South Africa: Houses and Bombs
By William Rowland (Rowland@sancb.org.za)
Driving south from Johannesburg on the Golden Highway towards the industrial town of Vanderbijlpark, we are listening to talk show host Noeline Maholwene Sangqu on Radio 702. She is taking calls about the dramatic events of last night.
Nine bombs exploded in Soweto, destroying vital rail links and damaging a mosque. One of these powerful explosions catapulted a railway sleeper into a squatter shack half a kilometre away, killing a woman in her bed. Her husband is in hospital fighting for his life.
Noeline's callers are angry... scared... sad. It is 30 October 2002: can these things still be happening in South Africa? Who is responsible? Can it be part of the recently uncovered right-wing coup plot?
Leaving Soweto behind on our right, we take a turn-off to the left and, skirting the huge informal settlement area known as Orange Farm, we come to the township of Lakeside. The marquee tent is easily spotted and we waste no time getting inside on this cold and rainy day. Piet Lethole, my driver, and I are the first guests to arrive. As usual on these occasions everybody is late, leaving the organisers plenty of time to arrange chairs, put out crockery, and run a cable across the main road to a nearby house to power the speaker's microphone and a music system that will contribute to the noise of the world.
Upmarket houses of the poor
Lakeside is a community of 8000 households perched, not unexpectedly, on the edge of a little lake. In Lakeside Proper the houses are a touch better than basic, the "upmarket" houses of the poor, one might say. This is where 100 stands have been set aside for the housing needs of disabled people and the reason we are here today is to hand over the keys to the first six owners.
More guests arrive; a bishop whose name I can't quite catch, some community leaders, the representatives of the participating NGO's, and a blind choir. I am introduced to Pastor Ray McCauley and I shake hands with South Africa's most famous preacher. No media... every available journalist has been deployed to nearby Soweto where for the world at large more important things are afoot. And so we can begin.
The Rhema Bible Church is at the centre of the Christian charismatic movement in the country and Pastor Ray delivers an inspiring message. He calls this "a defining moment for our nation". He reminds us of the parable of the Good Samaritan and how the priest had failed in his duty of compassion. In the struggle years, he says, religious leaders pointed the way and today there was a need to restore the role of the church in social action. St Francis of Assisi once said, "we must preach the Gospel always, and if necessary use words."
Time to put something back into the community
Mac Leaf, a property developer, is a member of the Rhema Church and he tells us how the preachings of Pastor Ray brought him to an understanding of the social gospel. As developer he had over the years built more than 4000 houses and made good money, but the time had come to put something back into the community. As part of its outreach programme the Rhema Services Foundation, with Mac Leaf's company, had bought up around 200 flats in the Johannesburg suburbs of Hillbrow, Berea, and Braamfontein, notorious for their drug trafficking and prostitution. These flats had been renovated and given to disabled people, the elderly, and abused women. The housing project in Lakeside would be an even more ambitious venture and would eventually extend to 500 units. One could see the relevance of his company's name, Mingisana, a Swahili word meaning lots of.
Deon Rezant steps forward. He is the chairman of the task team. A quietly spoken man, his words are compelling. It all began, he says, with a get-together of six organisations from the greater Johannesburg area to talk about the wants of blind, deaf, and physically disabled persons. The need for people to be consulted was realised and soon consensus was reached that the most important thing that they could do would be to provide housing. At this point Deon's personal philosophy started to come into play: "People must stop criticising and ostracising. They must rather take hands." Take hands with government is what he meant, but this proved to be a frustrating process until a housing official, Louella Lekgetha, introduced them to Mac Leaf. It had taken a full two years and today he felt like "an eagle flying".
The proceedings are interrupted by the news that another bomb has exploded, in a Buddhist temple west of Pretoria, injuring more people. Pastor Ray intervenes and somehow he finds words of prayer to calm and soothe.
I take my turn and say that Deon's eagle must fly far and high. And then I speak from the heart: "There are two messages going out from Gauteng today, a message of violence and a message of goodwill, peace, and development. All of us know which one will outlast the other."
Disabled homeowners dispersed throughout community
With the talking all done, we break into groups and move off towards the houses. I am with the smallest group and we are headed for the farthest house. This gives me time to chat to Julia Mabasa, who is about to become the new owner of this house. Julia is the mother of three teenagers and, at age 33, she is fast losing her sight to retinitis pigmentosa. She has had just two jobs in her life, one as a cashier in a liquor store and the other as a glass polisher, but I never discover what this entailed. Currently she is unemployed and living on the paltry disability grant of R630 per month.
We huddle together outside the house in the cold - Velli, a social worker, an unnamed photographer, Julia, and me. We are held up because we do not have the keys; these will be brought to us by the builder. When at last he arrives, a simple little ceremony takes place, whereby Julia inserts the key, unlocks the door of her new home, and steps inside.
I am given permission to enter and together we explore the interior. The house is heartbreakingly tiny, 30 square metres in fact. A toilet area is partitioned off, and the rest is all one open space. Once the cane furniture has been introduced, though, a divider will create a cramped but cosy sitting room and an elbow-to-elbow bedroom for Julia and her children. Outside the house is not unattractive, the walls having been plastered and painted and the regular monopitch roof of RDP dwellings replaced by a dual-pitched roof.
State funding for the initial 100 units in Lakeside amounts to R2.6 million ($260 000). To provide a house like Julia's costs R22 800: R9 000 for the land, R12 950 for building costs, and R800 or so for the drawing of plans, an electricity connection, legal charges, and sundry expenses. The only financial obligation left to the owner is a monthly payment of R150 for municipal services. As Mac Leaf explains, there is little profit for the developer in such an enterprise. Return on investment depends entirely on volume.
For the disabled people settling in Lakeside there is no hope of employment locally. A twenty-minute ride in a township taxi would take them to where mines and factories might offer better prospects for a few. Mac and Deon argue that a local workshop would be a better option and think that the nearby community hall, once renovated, could be put to such use. Time will tell.
A precondition set by government was that the houses be dispersed throughout the township to ensure proper integration into the life of the community. During prior consultations disabled people themselves were insistent that they not be institutionalised in any way, but fit in normally. A series of meetings was held with the residents' association and as a result the newcomers have been warmly welcomed by the locals.
Success prompts expansion of plans
Spurred on by its success in Lakeside, the vision of the task team has expanded massively. As articulated by Deon Rezant, it is nothing less than to build houses for all "people with special needs" in the country. A section 21 company, not for profit, is to be established to attract further government funding and hopefully to draw in corporate and international donor money. More land has been acquired in Payneville, near Springs, and Mohlakeng, near Randfontein, and Refilwe outside Pretoria will be next in line.
Deon's own story is as unlikely as the project which he leads. One night nine years ago, after a heavy bout of drinking, he settled himself in the back of a Combi to sleep off the effects. When he recovered consciousness, he found himself dumped along the roadside, shot through the head. The assailants have never been identified.
Deon speaks to me factually about his experience, and without undue emotion. Up to this point the story is unremarkable in the violent society in which South Africans live. What is remarkable, though, is the way in which Deon responded to his calamity. First he entered the Coronationville Workshop for the Blind in Johannesburg as a cane worker, but he left soon afterwards to start his own business. Then he went back as a switchboard operator, determined to grasp every opportunity that came his way. Labour relations and peer counselling proved to be where his talents lay, while he is also given enough time by his employer to organise the burgeoning housing project.
Remembering harsher housing realities under apartheid
As I listen to Deon, with a tape-recorder between us on the boardroom table, my memory winds back twenty years and more to a blind activist of the previous generation, Harry Mohale, Harry was unsilenceable on two issues which he raised unrelentingly in every forum, adult education and housing. At that time Black South Africans were subject to a body of apartheid law regulating virtually every aspect of life - where they could live, who they could marry, what jobs they could perform, what amenities they could enjoy, and much besides. The provisions of the Black (Urban Areas) Consolidation Act (Act 25 of 1945) are pertinent here.
According to this act no "Black" could remain in a prescribed area, outside the so-called "homelands", for more than seventy-two hours, unless "he" had resided there continuously since birth. On the strength of a birth certificate therefore you would become "a 10 (1)(a)", the person being labelled according to the section of the Act that applied to his circumstances. So strict was the law that a man could go away for Christmas and on returning find himself back on the seventy-two hour restriction.
You could also remain in such an area if you were "a 10 (1)(b)", meaning that you had worked continuously in such an area for a period of not less than ten years. Not only would you have to produce proof of your employment, but you would have to know the answers to some tricky questions as well. One of the favourites asked of Sowetans commuting by train to Johannesburg was this: "At what point do you come to Uncle Charlie's?" In truth Uncle Charlie's was a roadhouse not near the railway line at all.
And then there were "10 (1)(c)'s", the wives, unmarried daughters, or sons under the age of eighteen years of "Blacks" mentioned under the previous paragraphs of the Act, and "10 (1)(d)'s", comprising those "Blacks" granted permission to remain in the area by an officer appointed to manage a labour bureau - and I quote the exact reference - in terms of the provisions of paragraph (a) of sub-section (6) of section twenty-one ter of the Black Labour Regulation Act (Act 15 of 1911).
But being allowed to remain in an area did not translate into the right to own property there. Houses - where houses were available - were given on 99-year lease, a measure converting uncertainty of tenure into a permanent condition. Most disabled individuals were unemployed and had to subsist on disability grants. However, a means test was applied which included the income of the spouse and therefore disabled persons tended not to get married but simply to live together. When, occasionally, someone did have sufficient income and actually was the head of a family, he would still meet with bureaucratic barriers just because of his disability.
These, then, were some of the harsh realities that angered the founding generation of disability activists in South Africa - Harry Mohale, Ruth Machobane, Friday Mavuso, Thulani Tshabalala, and many others. But it is Harry that I call to mind as I sit at the boardroom table with Deon, talking about new and exciting times; Harry, because it was right here at this table that he delivered his final appeal for action, at a committee meeting of the SANCB. Whether that plea was for housing or for adult education - Harry's other cause - I cannot remember, nor can I look it up in the record, as the minutes of that meeting were never written, because of Harry's fatal heart attack which terminated the proceedings.
Election promises of 1 million houses in 5 years
The housing needs of people with disabilities were, of course, only a sub-set of the limitless demands being made of the ANC-lead government as it came to power in 1994. Housing was also an election promise: "One million houses within five years." It was a promise much ridiculed at the time, for example, in a cartoon showing a gaping hole in a Johannesburg highway, caused by a house miraculously fallen from heaven.
A Department of Housing White Paper, adopted in late 1994, transformed this promise into public policy. The declared goal of the Government of National Unity was to increase housing's share in the total state budget to five percent and to increase housing delivery on a sustainable basis to a peak level of 338 000 units per annum, within a five year period, to reach the target of one million houses in five years.
The sceptics, it would seem, have been put to shame. The total number of houses built from 1 April 1994 to 31 March 2000 was 997 552. By September 2002 the houses completed or under construction had risen to 1 444 932. While complaints about "matchbox houses" - in reference to size and design - are likely to continue, the housing of hundreds, and potentially thousands, of disabled persons and their families is a tangible achievement of democratic government.
And I would argue that the new kind of activism, advocated by Deon Rezant and his "brothers and sisters" in faith, has much to do with it. It is an activism that is persistent, insistent, and hopeful. It is an activism that says: "Let's take hands and get things done."
Unfamiliar words and abbreviations used in this article
Flat = apartment
Gauteng: = one of the nine provinces of South Africa
Combi = a mini-bus
SANCB = South African National Council for the Blind
|
