The Foreman Road informal settlement nestles in a ravine leading down to the Palmiet River on the edge of the middle-class suburb of Clare Estate in Durban. From the top of the settlement the view across the river is of a swathe of trees and bushes, yet that is where the idyll ends.
Descending from Foreman Road into the narrow, steep alleys between shacks built with scrap metal, wood and (ironically) election posters, the stench from open sewage and rotting rubbish is inescapable. Young children with mucus-caked upper lips play in the filth and mud, their laughter only interrupted by hacking coughs.
This, tragically, is the emerging South Africa. Many of the facts relating to changes in South African households that appear in the government’s recently released discussion paper on macro-social trends in the country, South Africa: A Nation in the Making, live out their realities here.
According to the document the nuclear family is disintegrating, while extended family households, single-person households and households with non-family members living together increased between 1996 and 2001. The most dramatic increase has been in the extended family households, which went up 7% while there was a corresponding 5% decrease in nuclear families. Household size has also declined, from an average of 4,5 persons to 3,8 persons per household.
The role HIV/Aids is playing in redefining familial structures in South Africa cannot be understated. Sixteen-year-old Bukeka Zulu* is painstakingly washing clothes while keeping one eye on her 12-year-old niece, Xolisa*, and the other on the spaza shop her mother runs in the settlement.
Bukeka is on school holiday and her mother is visiting Xolisa’s 10-year-old sister, Sikithi, who is in hospital ”because she was coughing”. Both Bukeka’s sister and her husband died last year: ”I don’t know what they died from,” she says. A neighbour intimates that HIV/ Aids-related diseases were the cause of death.
The Foreman Road settlement started in 1988 and today houses about 7 000 people, the majority migrants from the Eastern Cape and rural KwaZulu-Natal who have moved to Durban to look for jobs. They have found only unemployment and menial labour, perhaps reflecting the statistics that show that while income poverty between 1995 and 2000 in rural areas declined by about 5%, it increased in urban areas by about the same figure.
For 24-year-old Pateka Mahawuza, sharing a one-room mjondolo with two women, it is a purely economic decision. While her shack-mates are cleaning chicken gizzards and intestines for their supper of amathumba and rice, Pateka carries her three-month-old baby, Inathi, on her back as she builds a fire. A plastic lid is burnt over the collection of sticks and branches to kick-start it: ”Her father gives me R150/ R100 a month but after I’ve bought the formula there isn’t much left. I don’t want to be with him,” says the single mother.
Pateka says that in three months she will resume her job as a domestic worker, which pays R400 a month — she works five days a week, eight-and-a-half hours a day: ”My mother died in 1997 from witchcraft and my father died in a car accident a year later, so I was alone, so I left Flagstaff [in the Eastern Cape] and came to Durban to look for a job,” she says.
While the discussion document concludes that ”how to mediate the tension between a market-based economic system premised on cut-throat competition, and the desire to build a caring society is one of the critical issues that identify themselves” in this evolving country, many of the people in the Foreman Road settlement blame local government for their plight, it being the closest sphere to them.
In Foreman Road, the grand speak of a ”caring society” is mere words on paper. The urban migrant experience is one of poverty and dislocation, with government services almost impossible to access. In fact, many here perceive authority as acting against them.
In a precariously slanting one-room shack with a number scrawled in red spray paint on the door, 18-year-old Nokubonga Camen is spending her holidays looking after her sister Nosphiwe’s two children. Nosphiwe is out looking for work: ”My sister was an informal trader in Albert Street but the eThekwini [Durban] council sent the police there to clear them out,” she says. ”She hasn’t had a job since then.”
Nokubonga says that R100 of the R190 social grant that her sister receives for each child is spent on day care for each of them.
The fissure between community and municipality runs deeper. Mnikelo Ndabankulu, PRO for the Foreman Road branch of the Abahlali baseMjondolo Movement (Shackdwellers’ Movement) — an overarching body that draws membership from the various informal settlements around Durban — says that the community has been struggling against the municipality since last year: ”We started demanding land and housing and we resisted forced removals because the municipality wanted to relocate us to Mount Moreland, which is near Phoenix and too far away for us.
”We have been here a long time and many people have jobs in the garages, the market, and our mothers and sisters are working in the houses all around. They can’t afford to take two taxis to come here and two to go back home. What time must they wake up in the morning?” he asks.
In November last year city manager Mike Sutcliffe banned a march from the Foreman Road settlement, and when the community decided to march against the ban it was, according to Ndabankulu, met with live ammunition and beatings.
In the same month a fire ravaged the settlement, leaving 700 people homeless. Ndabankulu points to a plastic cover over a hydrant box in the ground where the municipality had promised to pipe water into the settlement in 2001: ”They said there were no funds to connect it to the main pipe across the road, so they still haven’t done anything. I tell you, there is no freedom for the poor,” he says.
* Not their real names