Swapna Prabhakaran
The tale of Cato Manor has always been a tragedy – an old South African tale haunted by the horror of forced removals and the ghosts of families split asunder.
Old men remember it with nostalgia as a once special place and a community which was crushed to nothing under the weight of the Group Areas Act.
Now the new government is trying to reshape the tale, hoping to change the ending with new words like empowerment and development. Pre-election dreams of land, housing, clean water, electricity, schools, clinics, roads and parks are now a reality for almost 60 000 people who live in Cato Manor.
And if all goes well, a further 100 000 people will be given the same services within a few more years.
The Cato Manor Development Agency (CMDA) started off as a small unit with only five staff members. Thanks to an increase of funds from the government and abroad, 35 people now work there full-time, and in their hands lies the huge task of co-ordinating delivery of services to the poorest of the poor in Durban.
Delivery has been happening here at a tremendous pace, massive infrastructure for roads, electricity and water has already been put in place, and thousands of houses have been built.
The scheme has recently become a presidential lead project, the star of the show in the government’s Reconstruction and Development Programme, and has attracted massive donations from the European Union. Unfortunately, development has happened faster in some parts of Cato Manor than in others.
A member of the CMDA and a resident of Cato Manor, Mazwi Ngcobo, says while areas like Wiggins and Chesterville are rapidly becoming fully serviced, other areas lag sadly behind. Ngcobo believes community involvement is the key to speeding up delivery.
“In Wiggins, for example, the community leadership has been strong in getting people together, getting things done. Now they have a clinic. The people of Wiggins were not the first to move to this place, but have managed to provide homes for their constituents the fastest,” Ngcobo says.
In other areas residents are still waiting for services, and while they wait they live as squatters on tiny bits of land that they call home.
Lydia Nhlangulela, a 37-year-old divorcee, lives in a mud shack that she and her sister built in 1994. Nhlangulela is a sangoma, and she used to practise her craft from the shack, but she has been unemployed for months.
“My house is cold and when it rains it leaks and the mud walls fall down,” she says. “I don’t have electricity, I cook on a paraffin stove and buy my fresh water from the water bailiff, just up the road. He charges 20 cents for a five-litre drum of water.”
Nhlangulela has two children, but they live with her parents on a farm on the North Coast. “Once they finish building the new school in Cato Manor [due to open doors next January], then my children will come and live with me here,” she says. “The CMDA has also promised me a house and I still have hope.”
Until a few years ago, Cato Manor was a blank spot on Durban’s map, undeveloped empty land separating the city centre from the plush residential area of Westville.
Now houses and tarred roads stretch from the University of Natal in the east to the Pavillion Shopping Centre in the west, making the city easily accessible to dozens of previously isolated suburbs. Plans to build an off-ramp connecting Cato Manor to the N2 highway are also in the pipeline.
For many residents, the government’s housing subsidy has become a stepping stone to achieving a dream house. They use half the subsidy to buy land, and the other half to buy building materials, and then they build the house themselves. They call it the “fast track” and it cuts out the costs of hiring housing contractors.
Moses Ntuli went on the fast track in 1996, and today he is building extensions to his house. “I’m putting on an extra two bedrooms and I hope to build a garage and a verandah one day,” he says. Ntuli and his neighbours pooled their efforts and built their houses together, sharing labour and effort. “This is much better than the shack where I used to live before. Here I have electricity, water and even a telephone,” Ntuli says.
The new Cato Manor has had its share of teething troubles, not least of which is the problem of illegal invasions. In the early 1990s, the House of Delegates built 800 houses in Cato Manor. The houses – modest two- bedroomed affairs – were intended for Indian families who had been evicted from their land decades ago under the Group Areas Act.
But black families from Chesterville invaded them and refused to budge. Ngcobo’s family was one of them, and he says his family invaded because they felt entitled.
“There was a feeling that those houses should not be reserved for one racial group at a time when the whole country was moving towards non-racialism,” Ngcobo says. “My family moved in and then replacement houses were built for those who were still waiting about 18 months later.”
Soon after the elections, unscrupulous warlords invaded the empty stretches of land in the area. They divided it up and sold it in lots to naive individuals and families who believed they were legally buying land in the new South Africa. Once they had made their fortune, these opportunists vanished, leaving behind chaos and overcrowded settlements.
One such area is Cato Crest – a highly visible eyesore close to some of Durban’s most elegant neighbourhoods. The CMDA is attempting an in situ upgrade of the area, to displace as few residents as possible while still providing roads and services.
Many of the present-day residents do not know the details of the forced removals of the 1950s. For them, Cato Manor is just land that has been lying empty and is now rightly theirs. As a result, there is a fierce sense of community pride, even in the areas which are technically still squatter camps.