The smell reaches you before the people do.
It hangs in the air, thick and difficult to ignore, following the narrow streets of Kanana Extension 5 in Tembisa, where sewage runs alongside homes and flies gather around the waste that has become part of everyday life. Children play nearby. Residents sit outside their homes, talking and going about their business. Some cook over open fires, their pots standing a few metres from the streams of dirty water running through the neighbourhood.
It is a familiar scene, one that the Mail & Guardian encountered three years ago when it visited the area in the aftermath of a service delivery strike that left four people dead and the Ekurhuleni Customer Care Centre set alight.
The visit in 2023 was to establish what life looked like for people living in Kanana Extension 5, where frustrations over poor services had spilled into the streets.
The conditions were grim then.
Three years later, the same streets tell a familiar story. The sewage is still running, the sanitation remains inadequate and residents are still waiting for the basic services they say should have been provided long ago. With local government elections approaching, the question of what has changed is no longer simply about infrastructure. It is about what it means to live in a place where the promises of politicians have become increasingly difficult to separate from the daily frustrations of the people who vote for them.
“You can call me the son of this soil, I was born here, you can call me the son of this squatter camp,” says Tebogo Maesela.
“As we speak, we have been without water and or proper sanitation for two months, but these people come here and ask for us to vote for them, why should we do that?”
Maesela speaks with the familiarity of someone who has spent years watching the same problems return, regardless of how many times they have been raised.
He does not need to look far to find evidence of what he is talking about.
Sewage streams through the streets and into people's yards. The flies are everywhere. The smell is almost unbearable, but residents continue to sit outside their homes, surrounded by the conditions they have learnt to live with.
For residents such as Maesela, the consequences extend beyond the immediate discomfort of living in a dirty environment.
He is looking for work and needs to keep his cellphone charged so that he can remain available when opportunities arise.
But electricity is not readily available where he lives.
He has to walk to Phomolong, the neighbouring section across from the informal settlement, where he asks for water and electricity to charge his phone.
“I have to keep my phone charged, but where I charge my phone, I have to pay R5. Which I sometimes don’t have,” he says.
Five rand might seem insignificant to someone with a steady income. For Maesela, it is another expense in a life where even the smallest necessities require planning.
He asks us to accompany him to his home, a few metres from where he and his friends were sitting.
Along the way, there is a large, lush tree growing next to a sewer pipe.
Maesela points towards it.
“Look at this,” he says. “This is probably the greenest tree in the area because of all the fertilisation it gets.” The remark carries a humour that does little to soften the reality of what surrounds us.
The tree is thriving. The people living beside it are not.
Maesela looks towards the children playing nearby.
“Children are growing up here, this is where they play. Can you imagine?”
For Maesela, the community is not asking for much. “We do not want big homes, in fact at this point, we do not even want homes anymore but to be given basic services, just the basic services, often at least,” he says. “They can keep their homes, all we are asking is for toilets and for a clean environment.” It is a request that sounds almost painfully modest. A toilet. Clean surroundings. Water.
Further into the neighbourhood, we meet Mary Motsamai, who comes from Matatiale in the Eastern Cape and has lived in Tembisa for 28 years. She is handing out pamphlets for the South African Communist Party outside her home when she notices our car.
Motsamai is eager to explain what life is like in the area. She stops us so that we can see where she lives.
There is no need for her to exaggerate.
She describes what happens when it rains, when the waste collected around the corner is carried into her home.
“You do not want to know what happens when it rains. All the filth from the waste by our corner comes into my house. My heart literally stops when I see rain gathering in the clouds,” she says.
The fear of rain is something many people would struggle to understand.
For Motsamai, it is not simply about getting wet or having to clean up after a storm. It is the anticipation of what the water might bring into her home.
“Because of the filthy conditions sometimes we have rats wake us up in the middle of the night.”
She has lived in Tembisa for almost three decades. The place is home, but the conditions have made it difficult to find comfort in the surroundings. Yet Motsamai says she will still vote in the coming local government elections.
“I know it is hard to look at my surroundings and see anything hopeful but I am hopeful that things will get better. Which is why I will cast my vote at the coming local government elections. Perhaps things will really get better.”
Her voice falters as she speaks about what she has endured.
She says she will bury her head in the sand and continue working for herself and her family.
“You may just see waste around us but we are affected in more ways that you can imagine. There is no way your life can be normal while your surroundings are as dirty as ours are,” she says.
For Vukosi Manyike, another resident of Kanana, the conditions have become a source of concern for his family’s health.
His three-year-old daughter suffered a stomach bug that left her hospitalised for a week.
He suspects that the environment in which they live may have contributed to her illness.
“I almost lost my daughter because she had ingested food that had flies on it and was unwell and had to be taken to the hospital,” he says.
The experience has left him worried about what the coming summer months might bring.
As temperatures rise, flies become more prevalent in the settlement, swarming into residents’ homes and gathering around food.
Manyike says waste is collected at least once a week, but he questions whether that is enough for a community of this size.
“Yes, they do come collect the waste at least once a week but look around you, look at how many people are in this community. There is no way that collecting the waste once a week is enough.”
The problem, he says, is not only the frequency of collection but also the behaviour of residents.
Manyike acknowledges that the community has held meetings to discuss illegal dumping and the importance of keeping the area clean.
But the conversations have not always translated into action.
As we speak, two residents dump buckets of waste directly in front of another home.
Manyike watches them.
“You see what I mean, people know that there are no consequences for this which is why we will never solve it. We will just continue to live like this.”
The moment captures the complicated relationship between the people of Kanana and the environment they inhabit.
Residents want cleaner streets, but the problem is also sustained by the everyday practices of some members of the community.
It is a contradiction that makes the situation harder to resolve.
There are people who want change and others who continue to contribute to the conditions they complain about.
For the municipality, the issue is one that requires cooperation between residents and the authorities.
Member of the Mayoral Committee for Metro Operations and Maintenance in Ekurhuleni, Nomadlozi Nkosi, says programmes have been introduced to encourage communities to take responsibility for their surroundings.
One of these is Love Your Community, which aims to promote cleanliness and discourage residents from dumping waste in streams and other areas where it does not belong. “We work together with them so they can love themselves. Because a lot of their time, they throw away their waste in streams and all these areas. What I can tell you is that the waste is being collected in Tembisa and it is collected on time,” Nkosi says.
She encourages residents to contact the municipality when they notice excessive waste in their neighbourhoods.
Nkosi says the number of households and the way residential spaces are organised can contribute to the amount of waste generated.
“Remember, in Tembisa, one house has many rooms in the backyard, obviously the waste is going to be on another level. That is why we have programs to work with our communities and communicate with them,” she says.
The municipality, she adds, remains willing to listen to residents' concerns.
Nkosi maintains that waste is collected regularly in Tembisa.
But in Kanana Extension 5, the distance between what the municipality says is happening and what residents say they experience remains difficult to ignore.
For the people living here, the question is not whether waste collection exists as a municipal programme.
It is whether the services are sufficient to make their homes safe and their streets clean.
It is whether children can play without being surrounded by sewage, whether families can pre-pare food without worrying about flies and whether a mother can watch the clouds gather without fearing that rain will carry waste into her home.
Three years after the 2023 strike, Kanana remains a place where residents are still asking for the same things.
They are not asking for luxury.
They are asking for the conditions that allow people to live, raise children and build a future without having to make peace with the smell of sewage outside their doors.