working
Connie Selebogo and Nadine Hutton
Past grimy braziers belching gray smoke, a gust of wind reveals a group of women in the technicolor splendor of their swibelana, or traditional Shangaan dress. Cocooned in smoke, they are still vabombile – dressed to kill.
This is no fashion show. It’s Johannesburg at 7am, and nestled between towering billboards selling a better life, a group of mielie sellers – homeless women, township dwellers, women newly arrived from rural areas – have gathered to light their fires on the pavement next to the Bree Street taxi rank.
Commuters scurrying to work are swallowed and spat out – their eyes tearing, sinuses burning and chests heaving as they pass the smoking braziers.
For Florence Kubayi, it’s just the beginning of another day selling mielies to commuters at Park Station.
As the smoke dies, two women help her to lift the heavy brazier on to her head and begin her journey to the station. Negotiating the rush-hour traffic, she performs a delicate dance around milling pedestrians. Even the most cynical of city dwellers crane their heads back for a second look as tongues of flame lap at red-hot coals.
Kubayi’s pitch is a good one. There are as many places to braai and sell mielies – at R2 each – as there are street corners. For these women, the braaied mielie trade is a reliable business and travelling long distances to buy and sell is routine. They hire transport every week to take them to the farms where they buy mielies to sell.
“I started selling mielies at an early stage.This is one of my cultural activities,” jokes Agnes Manganye. Then she becomes more serious. “We are told that a woman should not stay at home while her children are starving,” she says.
She grew up in a rural area near Tzaneen. Since she arrived in Johannesburg in 1994, she has always been dedicated to this job and she feels that it is a fair industry for disadvantaged people. She left her children in Tzaneen with their grandmother. “The city is not a place for children,” she says.
“Jobs are scarce and are often temporary or part-time,” she says. There are few benefits and one may be fired at any point – whereas selling mielies, which she has done since her arrival, is a good way for disadvantaged people to make a living.
It’s a reasonable living, too – sometimes they are able to make as much as R200 a day.
However, the women often have quarrels with the police and the Johannesburg municipality, whose officials remind them that hawkers can’t just set up shop anywhere they like. But one still finds them there. “When they ask us to leave, we ask them to give us money to take care of our kids,” says Nellie Maringa.
Maringa has four children whom she raises with the money she gets from selling on the streets. When mielie season is over she returns home to her Northern Province village to sell fruit and vegetables.
Some of the mielie women have followed husbands who have come here to look for work on the mines; some have come on their own, and hire rooms in townships. They leave their children with relatives, and send money home; they say Johannesburg is not a place to rear a family.
The sellers pay R10 to R15 every week to security guards who keep an eye on their stock and have also given gainful employment to an old man staying in the shack next to their fire area. Amos Shongwe helps make the fires and cleans up afterwards, for the princely sum of 50c twice a week from each of them.
Who owes Shongwe his twice-weekly stipend makes for friendly arguing among the women – for the taxi rank is not just a workplace for the mielie women. It is a place to gossip, to laugh, to catch up with the lives of their little community.