Tree-lined avenues walled with six-foot stockades and electric fencing in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs hide lush green gardens. What many are not aware of is that a network of Malawian green fingers tends the city’s greenbelt.
Dennis Nyirenda is sweeping the driveway in a garden in Parktown North on an overcast Saturday morning. The garden is small, but a collection of colour lines the driveway. Ivy covers the brick walls and potted plants line the entrance to the house.
“The fragile ones, those are impatiens, the others are roses, geraniums and ivy,” says Nyirenda pointing out his charges. He starts his day by sweeping the driveway alongside which are the flowers, then he mows the lawn and maintains the beds. “It takes me the whole day to pull the weeds.”
Nyirenda hails from the north of Malawi and moved to South Africa in 1995, travelling down the continent by bus. “It took two full days; we travelled day and night and were delayed by borders. It is a hassle.”
His wife joined him in Johannesburg two months ago while his four children live in Malawi with his mother. “She is looking for a job, she can’t find it.”
Nyirenda has dreams that his eldest, now in secondary school, will go to university, “I work hard for them, but it’s expensive”. He sends home as much as he can as often as possible, at the moment R300 every two months. In Malawi, someone doing his job would earn between R100 and R150 a month. He earns about R70 a day in South Africa, but finds the cost of living here expensive.
“I don’t earn much here.” His wife is battling to find a job, together they stay in Kew and he works as far away as Linden, travelling by taxi. “Life here is better than Malawi, it’s a poor country compared to South Africa.” When he arrived in South Africa he found work as a gardener for a company in Rivonia and was later promoted to office cleaner and then to an administrative clerk. “The company sent me to school; I used to go to Rosebank Damelin.”
At Damelin he qualified as a bookkeeper. “I used to be a part-time bookkeeper — when they had work for me I did work for them.” When he wasn’t keeping the books he was doing the filing, the banking and delivering messages. When the company in Rivonia went bankrupt, he went in search of another job. “Any job, being a foreigner I don’t have a choice.”
He doesn’t find conversing in a different language difficult. Initially he used to work in a white-dominated environment but now he is learning Zulu. “Some words are the same, there is no problem conversing.”
Nyirenda’s youngest brother was sent to Rhodes University to study on a scholarship from the Malawian government and has since relocated to South Africa. “There is a community of Malawians [in Johannesburg], most work as gardeners, messengers, housekeepers. A few are professional, my brother is a pharmacist,” he says.
Relocating is an expensive process. “Somebody who comes here must have good cash.” It cost Nyirenda 4 000 Malawian kwacha (about R300) to relocate. “To find it, it’s not easy.”
“Most of the people like Malawian gardeners, we’re friendly and don’t like crime, we’re hard workers but it’s expensive and a long process to become legal,” Nyirenda says.
The Malawian greenbelt operates by grapevine. Gardeners pass on work to each other and even advertise in local knock-and-drop newspapers. Brothers often teach each other the trade.
Nyirenda has been employed by James Bamford for about 14 months — he found the job after being recommended by a previous gardener. Bamford says that Nyirenda is enterprising and pro-active, not only in his work in the garden, but in his approach to life.
The two men run the garden like a business with daily work plans and updates at morning tea, lunchtime and a round-up at the end of the day.
Samuel Jere arrived in South Africa in 1995 and has worked as a gardener, driver, messenger and petrol pump attendant. He is currently working temporarily as a gardener, which is why he has advertised in the Rosebank Killarney Gazette.
Jere sends as much as he can afford home every two months, to his wife and five-month-old baby who still live in Malawi. It was always his ambition to come to South Africa as he believed he could find better employment here than in Malawi. “I’m very happy to live here. Now I’m satisfied. I’m fulfilling my ambition.”
He says he tries to return to Malawi once a year. After one such visit he lost his job as a petrol pump attendant as he was “late for work, they said I must look for another job”. He went back to Malawi to get a driver’s licence, “now I can drive all over Africa”.
Despite having a driver’s licence, Jere still travels back to Malawi by bus, a long and arduous process that starts with negotiating leave from an employer. Transport is another problem he has to contend with. “A lot of people are going home; I have to fight for passage.” There are Malawians travelling home every day and the trip can cost up to R500, he says.
The shortest route is to travel through Zimbabwe and Mozambique before getting to Malawi, a total of five borders. The trip north takes two full days, travelling day and night, and the bus stops periodically for supplies at shopping centres. “We just carry some food.” While the bus is comfortable to sleep on, Jere sends the majority of his luggage with private people heading north who act as courier companies beforehand as there is only space for hand luggage. “We make sure we send our things first.”
Malawi has a population of 10,5-million people living in 118 500 km2. Its gross domestic product is $1,7-billion and the population grows at a rate of 2% annually, according to information on the World Bank website.
Henry Flint, senior economist of African research at Standard Bank, says Malawians were traditionally employed in the mining sector. “They were regarded as hard workers, word of mouth spread and now you find people doing various jobs. They are employed as gardeners and cooks.”
Malawi is undergoing economic hardship; there is drought and food shortages and the unemployment level is high. “Malawi is not creating many new formal jobs. The economy is agriculture-based, tobacco is the main thing but it can only absorb so many people,” Flint says.