It is government policy to redevelop and clean up hostels monuments to the apartheid-inspired migrant-labour system and a focus for township violence but many obstacles remain. Thabo Mohlala reports
“Ever since the violence stopped, a new sense of maturity and normalcy has set in here. I am very excited about it. I’m free now to visit the township any time I like and people from the township also feel secure to come visit our hostel.”
These are the words of Bonginkosi Majozi (44), a resident of Buyafuthe, on the once-notorious Khumalo Street in Thokoza on the East Rand. His views sum up a new spirit of camaraderie among residents in the area.
In an outbreak of internecine violence in the 1990s, Khumalo Street witnessed a wave of killings, in violence between hostel dwellers on one side of Khumalo Street and township residents on the other side. To obliterate that memory and in keeping with the new spirit that pervades the area now, the street has just been re-christened Masakhane, a Zulu word meaning “let’s build together”. People are determined to start anew and knuckle down to some real business that no longer caters to sectoral interests but engages the broader community. Kae Kae Bathopele, a community-driven project, is concrete and living testimony to this.
Formed in 1995 by township resident Joseph Ramollo and hostel resident Fundethule Malinga, the organisation succeeded in uniting residents from both constituencies. It focuses on basic activities such as tree-planting and traditional dances.
“The idea was to stabilise the area and build trust and confidence among the residents. We are now looking at self-empowerment projects where people are given skills to be on their own,” Ramollo says.
They have approached the corporate sector with some success for funds and jobs for newly trained members. Ramollo says they consciously steer clear of politics as it has the potential to antagonise people.
But there is a general fear that bad days could soon return if the slow pace with which the government is implementing the redevelopment programme is anything to go by. Most hostels still look their typical selves social disasters. Grime, hunger, despondency and decrepit structures still remain part of life in a majority of the hostels around Gauteng. The situation in Kwesine and Buyafuthe hostels on Khumalo Street the two hostels that were flashpoints of bloody violence in the early 1990s bears eloquent testimony to this.
Buyafuthe a Zulu word meaning, “come back again” is one of those areas yet to benefit from the government’s grand redevelopment programme. Its infrastructural neglect is striking: the ubiquitous greying, weather-beaten walls with peeling paint; a lack of fencing; broken and sooty windowpanes and rickety and rusty staircases. Puddles of water from the leaking pipes combined with the litter and dirt emit a choking stench.
This desperate situation is deeply etched on the faces of the residents who look for the most part uninspired and life-weary. The only sign that things have changed, perhaps, are children and their mothers (in the past not allowed to stay in the hostels) who bring cheer to these rather dull, testosterone- and tension-filled environs.
Majozi, who assists in his brother’s spaza shop, has been living here for as long as he can remember. He is one of the people who feels the authorities have neglected them.
“As you can see for yourself, the situation is bad here. The authorities have abandoned us. Toilets are not up to standard and some have stopped functioning,” he says. And where do they get their electricity? “We hot-wired it ourselves. You can imagine how dangerous this is, but then what can we do? We need it.”
Do they pay rent? “No, how can we? We do not get any service here.”
Why is the government’s redevelopment programme taking such a long time? According to Mandla Mathebula, the director of communications in the Department of Housing, the programme “is a very complex” one, as “some of the issues pertaining to it cannot simply be bypassed as this may defeat the very same objective of the programme”.
He reckons that “one of the contributing factors of the slow [rate of] progress is the difficulty in the establishment of local negotiation groups and to reach consensus on all the issues of a redevelopment”.
Has there been any improvement in relations between hostel dwellers and the nearby communities in those areas where the programme has been launched?
Mathebula says although circumstances vary from one community to the other, “the general assessment is that in all the completed projects, relations between hostel dwellers and their surrounding communities have drastically improved”. He cites the Marapong hostel redevelopment project in the Northern Province as a good example of “strategically amalgamating the hostel into the local community”, as inmates who could not be accommodated in the refurbished structures were given alternative shelter in the Reconstruction and Development Programme houses. He says the enmity that used to characterise relations between hostel residents and the neighbouring communities was further defused “as both residents share facilities and other amenities and at times organise joint activities”.
Statistics provided by the Department of Housing show that Gauteng, followed by KwaZulu-Natal and Free State have the highest number of hostels. There are 47 in Gauteng, with only 24 developed, at a cost of R424-million. KwaZulu-Natal follows with 25, 12 developed for R154,1-million and then Free State, with 18 hostels and 16 already redeveloped, costing R55,8-million. The Northern Province has 13 hostels with only two developed, at R32,6-million, while North West has 14, but only three have been refurbished, at a cost of R19,3-million. According to Mathebula, Western Cape has not historically had hostels, while in Mpumlanga units are still under reconstruction and thus figures are not easy to determine. Eastern Cape has 10 hostels with only six redeveloped (figures are not available yet).
Gertrude Mzizi, an Inkatha Freedom Party Gauteng MPL who sits on the housing committee and whose constituency comprises hostel dwellers, claims the project to redevelop hostels never went beyond the commissioning stage. She says there is no “integration” to talk about, as hostels dwellers have always been part of the adjacent communities, adding that “most of them have kids in the townships”.
Mzizi reckons the programme directly affects the interests, needs and requirements of hostel dwellers and as such these are the people who must be highly involved, rather than those township residents who live in houses in the communities. She also said that, although the government should consult people affected by the programme, it should also be decisive in some respect and not consult forever.
The main cause of the delay appears to be the bureaucratic processes. And as Majozi warns, rather ominously: “The hostel redevelopment programme is fantastic but it needs to be accelerated. As it is, due to widespread retrenchments that have seen scores of people losing their houses to banks and the resultant poverty, we have already seen multitudes of people taking shelter here. I am afraid this will lead to serious overcrowding, whose consequences can only be nothing less than catastrophic.”
In its statement reacting to the Johannesburg Metropolitan Council’s removal earlier this month of families from Mandelaville in Diepkloof to Durban Deep hostels, the Human Rights Committee points out the appalling and glaring sub-human conditions under which the removed families are forced to live, the violation of the families’ fundamental human rights and also the callousness of the authorities in handling the matter.
The committee says: “There seems to be a total lack of planning by the local government. Overcrowding has led to many families having to share limited and, in some cases, non-functioning ablution facilities. Several families are forced to share space and there is a lack of privacy; for example, communal showers and toilets, which service both men and women, have no doors”.
The committee feels the removal has further disrupted children’s education as no provision has been made for those who used to attend schools in Soweto. “It is shameful that people’s lives are put on the line at the whim of bureaucrats who clearly have no empathy with South Africa’s downtrodden.”