FERIAL HAFFAJEE
TAKING STOCK
Lazarus Madiseng proffered the fruit of democracy. A prickly pear, it is sweet and juicy. The assignment: to find out about the life of ordinary South Africans since 1994, when change came to this land.
They don’t come a lot more ordinary than Madiseng – a kindly grandfather who after a life of wandering has settled in a village near KwaMahlanga. It served once as the incongruous capital of the KwaNdebele homeland: glass and brick buildings looming from nowhere in a very rural landscape. These have now been appropriated by civil servants who administer the water projects which first piped water to Madiseng’s plot in 1996.
“I was very happy,” he says. “We went to a hardware [store] in Pretoria to buy the material and then I made the garden.” He points out his mielie field and warns us not to trample the pumpkins and watermelons that grow underfoot. The gardener has coaxed much from the earth since he got water – grenadillas, guavas, grapes, paw-paws, naartjies and mangoes.
For an urban being whose water has always come on tap, it’s awesome to see how much water can change a rural life. Madiseng sells his fruit. He also runs a poultry business which employs four women, and sells his chickens for R16 to R18. If his garden is his primary business, then the furry chicks make up the downstream industry that water has enabled. “If there’s no water, you can’t have chickens because they drink a lot and you must have water to clean the place.”
Jane Madiseng is as effusive as her husband is quiet. The bespectacled aunty credits the changes in her life to “that Mandela. I’ve got water, electricity and a stove there in my kitchen. I think I’ve got it all.”
Having it all is a rough row of rooms that serve as home while her husband puts the finishing touches to the dream house he’s building in the front. The fridge, freezer and maze of wires strung through the roof beams (there is no ceiling) are testimony to life with power and now water. Prosperity and pride are in the pink and white doilies, a television and a dining room set made from good wood.
These ring the changes in the lives of this ordinary South African family with a history of hardship. “We were drinking water with the donkeys and pigs,” says Jane Madiseng.
Police on a pass raid broke into Lazarus Madiseng’s room and pulled the blankets from him and his sleeping wife. “We were naked,” he says, his voice quivering with anger that hasn’t receded into deep memory.
Palpable change is easy to see. But how do you assess whether change has returned dignity? “These days at the hospital they [the white clerks] say `Ma’m Madiseng’. Not `Jane’. Not `kaffermeid’. `Ma’m Madiseng.'”
The couple has reached their zenith of change but has big dreams for their grandson, Tsepo. “I want this small one to live like an umlungu [whitey],” says Lazarus Madiseng.
Enlivened, we push on in this corner of Africa, tracking transformation. New pylons line the pot-holed roads. A water affairs official points out reservoirs and tanks. We get to the home of the woman who, among the agents of delivery, has become known as “the three-millionth recipient”.
Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry Kader Asmal has trumpeted every millionth person to receive water. The person is presented as an everyman (or everywoman: Lena Mtsweni is poor, black, female and a single parent) and their accession to the world of the watered is heralded.
Mtsweni’s turn came in the middle of January when Deputy President Thabo Mbeki and a host of other dignitaries pitched en masse to drink in her yard. The tap is a modest affair under a tree: rickety and quite small.
The happy-go-lucky Mtsweni is a vendor who gets up at 3am every morning to leave 40 minutes later for Pretoria where she sells vetkoek, coffee and other food. It’s a hard life made easier with access to running water. She can take a nap in the afternoon and do the washing at her leisure.
The power of water and electricity is there to see in home after home. It has a domino effect: small businesses, more leisure time, children are at school instead of lugging drums of water about. But the more you look the more the modesty of the gain is underscored by what is missing.
Despite Mtsweni’s best efforts, flies still fill the pit toilet and the stench remains overpowering. South Africa cannot afford a decent sewerage system – overwhelming evidence that in most parts this country is not so much an emerging market as it is an underdeveloped economy.
Vlaklaagte 2, the village where Mtsweni lives, was once at the epicentre of the battles with the tinpot dictators of KwaNdebele whose ruthless mbhokodo (vigilantes) unleashed terror on the villages.
Ten years on, peace has returned. The shock troops of yesterday – the activists from African National Congress-aligned organisations – are now councillors engaged with governance. They’ve exchanged their “vivas” for development jargon like “water reticulation” and “pipe networks”. Where they once worked to make KwaNdebele ungovernable, now they struggle to govern.
Councillor Hendrik Budha rails against people who connect water illegally. Civic member Wally Ndlovu is running a programme to improve the matric pass rate in between trying to get identity documents to people so that they can register to vote.
In a room of the house his mother built herself, Jabu Mtsweni talks about change: “There has been a shift in power.It’s slow but it’s there. If you ask someone who’s not involved, they’ll tell you nothing has changed.” If there is growing apathy, as opinion polls and a slow registration drive indicate, Mtsweni blames it on the legacy of the homeland system.
Unemployment is rife because without homeland subsidies the factories have closed. Vlaklaagte suffers a brain drain to the cities. “If someone leaves home at 3.40am and gets home at 8pm, he’s got no life. As long as … job opportunities are not here, it’s going to be very difficult,” he says.
We leave the activists debating the future as children outside drink water from The Tap and we head deeper into rural South Africa. The tarred roads get worse and then they end. Cellphone towers are all that’s left of the urban economy as we climb steep dirt roads to Moutse, an area of 47 villages and 260 000 villagers in Mpumalanga.
At the entrance, Moutse’s regal deputy mayor Martha Matlala waits for us – cellphone in hand – and takes us back to the house she built with the help of her husband, five sons and the women who made the bricks.
Matlala was a domestic worker in Johannesburg’s suburbs through the Seventies and Eighties. She cut her struggle teeth at the Alexandra women’s hostel where she lived, and returned to Moutse in 1987 where she rapidly became a huge pain in the butt to the homeland’s traditional leaders. With people like Lydia Kompe, they started the Rural Women’s Movement. Moutse became a focal point of the anti-apartheid struggle.
Ten years on, the changes have arrived more slowly because there was so much more to do. For its absolute refusal to partake in any homeland activity, Moutse was punished with underdevelopment. Today it still has only one tarred access road. When it rains, entire villages are cut off.
Moutse has electricity but no running water and Matlala has a bathroom with no bath or taps. Water for cooking, bathing, brushing your teeth and cleaning is collected in steel buckets and plastic baths outside.
Local government, of which Matlala is a representative, is at the coalface of constituent anger with the ANC. She was recently on the opposite end of a march when for the first time she had to receive a petition for water. “Sometimes it hurts when people do to you what you used to do to others. You get a taste of your own medicine,” she says with a wry smile.
This ANC stronghold (the party got 100% of the seats in the 1995 local election) faces competition from the United Democratic Movement, the Democratic Party and the New National Party. Meanwhile, it’s government by cellphone in Moutse. Matlala takes us to the mayor’s residence while she directs registration by remote control.
Dr Conrad Tsiane’s compound is filled with patients sitting in the January sun. The mayor is a popular traditional doctor. His curative powers have brought him great material gain: a Mercedes and a BMW stand in the yard while his home has every imaginable luxury. His timetable for the year includes trips anywhere in the world where Bafana Bafana heads.
Tsiane reels off the figures of delivery: R20-million has just been voted to Moutse for bulk water supply, sewerage, roads and taxi ranks. The figures are not remarkable. Once funds eventually get to local government, there’s little left. What is remarkable is the sense that this is government of the people – that the biggest change has been the exchange of homeland shysters for legitimate local leaders.
Tsiane, a “crowd-puller”, clearly isn’t in government for the money. Mayors receive only a small allowance and he makes at least R 4 000 a day with his practice. He enjoys rubbing shoulders with power as the pictures of the mayor with Mbeki and Mpumalanga Premier Matthews Phosa show.
But mostly Tsiane and Matlala enjoy leading. Committed to building, they have pulled off quite a coup for a troubled province like Mpumalanga.
“I wanted to kill the culture of non- payment,” says Tsiane. Moutse residents now pay for water they don’t yet have: they’ve got R20 000 to buy the small things the community needs for the day water arrives.