Indbyggerne i tre bydele – Umbumbulu, Chatsworth og Umlazi – fortæller om, hvordan deres liv har ændret sig siden apartheid-styret faldt for 20 år siden og om de både gode og triste ting under ANC, først under Nelson Mandela og nu Jacob Zuma.
UMBUMBULU: Spaza shop owner Justice Msomi has been selling cooldrinks and loose cigarettes from the same red shipping container in rural Umbumbulu for exactly two decades. He sold liquor, too, until licences became strictly policed.
“Remember when Mandela said that each and everybody must by all means try to make something of themselves? That is when I started selling ice lollies (ispinde).”
Msomi worked at a flooring factory for 14 years before it closed.
“In 1992 I started visiting principals at their schools to ask if I could put in containers from which to sell bread and cakes.”
As he tells it, he quickly did well enough to sell 50 cases of cooldrinks a week.
In vesting governing bodies with the power to run schools, the South African Schools Act of 1996 ushered in problems Msomi had not expected.
Talk of schools prompts Msomi to recall a time when faction fighting between families wreaked havoc in the area.
Borrowing a white shirt, grey pants and a tie, he would pass himself off as a pupil, remaining within the relative safety of the school grounds.
Mest tumult over taxi-priser
He says that the only unrest in Umbumbulu now is over taxi-fare hikes (stigninger).
“I can say that they are good,” he says of the government’s performance post-1994.
“They have built community halls, there is a library and three or four clinics. The world is too big, you can’t satisfy everyone. This period of 20 years is too small.”
However Msomi wants Umbumbulu to have its own hospital, as the closest are in Umlazi and Isipingo.
“The government promised to build a hospital very soon,” he says earnestly.
Down the untarred road from his container, Msomi’s ambitions stand abandoned – a store with walls of concrete, but without a roof.
Hos inderne i Chatsworth
CHATSWORTH: Gopal Naicker was in his twenties when his family were forcibly removed from their home in Stamford Hill, and moved to a “matchbox house” in Unit 10 in Chatsworth.
Now 68, he still remembers how he and his siblings (søskende) slept on the veranda of their old home on warm nights.
“When we first arrived (in Chatsworth) there were matchbox houses all over, but they have changed as people have renovated. Of course we have more burglar bars now, and alarms.”
Nearly everybody in Chatsworth mentions the increase in crime as a feature of the past two decades. And the drugs and poverty which have taken root in the notorious Road 240 flats.
“The government has not done much (in Chatsworth since 1994). I would love to say something different… I heard that one of the ministers said that Indians don’t vote for the ANC so they are not needed in Parliament. But if you look after us, we will vote for you.”
Naicker plans to put his vote towards building a stronger opposition. “The DA won’t win the election, but (the ANC) needs someone to tell them to stop it.”
Vee Govender’s family was moved to Unit Two in 1964 from Cato Manor. “This is not a place that is safe. We are caged in our houses. The government needs to do something about crime.”
Govender also plans to vote DA. “Just look at the corruption we are reading about in the ANC.”
Boykotter onsdagens valg
Jetaime Mathura has lived in Chatsworth all his life and, on a rainy Wednesday, is manning his vegetable stall. The 32-year-old is boycotting the election.
“It is a waste of time. You know who is going to win.”
He also does not believe that the government has contributed in any significant way to development in Chatsworth, but that its inhabitants have pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps.
That the character of Chatsworth has been irrevocably altered post-1994, no one mentions as a matter of significance.
As KwaZulu-Natal academic Goolam Vahed says, it would be inaccurate to continue to refer to Chatsworth as an Indian township.
“The schools have changed with African pupils from Clermont, Lamontville and Umlazi, and from informal settlements within Chatsworth, attending Chatsworth schools.
“Many Africans now live in informal settlements in Chatsworth such as Bottlebrush and Crossmoor, in Welbedacht, while others have moved into the flats as well as places like Mobeni Heights.
“Migrants from the Asian sub-continent, who arrived post-1994, can also be found in many parts of Chatsworth. As geographers and social scientists tell us, places are never frozen in time but are processes, always in the making.
The same is true of Chatsworth,” explains Vahed, who is the co-editor of the recently published Chatsworth: The Making of a South African Township.
Skolerne er bedre nu
UMLAZI: Felix Mshololo has lived in Umlazi since he was a teenager.
“The population in our township and at our schools was not as high as it is now. There were still many areas without houses, many open areas, which in my opinion kept our township clean,” the celebrated headmaster of Menzi High School recalls.
“The shacks (slumhuse) which we are experiencing now are new. They only started going up in 1990. From 1990 we saw an increasing number of informal settlements. The municipality could not cope and somehow the township became dirty.”
That was the same year that Mshololo took the reins at Menzi High School, and he remembers how pre-1994 teaching was regularly disrupted as pupils readily joined political marches.
“(Post-1994) some of our schools started operating at half-empty as pupils started moving to former Model C schools and under-performing schools experienced serious staff shortages”.
“In 2000, the schooling system started to stabilise. When there is (positive) development in education, there is hope that life in general will improve,” Mshololo says.
Går trods alt mod bedre tider
People are continually being moved from shacks into homes.
“The process is slow, but it is getting there. There has been a gradual change for the better. There is an increasing number of clinics and sports facilities. There are now swimming pools in G section and B section… I have no reason to move out of Umlazi.
“My residential area is crime-free. There is crime in upmarket areas too. Better the devil you know,” Mshololo says.
It is four months since Mavis Makhunga moved into her RDP home in W section. For 14 years she lived in a shack. “There are no words to explain,” she says of having a solid roof over her family’s head, even though there isn’t running water or a toilet yet.
“It is better to live in a house when it rains. Now I feel that we are human, to live in our own houses.”
The only thing missing from her life is a job she says. Other than that “everything is well”.
Makhunga walks us to the home of the oldest member of their little neighbourhood, 77-year-old Khipeni Ngubane.
She is firm that the past 20 years have delivered on the promises of 1994 – but laughingly says the one thing the ANC could do is give her a flat-screen TV for her next birthday.
On the wall of her lounge are photographs of her grandchildren, four of whom depend on her old-age grant.
Pasted alongside the family pictures is a holographic poster. Depending on from which angle you look at it, it is either the face of Nelson Mandela or of President Jacob Zuma.
Kilde: Sydafrikansk presse
