Seventeen-year-old Francine Walkenshaw tried to go back to school last year, but gave up when better-dressed pupils jeered at her: ”Why do you live like a squatter? What did you do wrong?”
Francine, her father Casper and her two brothers live in Lochvaal Emfuleni, on the outskirts of Vanderbijlpark on the Sasolburg road. It is one of at least three white squatter camps that have sprouted in the Vaal Triangle.
None of the children who live there have finished school, and Francine, a quiet, pale girl, was forced to drop out in grade eight. Last year she tried to return to the local high school where poor children are subsidised, paying a R50 registration fee and contributing money when they can during the year. After being rejected by the other pupils, she never leaves Lochvaal. She wants company but has no friends. Her dream is to own a pair of Nike takkies and to live somewhere ”restful”.
The camp is a litter of corrugated-iron structures, tents, decrepit caravans, scrap metal, cans, weeds and emaciated mongrels. The people who live there have the glazed, faraway look of sleepwalkers. They rarely wash their clothes, and turn a sullen, taciturn face to the outside world.
A typical white squatter camp is located on a private plot owned by a middle-class Afrikaner or a charity organisation. Usually the landlord lives in a respectable home with the shack settlement mushrooming behind it, hidden from the public eye.
The landlady of Lochvaal Emfuleni is Sally Bruwer, who spends most of the day in green curlers, bellowing orders because her legs can’t carry her enormous bulk.
Forty homeless whites currently live there, but the monthly turnover of residents is much higher, at about 800. Drifters or temporary workers constantly come and go.
Bruwer says the settlement is sustained by donations, usually dropped off by anonymous well-wishers. A communal kitchen offers a daily menu of pap and one spoon of sugar in the morning, and pap and sauce for lunch and supper. There are two long-drop lavatories that are humid and fusty, with used toilet paper lying on the floor.
Francine’s father was once a fitter and turner at Sasol, earning a monthly wage of R4 500. Five years ago he was retrenched with a R100 000 package, but blew it on a pyramid scheme. His wife walked out on him and their children. They moved here three months ago, and live in a rusted caravan and a blue tent. The canvas is rotting.
Casper has stopped looking for work. His last gainful employment was menial labour — bricklaying and digging holes — for R450 a month and his cash reserves are dwindling. No longer alert, he seems unable to fight the dullness that has settled on him.
The Walkenshaws’ neighbour, Hannes Schoeman (44), is mentally ill. He is a filthy six-footer with an obsession with shoes — because, he says, his penniless upbringing forced him to go barefoot as a child. He wears three pairs of shoes, one inside the other, and spends his day repairing other items from his extensive collection of tattered footwear.
Schoeman’s house, a 5mx4m cement and corrugated-iron hovel, is filled with scrap he has hoarded. He wears a piece of wire around his neck ”to keep my neck up to keep me proud”, he says.
Some of the sleeping arrangements are communal. Ann (25), who has a five-year-old son, Kyle, and is eight months’ pregnant, lives in a room with eight other women and two children. She moved to the area three months ago from Newcastle in KwaZulu-Natal, to escape an abusive husband.
To earn their keep, the people in the camp are given chores like cooking, gardening and building. They go about these, listlessly sucking on cigarettes and staring into the middle distance.
They have lost touch with the world and live a vacant existence. Here the sons and daughters of impecunious whites, once elevated by apartheid, have become the detritus of democracy.
Thank you to Carla Lewis for translating