Ferial Haffajee
The title might be A Grave Called Home if the homeless who make their shelters in city graveyards could sell their script to a movie-maker.
Their stories range from the macabre and heart-wrenching to the downright comical – like that of the squatter couple who made headlines last week when they were spotted making love on the grave of a bishop in Port Elizabeth’s Zwide township.
In Johannesburg, the homeless begin vaulting the tall grass hedges to get into the Braamfontein cemetery when night falls. Security is tight by day, and all that gives away the presence of the living are ashes of graveside fires and the odd cardboard box.
The graveyard tenants are among the shock troops of squatter leaders who are forcing themselves on to the political landscape. Around the country, wily leaders plan invasions in resistance to current policy which demands that they take their place on long housing lists which often mean a wait of many years.
Often their strategy pays off and they get services and sites long before those who remain on the list. Many of these communities then save and work together to build their own homes, prompting housing specialists to suggest the government needs to recognise these organisations and find a way to provide housing for them.
African National Congress members at local and provincial government level sit with a political hot potato: the long wait for housing and forced removals risks losing them vital grassroots votes, and opposition parties are quick to exploit the anger this causes. On the other hand, they also need to attract investors to their cities and must show themselves capable of dealing with illegal occupation.
Meanwhile, people are shacking up under city bridges and in alley-ways dividing factories. Most city parks have become home to entire families and children get dressed for school in the public toilets.
In Jack Mincer Park, across the road from the ANC’s former Shell House headquarters in Johannesburg, Ma Khumalo, dressed in worn takkies and layers of hand-me-downs, tells her story.
Two weeks ago, the tractors moved in on Jurassic Park – as its residents have baptised the area – to carry out a policy many thought was extinct. It was launched by an ANC-led council desperate to clear the park for businesses which are planning to build a hotel and an orderly taxi rank in the denuded east of the city.
In the middle of a cold snap, Ma Khumalo, her neighbours and their belongings were loaded on to a truck and removed to Weiler’s Farm, about 40km away. For her, it may as well have been on the other side of the world.
“That place … haai! That suffering place. There’s nothing. Not even rubbish,” she says.
Scores of people stole train trips back to town from Weiler’s Farm. But Ma Khumalo claims she walked back. “I travelled four days. Then I saw that thing,” she says, pointing to Hillbrow Tower, which stands sentinel over Jack Mincer Park.
The city streets provide a living. They earn money parking cars (up to R30 on a good day), picking pockets, washing taxis (between R5 and R10 a taxi), collecting cans and newspapers for recycling (R60 a load) and guarding goods for hawkers who pay them with over-ripe fruits and vegetables that will not sell.
Around the country, many people who have been given housing sites out of town sell their sites for under R1 000 and move back to the cities. City life provides an economic base for the poor that is just not available in many of the serviced sites or housing developments to which they are moved.
Housing policy, with its emphasis on ownership, does not take account of squatters who cannot afford to buy a house, who do not want to own a house, or who haven’t yet decided where they will settle. “We need a housing policy that creates a greater number of housing solutions,” says Warren Smit, a researcher with the Built Environment Support Group.
In the absence of cheap rental stock in town, the owners of derelict warehouses have cottoned on to a way of making money.
In a two-floor brick building, two handymen armed with plywood walls, thin doors, a lock and a couple of nails hastily subdivide a rough concrete warehouse into tiny rooms. Each space is rented out for R250, and demand is high.
Gutted of its infrastructure, this building, with its views over Johannesburg’s high-rise office blocks, has become home to people like Sixtus Maduna. After negotiating with a middleman, he moved his six plastic bags of possessions from a nearby park into the building earlier this week. He collects water from a tap and lights his space with candles. He doesn’t cook, but scrounges from the city bins.
While this building’s owner knows what’s happening, many city landlords do not know that their empty buildings have become lucrative squats.
Entrepreneurs are profiteering as local and provincial authorities around the country struggle to overcome housing hurdles. Local government is still in the throes of being set up, the housing waiting list system remains mired in an apartheid past and land is not being released fast enough.
Estimates suggest there are about 30- million hectares of available state land and that one million of these could house all the country’s squatters.
“The procedures are not fast enough. Most land is owned by local authorities, but they will not release it until services are provided on the land,” says Clive Felix, the director of the Urban Services Group in Port Elizabeth.
But the flip side of the invasion coin is that a land mafia like that which rules Brazil’s squatter settlements and those in other parts of Africa has taken hold here too. It is a mafia with networks than can organise 5 000 people on to a piece of land in a fortnight.
The organisers charge an average of R80 a month per site: R50 rental, R20 protection money and R10 for a legal defence fund if the authorities attempt to remove people.
Often this mafia acquires legitimacy through the resources it controls and by forming itself into one sort of residents’ organisation or another. In many areas, councillors have begun to ally themselves with the mafia in order to win the support of the residents.
In Gauteng, the government has formed a three-pronged strategy to cut the mafia’s power base, and Carien Engelbrecht, the chief director for land and asset management, says invasions are slowing down.
In other provinces, desperate officials are looking to copy Gauteng’s plans for rapid land release, upgrading and expanding existing informal settlements and providing temporary shelter for desperate people like Ma Khumalo.
Says Engelbrecht: “Invasions feed off desperation. Perhaps now people can see `government is going to get to me’.”