Jo’burg er Afrikas New York: Engang boede de fattige ude i Soweto – det gør de ikke længere
JOHANNESBURG, 2 June 2011 (IRIN): Johannesburg’s abandoned and neglected inner-city buildings have become slum dwellings for thousands of people.
Many of them are jobless migrants, who endure over-crowding, poor or non-existent sanitation and limited access to running water and electricity because of a lack of affordable alternatives.
With their broken or boarded up windows, peeling paintwork (maling) and unlit doorways, many of the buildings appear uninhabited from the outside, but often house up to 1.000 people in a warren-like maze of (virvar af) shacks (hytter/skure) and flimsy (spinkle) partitions.
One such building near the city’s Ellis Park Stadium provides shelter to over 400 people, most of them Zimbabwean migrants, in rooms sub-divided by cardboard (pap) or washing-lines hung with sheets (lagner).
By 5pm on a recent winter afternoon, the rubbish-strewn stairwells (trappeopgange) and narrow corridors are already so dark that residents use cell phones to light their way as they manoeuvre buckets of water to their rooms from a public tap outside.
– I have been in this building for two years now because I cannot get work to pay rent. Here we do not pay rent, we just stay, said Caroline Magore, a 36-year-old resident from Zimbabwe.
A number of the residents found refuge in the building following a wave of violence directed at foreign nationals that swept South Africa in 2008.
But the price of a rent-free home is one without running water, functioning toilets or electricity and in the case of this building, regular threats of eviction by the building’s owner and occasional harassment by the police.
– Most of the police do not give us a problem, but one comes and asks for our IDs and passports and if we do not have them, he takes your property, said another resident.
Criminals and slum lords
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