The generation called ”ama-Born Free” is sceptical when told that as schoolchildren, their parents were forced to celebrate national holidays, such as Dingaan’s Day, which symbolised the subjugation of the black race and the dispossession of its land.
The year is 2006; South Africans are no longer forced to take part in holiday celebrations they have no need for.
At the same time new national holidays they respect can be celebrated. The construction sector has decided to launch Women’s Build 2006 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the women’s march to the Union Buildings in Pretoria, by building 50 houses for pensioners, mostly women, in Orange Farm, south of Johannesburg, on a Thubelisha Homes’ construction site.
The intention of Women’s Build seemed quite straight-forward initially: build the houses while providing emerging women contractors and corporate sponsors with practical experiences of building houses, for example mixing mortar, using a spirit level and so on.
This was complicated when the project selected the 50 pensioners in preparation for the planned Women’s Build. Wheelbarrows full of dagha (cement mix) and volunteers relaying bricks to the bricklayer would disrupt their world for the duration of the build.
Sitting in their shacks, the women reminisced and what emerged was that most of them could not read or write, were domestic servants all their working lives and were born and raised in farms.
When they became too old to work in the ”quarters” — as they call servants’ quarters — they lived in rented shacks in places such as Evaton for 20 years.
Through word of mouth, they heard about Orange Farm and managed to secure land, but had no money to build their own houses.
They were not part of the 1956 march, because they were cleaning someone’s house, but the march was about them.
It might be a drop in the ocean, but it is fitting that through the 2006 Women’s Build, they will have a brick and mortar structure that they can call their own.
Laura Msimang is a member of the 2006 Women’s Build committee