Take a walk through Ntuthukoville, a low-income residential area in Pietermaritzburg. The roads are clean. Gardens are well cared for, with flowers and shrubs, paths and edgings. Old car tyres have been used as planters to shore up the steeply sloping ground.
Residents have done all the work, transforming an impoverished settlement into a model of community self-help. It is hard to believe that 10 years ago Ntuthukoville was a battleground between the city council and a handful of people living under makeshift plastic shelters between the bushes and trees.
Gretta Maphumulo, who manages the community-based maintenance programme, has also been transformed. ”I was a shy person, frightened and not used to standing in front of a crowd,” she says, ”but I’ve learnt to debate if things are going wrong.”
A trainee nurse whose education was interrupted by the birth of a mentally disabled child, Maphumulo never expected to find herself worrying about refuse collection and blocked drains. ”What do you do when your dream is shattered?” she asks. ”That’s when it’s important to have other goals.”
Maphumulo is one of the original residents in the shack settlement that is now Ntuthukoville. She had to find shelter after fleeing from political violence in Maqonqo, outside Pietermaritzburg.
She had a job at the Jaguar shoe factory in Pietermaritzburg, but in 1992 the factory closed down. Then, within months, the safety net — the family land in Maqonqo — was ripped apart by violence and the extended family displaced.
That’s when Maphumulo and others sought shelter on the vacant land between Indian and coloured residential areas. The council reacted with force, sending police five times to destroy the shacks and evict the residents. But the persistence of the occupants turned into a highly publicised campaign with support from many local organisations and, eventually, the Ntuthukoville community won the right to stay.
In 1994, as the country turned from defiance to democracy, Ntuthukoville residents turned from resistance to development. With support from the Built Environment Support Group, the development organisation where Maphumulo now works, this traumatised community began the slow process of transforming an informal settlement into a legitimate part of the city.
For more than three years the trustees worked to ensure that plans were prepared and passed, that roads, water and sewerage were installed, that people received building materials to improve their wattle and daub houses, and that each of the 166 families got title deeds to their small pieces of land.
Maphumulo first volunteered to take notes at development committee meetings. She became committee secretary and was elected a trustee. Members of the community got paid to work on the development project. But trustees, as managers, were precluded from benefiting from these jobs. A single mother, Maphumulo supported her three children through sewing.
She shrugs: ”Yes, it’s hard to be in a leadership role, but if your community is using the railway line as a toilet you have to work hard to improve things.”
The community had to make difficult decisions — should every site be the same size? Should those who have to make way for roads and pipes be compensated for the loss of their gardens or mealie patches tucked in between the shacks?
Maphumulo and the other trustees mediated, and when conflict in the community threatened to spiral out of control, political leadership from the region was called in to intervene.
By 1997 the development project was largely complete and the Ntuthukoville story seemed to be heading for a happy ending. But the area quickly deteriorated. The municipality was struggling with transformation and new responsibilities; it lacked both the capacity and the commitment to provide services in the area. So storm-water drains were soon blocked and uncollected refuse littered the roads.
The development trust set up a partnership with the municipality for residents to service their own neighbourhood. Today residents can be found cleaning the roads; unblocking storm-water drains; cutting the grass along the roadside verges; doing door-to-door refuse removal; building the car-tyre retaining walls; watering the indigenous trees they have planted on public land; and managing community facilities. The programme has provided residents with permanent employment.
Community-based maintenance is now being adopted in other settlements: the programme serves several thousand low-income households around Pietermaritzburg and has won a number of awards for innovation.
And Maphumulo is now advising other communities how to solve their own problems. It’s not quite the line of work she imagined in her youth when she dreamed of being a nurse. But as she says, if one dream fails, you must move on to the next one.