Sibusiso Nxumalo
IT’S a chill Monday morning in a coal-yard in White City, Soweto. Oupa Nsibande, his face black with soot, is among a group of men gathered around a flaming inner-tyre they are burning for warmth. Though it’s only 6.30am, they’re swigging in turn from a carton of sorghum beer.
The yard is dominated by black mounds of coal; bits of it crunch underfoot. Horses with ragged coats stand crowded in small pens. Nsibande (22) lives in a shack behind his parents’ house in White City. He spends his days filling sacks with coal which are then sold to Soweto residents, delivered door-to-door by horse-drawn carts.
The soot covering his face and hands makes him look older than he is. Like the men standing with him, he is dressed in a heavy, ragged coat that’s also blackened by coal dust.
He gestures at a powder-blue luxury German sedan parked across the road. In its warm interior sits the coal-yard’s owner, Phil Mkhwanazi. Says Nsibande: “We buy coal from him at R10,50 a sack and we sell it off at R17,50.”
Mkhwanazi, dressed in a woollen jacket and cap, tells how he’s owned the coal-yard for “six or seven years”. In the summer he says, he uses the coal-yard to store building sand. “The coal just sits there and gets rained on. At least those coal-yard owners who sell in Orange Farm squatter camp always have business”.
A caravan of horse-drawn carts clip-clops into the yard. The horses’ scrawny appearance causes one man to chide the owner: “You don’t feed your horses _ that is why they die off.” The man explains that traders can only afford to buy small amounts of food for their animals. The horses mostly have to graze on grass verges and dump sites.
Enos Mafokate is head of the SPCA’s Soweto horse unit. Mafokate implements a programme of education and assistance for the traders, and is finally seeing his efforts bear fruit.
The number of horses treated at the SPCA clinic _ mostly for eating the plastic bags which litter the landscape and can block their intestines _ has dropped by two-thirds in a year. And the condition of horses has improved generally. “They are not as thin as they were last winter,” he says.
His unit runs a feeding scheme, dispensing free vitamin tablets and selling food _ cubes, molasses and bran _ to owners at a reduced price. The food is free for those who can’t pay, but it was quite a job persuading owners to take advantage of the scheme, says Mafokate.
Horses are also given a course of vaccinations against African horse sickness. But for the shots to be effective, a horse must be rested _ something the coal-traders can ill afford. The unit’s staff persevere, however, visiting coal-yards regularly to persuade their owners to give the horses a break.