed were those we hear about in books like Half the Sky – women who sell sweets on the streets every morning to earn a few rand a day for their family, spend essentially their lives caring for their kids, sometimes diseased or disabled or are AIDS orphans from another family, and who live every day of their lives wondering when they’d be able to move into a house. By the 26th right in the South African Bill of Rights in the constitution, everyone is entitled to proper housing. The municipality has promised houses to these people for years…but has never acted on it. All of these women welcomed me into their homes with such generous hospitality. They can hardly feed themselves and yet one woman even served me a coke for our interview. At some point in the interview, she cried. How was this supposed to make me feel?

Hlebani is a woman who lives in a mud shack, and has been living in the shack settlement for 28 years. She is the breadwinner in the household, selling chips and snacks on the street in the morning after taking care of her 20-year-old mentally disabled son and sending him to school, in addition to four other kids. She’s still with her husband (one of the few women who actually had husbands with them).

Nomali is the treasurer and secretary for her branch in Abahlali and is also the founder of Siyanda’s main creche, which serves over 120 kids, some of whom are AIDS orphans. Twenty two years ago, before government grants were available, she saw the need to build a crèche for orphans and underprivileged children in the community. She gained sponsorship from someone who worked for the municipality, but when they left the project unfinished she used her own money to finish building it. The crèche hardly pays for itself because the families are either too poor to pay for it or because the orphans simply can’t. She also keeps another shack next to the crèche for homeless people and some of the AIDS orphans.

Bongi lives in a transit camp, cardboard and metal structures built by the government for those who were kicked out of their shacks so that houses could be built in their place. Bongi and all those in the transit camp community have lived there for three years, though the government was supposed to move them into houses on March 17, 2008. They are still waiting for day they can move into a house.

These are a few of the stories of the 10 women I interviewed. Every single one of them was so powerful, passionate, and independent. They had all endured so much in their life but could still put a smile on every day. They care so much for their children and their community that they often forget about their own problems.

After interviewing a woman named Zanele (a widow who lives in a mud shack with her epileptic son and another daughter, was evicted from her home after her husband died), I bought two pieces of fish from her not so much because I was hungry as much as I just wanted to support her and her small business of selling food around the neighborhood. I was tempted to give her more than the 1 rand, and to give her 10 or 20. I refrained and gave her 2 only because I didn’t want her to think that I was just some rich Westerner girl who could just give her a bunch of money because I had so much of it. Even if I did go back to America, raise money, and help build this crèche for AIDS orphans that is currently a 10×10 shack for 40 kids, it would only make people believe that these westerners are so rich and “up there.” It would only encourage a dependency on Western aid. But what are you supposed to do then? I can’t fix their government or make their government listen to them. And even if I did help build this crèche, how could I make sure it’s sustainable? Even if the government did end up building them homes, how would they pay for it and make a living there, still unemployed? Will they get jobs? They can’t get any now but you can’t blame them in a country of 35% unemployment and when your only chance of getting a job relies on connections to the world outside of the informal settlements. So does the solution lie in expanding the economy and creating jobs? How do you do that, if capitalism clearly isn’t working? I was constantly baffled by this cycle of problems.

Aside from the issue of housing and gender inequality, the informal settlement is unsafe because doors don’t have locks and windows are merely holes in the wall. Anyone can just jump in and rape a girl. HIV/AIDS is most prevalent in these areas, which also creates more orphans who don’t have homes. Kids have no incentive to go to school or work hard in school because even if they get matric and graduate there won’t be jobs for them. Besides, “how can a child concentrate in school when he/she is starving?” The people here are not just hungry…they’re hungry for education, shelter, life.

At the end of my interviews I always asked my interviewees if they have questions for me. In one form or another, I was always asked: “What will you do to help us? Will this research give us houses?” I don’t know and no, I can’t. I realized that I don’t have any more power than they do. I felt horrible just being another observer who walks in, walks out, and doesn’t give any form of concrete help. And yet, because I was this foreigner from such an affluent country, from “Obamaland,” I was expected to be able to somehow bring them out of their misery, influence their government, give them homes…how was I supposed to tell them that I couldn’t do any of these?

In the end I told them I was just a student, a young learner still in school and without any real political power. I asked what I could do. They said they wanted me to share what I saw and felt to everybody I know so that “the world can see how we live.” Their lives are defined by the struggle for a proper house and to keep their children alive. These are real people, with real needs.

Compiled by Jaclyn Dean
United States of America

Jaclyn Dean
Jaclyn24 [@] gmail [dot] com
076 613 0605