Last week I accompanied a home-based care-worker on a visit to patients in Site C Khayelitsha. It was in the heart of the informal settlement. If she left me there alone I would never have found my way out of the maze of narrow lanes that separates a block of shacks from each other. Everywhere I looked, were unemployed young and older men; many young women were pregnant; and babies of teenagers were cared for by older women. HIV is rife, poverty and hunger palpable.
In one of the shacks, a young man was watching television, and at some point he got up, took seven slices of bread from a packet, and chomped through them simply to fill the hunger in his belly. No butter, no jam, no peanut butter in sight. The urge to give him money to buy something nice was strong.
Yet I knew such a gesture would not make a difference. Amidst all the poverty, dignity radiated from most of the homes. Women beautified their homes against the relentless southeaster blowing tsunamis of sand into the shacks; shimmering pots and glasses adorned the drab cupboards; and sofas had crotchet doilies to protect the armrests. Baby clothes hanging on the lines were colourful and neatly strung. And I suddenly envied shack dwellers for not having washing machines, which reduce most clothes to a dull grey.
Surreptitiously my eyes looked at the structure of the shack; how it had been put together; and how the electricity wires were draped around chaotic and informal structures. Many holes were clearly visible as a result of wear and tear and the attempts of residents to construct airtight spaces, never getting it fully right.
I asked the house-proud owner how she managed to keep her flat dry during the winter rains and her matter-of-fact response crippled me for the rest of the day. "We stay in the community centres and after the rain we come back to fix our floors." Beautiful Novilon covered her floors and I realized that this must have been replaced tens of times over the years in response to the Cape's drenching winters.
As I trudged through those lanes I could envisage what it was like in winter for the inhabitants. Water mixed with sand and in some instances sewage, creates constant puddles of mud. Here proximity is the enemy of the poor as frequent fires raze entire settlements to the ground; one can hear the neighbors breathing.
All my life I have travelled into the coloured and black townships. I have worked in gangster-infested Manenberg; I have taken visitors into Khayelitsha. But this time trudging through the highways and byways of "shackland" to listen to women being counseled, babies weighed, HIV patients tracked, I knew that this was unsustainable; that housing was not so much the problem as it was education, unemployment and job creation.
I know that only huge dollops of political will to transform informal settlements into habitable residential areas will provide hope for the future. The way people succumb to living like this while working in rich South Africa must be the powder keg that will ignite a revolution second to none. There is nothing more soul destroying than witnessing the fatalism poverty breeds.
Leaving Site C I was reminded of Frederick Douglass who so presciently said:" Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe."
It is time for the private sector to come to the party - in a big way.
This article first appeared in Die Burger.
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