Story of the urban poor

South Africa has gone through cataclysmic changes quite peacefully, but the division of races still remains. The urban poor, like those in India, are struggling to make a better life for themselves. It will, however, be a long time before things change, says KALPANA SHARMA.

IT hits you as soon as you drive out of Cape Town airport. Apartheid has officially ended in South Africa. But, in reality, the races remain as divided, barring a few rare exceptions.

The scene that confronts you as you drive toward the beautiful port city of Cape Town, set beneath the majestic Table Mountain, are rows of tin shacks, not very different from our jhopad-pattis in Mumbai. These are the Cape Flats, home to the poor Blacks of Cape Town.

But, as with slums anywhere, what you see is not the whole story. It is only when you walk into a settlement that you enter another world, a world as far removed from the gracious homes of Cape Town as India is from any of the more prosperous countries in the world.

In a country that has gone through cataclysmic changes fairly peacefully in the last five years, the story of the urban poor is an example of how much needs to be done before a substantive difference can be made to the lives of poor people. Yet, even if the pace of change is not fast enough for some people, it is happening. And, unlike India, the change is taking place through a combination of efforts by the government and by the people.

The shanty towns, where the poor blacks live, are a fair distance from the city. The majority of them travel daily to work in Cape Town. Public transport is inadequate. As a result, the women - who work as domestics in the city - spend a substantial part of their earnings on "share taxis". But even these will not drop them to the homes where they work. So they go as far as they can and then walk. In the wealthy residential districts located in the shadow of Table Mountain and Devil's Peak, each morning you see a procession of black women, wearily trudging up steep slopes to the homes where they work.

All the urban poor settlements are not like the tin shacks you see on the way in from the airport. You also find settlements with rows of neat houses. Victoria Mxenge, for instance, consists of separate brick and mortar structures of different sizes. It is part of the redevelopment plan that the South African government has initiated. But Victoria Mxenge came about through the initiative of people, especially women, who lived in typical informal settlements of Khyletisha, Langa and Gugulethu.

Patricia Matolengwe, dressed in a florescent orange dress, is the leader of the community in Victoria Mxenge. Until recently, she lived with her mother and 26-year-old daughter in Khyelitsha. "My parents experienced a number of lives", she says describing, without emotion, the different jobs they did and the places where they lived. Patricia's father, who had worked as a policeman and then in a clothing factory, died in 1965. This was when her mother came to the city to work as a domestic worker.

Patricia followed in her mother's footsteps. Having failed her Std. 10, she tried to look for a job but finally ended up being a domestic earning about 30 rand a day (one rand is approximately five rupees).

She recalls vividly the mid-1980s when demolitions of settlements like hers were a frequent occurrence. The apartheid government had introduced the hateful Group Areas Act under which entire districts were be overnight designated for Whites only. All others had no choice but to move. "We were forcibly removed from our settlement in 1986. There were lots of fights. The strategy of the authorities was to get us to fight and burn each other's houses. Most people lost all their belongings in the process," she remembers.

Patricia and her mother moved to Khyelitsha, the largest of the settlements on the outskirts of Cape Town. In 1991, Patricia was one of those who initiated a small savings group amongst the women in her settlement. "We got the idea at a conference in Johannesburg where we met some Indians from Mumbai." Patricia was referring to Mahila Milan, women's collectives in Mumbai who have pioneered savings and credit groups and also made significant interventions in housing issues in the city.

As a result of that meeting, a group from South Africa, including Patricia, came to Mumbai to learn more about savings and housing issues. I happened to meet the group and was part of the encounter between them and the pavement dwellers of central Mumbai. The meeting remains firmly etched in my mind as the two groups of women, from countries so far apart, found a common language in which they communicated.

Recalls Patricia: "When we went to India, it was the first time we had been out of our country. Seeing the condition in which the women in Mumbai lived, many of us thought that our conditions here were much better. Also we thought we were struggling alone. After going there we realised how people are surviving."

What was the main difference she saw between the conditions in which the poor lived in the two countries, I asked. "Even if Indians are poorer than us, they are clever and better in terms of skills and they work and try hard to survive. Here people in the past learned to be beggars. So they started to depend on the government. In villages, people were independent. But when they came to the cities, that's where the problem began", she says.

She says the situation has worsened in the villages now and more people are flocking to the cities. With growing unemployment, there is also growing crime in the settlements.

The resettlement work started by the government is proceeding very slowly, feels Patricia. "The key issue is land", she says. "Like India, poor people cannot get land. For example, it took us nine months to find the land on which we have built Victoria Mxenge. Other groups are still struggling."

Patricia's savings group is part of the South African Homeless People's Federation which has representatives all over the country. The Government has recognised the Federation. Rather than letting the Government build houses for them, the Federation has undertaken to design and build houses. Patricia says that the majority of people are unhappy with the houses built by the Government, which are too small for their large families. Those who accepted these houses are dissatisfied. As a result, many have sold out and moved back to their villages.

However, the Federation acquired land from the Roman Catholic Church where the settlement of Victoria Mxenge developed. Here people put in their own savings, in addition to the government subsidy, and designed houses that suit their needs and are substantially larger than the government-built houses. The women have been central to the process. In India, women like Patricia learnt from Mahila Milan how to cost and design their houses so that they were affordable and even learned basic building techniques from them. Over the years, there have been several exchanges between the urban poor of South Africa and India.

The difference between the homes in Victoria Mxenge and the neighbouring settlement are a statement in contrasts. Vlei is a typical tin-shack settlement. The toilets are tiny tin structures built individually. When the pit gets full, they are abandoned and another structure is built. There is no running water. As in India, women fill water and store it. There are few shops in the settlement.

On the other hand, Victoria Mxenge has electricity, water and sanitation. Some of the houses have small garden patches. Others are experimenting with an additional floor if their plot is small. They have a community centre and a creche for working mothers.

In settlements like Vlei, there are few businesses or shops. Nokhanyo runs one of the few shops at the edge of Vlei. Her husband is a taxi driver. She shares the tiny shop-cum-house with her husband's brother and sister, both of whom have dropped out of school because they had no money to pay the school fees. They are new migrants to the city. Nokhanyo has no running water; she has to make several trips a day to fetch and store water. Nor does she have the space to build a toilet. So she and the family use the open fields.

The two settlements, one developed, the other undeveloped, stand uneasily next to each other. Charlotte and Mama Makasi, who take me on a guided tour of the settlements in the area, are afraid to walk into Vlei. "They don't like us", they tell me when I want to go in. It is evident that, with redevelopment, how people view themselves has also changed.

Says Patricia, "When we were living in informal settlements, we would be pushed around. It was really not living. But now our values have changed. People are sending their children to school. It is free up to the primary level."

But the problems of poverty persist, she adds. People still have no transport, have to walk long distances to their work places. And there is the growing problem of unemployment that is contributing to the crime graph.

It will take a long time before the images change, before the mentality changes and before the reality becomes different in South Africa. While you feel a sense of despair as you notice the stark differences in economic levels between the Whites and the Blacks, when you cannot fail to notice that all the customers in a restaurant are White and all those serving are Black, when almost everyone using public transport is Black and most cars are driven by Whites, you also know that there are people fighting to make things different. Women like Patricia, like Charlotte, like Mama Makasi.

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