Lindiwe Mvula is eighth in line, waiting with her trolley outside a recycling plant in Johannesburg’s Newtown. She’s there to sell the used cardboard and plastic she collects and she isn’t pleased with her haul. At the rate of 25c a kilo of cardboard she reckons it’s worth about R20 — not a lot for a hard day’s work. Take away the R5 she pays a friend for the use of his trolley and the 50c she spends to use the toilets at the Bree Street taxi rank — and it doesn’t leave much for a woman with three children to support.
But you would never know that from the way Mvula chats to others in the queue, giggling in response to their stories. Her Miriam Makeba-like features belie her age — 49 years — and a hard life trawling the streets for the cast-offs of a consumer society. Finally her turn comes. Her trolley weighs more than she originally thought — enough to earn her R30,60. She shrieks with delight.
Mvula started out in the cardboard business when she first arrived in the city. She had separated from her husband and, leaving her children in the care of her mother, moved away from her home in Bergville, KwaZulu-Natal.
She knew the streets of Johannesburg were not paved with gold, but didn’t expect to find cardboard instead — a commodity that could be sold for cash to the large recycling companies. ”I walked around the streets looking for boxes,” says Mvula. Then someone referred her to OBC Chicken Wholesale/Retail and she started collecting the company’s waste — clear plastic bags and cardboard boxes. She now has an informal arrangement with OBC to remove its waste each day.
Mvula arrives at OBC in Rissik Street at 2pm and starts sorting the used boxes and bags. It takes her all afternoon, and she is obliged to wait until the shop closes so that no waste material is left lying around. On a good day Mvula will collect up to 150kg of waste. She then makes her way through town, a distance of 11 blocks, weaving her heavily-laden trolley between the parked cars and speeding taxis.
Even though Mvula performs an invaluable task for the city by helping to reduce its waste, her services are not recognised by a local government supposedly going green. Marius de Villiers, the public relations officer of Pikitup — the utility that manages Johannesburg’s waste — says: ”Recycling is not one of our businesses. We don’t control these people.”
With 12 years’ experience in the cardboard-collecting business, Mvula is an old-timer. Walter Mokoena, a relative newcomer with eight years’ experience, says ”She’s a good lady. She’s not afraid.” Mokoena is hoping to earn between R35 and R45 for his haul, but then he has more overheads — daily transport to and from his house in Dobsonville, Soweto, and weekly rent of R30 for a storage space ”somewhere under the Mandela Bridge”. Mokoena grumbles that the business has deteriorated in recent years. ”When cardboard was 60c a kilo we were earning good money. Now it’s 20c for boxes. Many people use this thing to get money. If they drop the prices — I don’t know …”
Mvula is more stoical. Yes, oversupply has driven down prices, but she does not know what can be done about it. On a good day she can make R49, on a bad day R20. Unlike Mokoena, Mvula lives within walking distance of the chicken wholesaler, where she gets her boxes, and the recycling company, where she exchanges them for cash. But her housing conditions are desperate. She lives in the abandoned, burnt-out warehouse once occupied by the recycling firm that buys her waste.
At the entrance to the derelict warehouse, two of Mvula’s room-mates are picking through two huge hessian bags of rubbish. Cardboard in one pile, white paper in another, plastic crammed into a large bag, and organic refuse tossed to the side. The women are scanning the contents for anything valuable. Will a discarded electric frying pan be of any use in a building without electricity? Are two red leather left shoes better than none at all? Thin slivers of light penetrate through the high, sooty windows.
Beyond this vestibule is the room that Mvula shares with 18 people. There are eight beds, screened off from one another with sheets of cardboard or old placards — including an African National Congress poster promising ”A better life for all”. These screens afford the smallest semblance of privacy. Otherwise the room-mates rely on a notional separation between men, who occupy one half of the room, and women, who occupy the other. Alongside each bed is a table, cabinet or crate that functions as a food-preparation space. Paraffin fumes permeate the air.
The building has neither water nor electricity. Residents either use the toilets at the Bree Street taxi rank at 50c a time or wait until 10am when the nearby Diggers Inn hotel opens its pub. Mvula collects water from a building site nearby, but she is not sure where she will get water when construction ends. She’d like to find a 10-litre plastic barrel to carry water from the chicken wholesaler.
There is nowhere to store her possessions and nothing that locks. She laughs when asked where she keeps her money.
Her trolley is heavy, but she is used to it. She’s renting it from a Mr Tsaca, who is away, but she is not sure what will happen when he gets back. Mvula has decided not to use the customised bicycles sponsored by the post office as part of a trolley-pushers’ empowerment initiative. They have to be returned each day by 4pm, which does not suit her, given her obligation to stay at OBC until after 5pm, and they also can’t carry a large enough load. So she’s sticking with Tsaca’s home-made device, cobbled together out of scraps of old metal and wire.
Mvula takes pride in her strength. ”You have to be strong and hope that you have no sickness, because then you cannot work or earn any money.” Earlier this year she broke a leg tripping down some stairs at OBC. She dragged herself all the way from Rissik Street to her room in Newtown. Then her room-mates phoned for an ambulance. She couldn’t work for a week, relying largely on the services ”of someone called Judy who comes every Wednesday with bread and meat and soup and painkillers”.
Mvula manages to save enough money to make two trips home every year to see her mother and children. She is thrilled at having saved the R90 she needs for a trip home at Christmas. She will be able to check on her eldest daughter, who is studying ”something to do with computers” at Mangosuthu Technikon. Mvula is hoping to leave the cardboard business when her daughter graduates.
What does Mvula think of the ”new South Africa”? She is optimistic, she says. At least this government lets her stay in the city.
Additional reporting by Msizi Myeza