While 1996 was in many ways the year of big business, there is still space in South Africa for the little person …
David Shapshak
AT the end of every working day, as commuters stream out of Johannesburg’s cit y centre, Sewlinali Ngwenya packs pots of face cream and bottles of washing-up liquid into a trolley and wheels it around the corner to a very unusual “ware
house”.
Each night, over 300 pavement hawkers, including Ngwenya, move their stands, t rolleys and red-white-and-blue striped oversized plastic bags to a small publi c park for safe-keeping.
The entrepreneur behind this alfresco warehouse is David Madzivhandila, who ha s set up shop near the leaping springboks – donated to the city in 1960 by Har ry Oppenheimer in memory of his father, Sir Ernest – in Pioneer Park, built to honour the men who came to make their fortunes on the Witwatersrand goldfield
s.
Madzivhandila’s nightly collection of bundles is a jumbled mass of hats, boxes of fruit, sacks of potatoes, piles of bananas, cosmetics, cigarettes, sweets
and colourful plates on which to display them – all the necessities of life, f rom peanuts to overcoats, that office workers buy off the street.
Madzivhandila says he knows what goods belong to whom. “I just know them by th eir faces and their bags,” he says. “I can’t tell you how I know.”
Hawkers pay R1 a day for trolleys or R2 a week for bags stored overnight. Secu rity is tight. Madzivhandila employs six young men who guard the merchandise a nd, for many hawkers, collect and deliver it.
Madzivhandila lives in his trolley island, much like a childhood hideaway, and each morning supervises the collection of trolleys and bags. He hit on the id
ea while doing painting work in a nearby building. He would park hawkers’ ware s in the unused basement but had to quit when the irate owner of the building discovered what he was up to.
After a year of parking haphazardly tied-up trolleys on a stretch of pavement – which the Traffic Department objected to as it reduced visibility – Madzivha ndila decided to try out his enterprise in the park.
For the hawkers it is an essential aid. “It’s safe. It’s the only place we can keep stuff,” said Jeffrey Dikhie, who has been keeping his entire stand and i
ts contents with Madzivhandila for a year and a half.
“If it weren’t for David,” added Ngwenya, “I would have to take my stuff home every day – and pay for it on the taxi, too.”