Katriena Sym considers herself lucky. She has a roof over her head, a husband who has found work on a farm nearby, and a lodger who contributes to the household expenses. “Ceres is baie hard, en ek praat nou van hard [Ceres is very hard and I mean hard],” she says, pronouncing her consonants with flinty Karoo precision, “maar ek dink ons sal darem regkom [but I think we will survive].”
She surveys the inside of her house. There is a plastic milk crate that does duty as a chair; there is a primus stove and a few pots; there are two sour and ragged foam mattresses; and there is a ramshackle cupboard containing flour, some salt, sugar and cooking oil, and one tin of cheap mackerel.
Beyond that, there is literally not a stick of furniture. The little space is bare and empty, cold in winter and hot in summer: most days Sym prefers to sit outside in the shade. In winter she builds a fire from scavenged wood or even discarded plastic soft-drink bottles.
She has plenty of time to sit around these days. Her eyes have deteriorated much in recent years and she is medically unfit for the hard and exacting work of picking fruit and pruning trees she has done for most of her 39 years.
She originally hails from Williston in the Karoo, but she has spent a significant part of her adult life away from home, travelling with teams of seasonal workers to Ceres, Citrusdal and other towns in the Western Cape’s horticultural districts. It was a hard and expensive life, being an uitwerker (migrant worker), and she has decided to settle in Ceres. Her partner has found work at a neighbouring farm, and they now have a lodger who has also promised to contribute to household expenses.
But her conditions still seem grim and there is an unsettling vagueness about her hopes that things will improve.
The reality is that her partner’s job has not brought in much money. In theory he should be paid between R150 and R200 a week, but she sees almost none of it. Lack of cash means that they have to “borrow” food supplied by the farm shop operated by his employer. The supermarket in town is significantly cheaper — but the supermarket does not extend credit. Every week, his payslip shows that most of the money he has earned has already been “eaten up”. In a good week, he will bring home R50; sometimes he brings home nothing at all.
When he does bring money home, Sym spends a significant part of it on their accumulated water debt, but she does not know how much she owes. In practice, she often has to rely on contributions for food from her partner’s mother, or from “die kind se pa se ma [the child’s father’s mother]” — the mother of another man by whom she has a five year-old child. They will often lend her a cup of flour or a bit of meat; if all else fails, at least the child is able to sit down with his grandmother for a meal. Sym goes hungry.
One woman: one household. The details of Sym’s life and circumstances are specific to her. Each household on these bleached, bare roads will have a different story to tell. But the themes and the relationships are similar. For Sym and others like her, working in the fertile valleys of the Western Cape has not brought respite from poverty. Survival is possible and people are resourceful. But hunger, debt, insecurity and dependence have characterised their lives for as long as they have known. Unless the underlying conditions that perpetuate this poverty disappear, it is unlikely that this will change. There is very little they can do about it.
Sym and her neighbours survive at the margins of rural Western Cape society. It is an odd kind of marginality: without her and other men and women like her who carry tonnes of Bon Chretien apples and Granny Smith pears out of the orchards every summer — sometimes at less than R30 a day there would be no fruit industry.
But this economic centrality is accompanied by social and political invisibility. From the point of view of those who hold power in Ceres, Sym hardly exists — except as a potential source of labour. Politically, the poor in Ceres are not a force to be reckoned with. Instead, they are recipients of concern, objects of development, members of what is patronisingly referred to as the agtergeblewene gemeenskap (the community left behind).
Economically and socially, survival depends on the largesse of those who are wealthier and more powerful. Perhaps it is this brutal fact that is behind Sym’s striking gentleness of manner. Her very existence is a tentative one, dependent on a tiny net of fragile relationships. It is a position in which it is possible to dream, hope and plan. But the plans are small. Very small.
Katriena Sym was part of a household livelihood survey by Andries du Toit and the United Kingdom-based Chronic Poverty Research Centre