Mark Gevisser visits Soweto’s Mzimhlope Hostel and finds the beginnings of a new political tolerance — thanks to two extraordinary women
IF Rita Tandy and Nonhlanhla Masondo were seen together a mere few months ago, both would have been in mortal danger. You wouldn’t know that now if you see the two women meandering together through the dense hinterland of Soweto’s Mzimhlope Hostel.
Tandy, an outspoken ANC supporter, is a Soweto shop owner who runs a creche in Orlando West. Masondo is a resident of Mzimhlope and a teacher at the hostel school set up by the Inkatha Freedom Party in 1992, when it was not safe for hostel dwellers to send their children into the township.
Together, in the glare of sceptical eyes on both sides, they are attempting to bring the township and the hostel dwellers back together again — by starting a creche and a clinic in the hostel and by involving hostel and township women in the project.
Watching Tandy in the hostel, walking with Masondo and exchanging backslapping ANC-IFP rivalry with the local heavies, one sees the tentative beginnings of a culture of political tolerance. Watching Masondo at Tandy’s Orlando West creche, laughing with the other teachers, one sees the beginnings of what Tandy recalls as “the old days, when there was an easy relationship between the hostel and the township”.
Imagine a whole township distilled down to Lilliputian proportions, but still with life-sized people and problems: such is Mzimhlope. It glowers beneath a mine dump, row upon row of concrete-and-tin barracks in a windswept sea of dust and waste and people. Almost a decade ago, the hostel was transformed into “family units” — each the size of an average suburban bathroom — and is now home to more than 16 000 people.
Over the past four years, as IFP/ANC tensions escalated, these people pulled tighter into themselves. Many had friends and relatives in Soweto, and relied on the township for basic services — schooling, clinics, shops. But, beleaguered and disoriented, they severed all ties with the township. The war between the ANC and the IFP turned Mzimhlope into another country; a hermetic city-state within Soweto, tightly controlled by the IFP-aligned indunas.
For 16 000 people there is a half-built, unusable clinic and a row of barracks approximating a school. With no textbooks to aid her, Masondo teaches 24 children crammed knee-to-back in a tiny classroom with a black-painted section of wall for a chalkboard. All seven teachers are volunteers, and none of the others is even qualified to teach.
The school, which has 240 pupils, is unregistered — ignored by the Department of Education and Training and the IFP. Hostel infighting between IFP councillors and indunas has only worsened the situation. The school was started by the councillors – – many of whom have since fled or been killed – – and the indunas want nothing to do with it.
Masondo and Tandy are single parents; headstrong, independent women in their mid-30s. Neither is interested in waiting for the men to come up with solutions.
Masondo, who left her husband in Durban in 1990 and came to Johannesburg, says: “It’s the men who make war and when they do, it’s the women who suffer. Here in the hostel, women have no power. The men make all the decisions. But we have to grab some power, because only then can we make peace.”
The two women met, appropriately enough, during South Africa’s exhilarating moment of peace, the April elections, when both worked at the Mzimhlope polling station.
When Tandy volunteered to staff the station, her friends thought she was suicidal. And she admits to some fear when she first entered the compound. Hostels, after all, had become mythical hells — the dens of savage killers — for township residents.
“One lady kept on following me as I was setting up the polling station,” she recalls. “And even though it all seemed friendly, one was still a bit anxious. Eventually I turned around and confronted her. She said: ‘It’s just because it is so nice to see people coming in from the townships. You are not treating us like animals and running away from us. We have friends in the township and things to buy there. Now that you’ve come we don’t need to fear any more’.”
Tandy decided there and then that she would continue working in Mzimhlope and started casting about for women to help her. On election day, Masondo was bringing hostel dwellers to the station to vote and, recalls Tandy with a laugh: “I did not like her one bit. She had this stuck-up face, real IFP. But I could see she was doing the work and the others were following her. So I knew she was the one.”
But one of Tandy’s biggest surprises was discovering that, while Mzimhlope was clearly IFP territory, it was by no means a war camp of IFP soldiers. “I was amazed to see a community, with families, with men, women and children, many of whom were not even Inkatha supporters.”
One of the reasons she wanted so badly to go to the hostel was that “I had seen how brutal hostel women could be. When they fight they chop you up just like any man. And it worried me that women could be so brutal. But once I went there, I realised why. I saw how they were following the leadership and protecting themselves. I realised that if I had to live in these conditions, I too could become brutal. Anyone could.”
Masondo is adamant that, as soon as she can afford to, she will move out. But in the meanwhile she has a roof over her head and, as a single woman, she feels safe. Unlike Tandy, who would never dare to walk around Soweto’s crime-ridden streets after nightfall, she feels free to roam the hostel’s narrow and dusty alleyways.
“It’s a mixed blessing, this traditional Zulu control,” says Masondo. “On the one hand, women are treated like children, with no power or authority. But on the other, it means you are looked after.”
Masondo lives alone in a tiny “family unit”. There’s no running water and three toilets must serve 160 people. Even in the middle of a weekday, the hostel’s passageways are buzzing with life. Few of these migrant labourers are lucky enough to find work. The men lounge about outside the strip of shops or the perpetually open shebeens, but the women are industrious, setting up a makeshift butchery in the windswept central square, tending a few dusty heads of cabbage growing in the dirt outside their tiny homes, selling produce door to door.
Now, more quickly than their spouses, these women are beginning to reintegrate into township life. One of Masondo’s colleagues at the school, Primrose Magubane, says: “We can sleep safe at night now. The war seems to be over. I have even started going back to the township to shop. But I’m holding my breath. I keep thinking this cannot last.”
Indications are that it might not: anger and hostility run deep. “That is why we have to start doing something now” says Tandy. “We can’t wait for the government’s five-year plan. It can’t make peace between our communities. We have to do it ourselves.”